Feedback:User/Nom/(Elite) skill swapping and recharge
(Elite) skill swapping and recharge | |
|---|---|
| User | Nom |
| Categories | Mechanics |
There's been discussion about swapping recharging skills. My preference would be that you can swap recharging skills, but the new skill inherits the old skill's recharge.
Why do it this way? Because deferred changing is annoying. Any time the player goes 'I want to change' but then has to perform some other activity before they are allowed to actually make the change makes it likely that the player will forget to do so, because they are always thinking of 'next' not 'now'.
Deferred configuration has another annoyance - it wastes time and attention. If there's a skill-swap countdown timer, then until that timer expires I'm stuck doing nothing. By letting me 'queue' the skill swap during countdown, I can get straight back to playing once the timer expires, rather than stop a second time to actually perform the swap.
Examples[edit]
Example 1 (Guild wars): forgetting to skill cap[edit]
There have been several times when I have forgotten to skill cap after killing a boss. The thought process is:
- I want to skill cap this boss, so I set up my secondary profession and cap sig.
- My goal is now to kill the boss.
- I kill the boss. My goal is complete. I head back home to celebrate.
- Oops! Oh drat!
Example 2 (D&D online): retraining spells[edit]
In DDO, you could retrain spells after resting. Resting took about 30 seconds at a designated rest point (which was single-use). Once you moved away from the rest-point, you could no longer retrain.
My general experience was that I'd decide to retrain after an encounter, but by the time I found the rest-point and successfully rested I was now thinking about moving on rather than reconfiguring spells.
Recommendation[edit]
The problem problems can be avoided by allowing the event to be 'queued' by the user when they think of it, but not take effect until the conditions are met. This would work well for DDO spells or GW2 skill swaps.
The weaker alternative is prompting. The game goes "dead boss that matches your profession, cap sig" and prompts to whether you want to skill cap before leaving the area (or map-travelling out). Prompting has several drawbacks: it's intrusive, it's only appreciated when the game guesses correctly, and it requires well defined trigger events.
