cooldowns?

[Golden Golem]

I really loved the first Magicka game, got all dcs, played almost 100 hours.
But I saw videos of Magicka 2, but my question is : Did you really add cooldowns for spells (like revive and thunder)?

[Rick C-993]

Yeah, they did.. It's very annoying..

[Rhudda]

Yes, but: The magick slots which you can activate by pressing 1 through 4 each have their own cooldown and combining elements to form magicks has a shared cooldown. You can still cast a magick in quick succession if you have it in a slot: cast the combo first, then use the button to do it again.
The slot cooldowns (called focus, by the way) depend on artifacts, number of players and your staff. I'm not sure if the combo cooldown is also considered focus.

[JackBaldy]

I was wondering ... Is there any particular reason for the global cooldown after you cast a magick via the elemental combination? I know it's not exactly that long or anything, but I'm really not seeing the reasoning behind it.

[IkkouSoryu]

If Magicka 2 had dedicated pvp CD would definitely make sense to stop macro abuse...

Yep, I've got nothing.

[Rhudda]

Originally posted by JackBaldy:

I was wondering ... Is there any particular reason for the global cooldown after you cast a magick via the elemental combination? I know it's not exactly that long or anything, but I'm really not seeing the reasoning behind it.

Dunno. Artificial difficulty? The cooldown's basically just long enough to keep haste up, but it keeps you from casting other magicks in the meantime unless you use the slots.

[JackBaldy]

Originally posted by Unwerth:

Dunno. Artificial difficulty? The cooldown's basically just long enough to keep haste up, but it keeps you from casting other magicks in the meantime unless you use the slots.

Good a guess as any. Honestly, I don't really see the magicks being all that powerful relatively speaking so the act of putting a cooldown (However small it may be) on manual magick casts seems a bit redundant and artificial, as you stated.

I guess initially you couldn't manual magick cast, but that was changed. It just seems pointless to have a global cooldown. Can't really argue it's for balance reasons as I can't see how that would be "unbalanced" relative to the balance that's already in place.

However, it could be argued that it would just be overall more *fun* for the global cooldown to be absent from the game thus giving a wizard a far more sense of freedom of expression, so to speak. This game definitely does go out of it's way to hinder people who are fast with their spell casting. Would be nice if it didn't. :Shrugs:

[Golden Golem]

Even if the first game was crashing, and the netcode was a bit broken, I don't think I'll have the same amount of fun playing magicka 2, which is really sad because I had a lot of hope and exitement for the sequel.

[Rhudda]

Originally posted by JackBaldy:

Good a guess as any. Honestly, I don't really see the magicks being all that powerful relatively speaking so the act of putting a cooldown (However small it may be) on manual magick casts seems a bit redundant and artificial, as you stated.

I guess initially you couldn't manual magick cast, but that was changed. It just seems pointless to have a global cooldown. Can't really argue it's for balance reasons as I can't see how that would be "unbalanced" relative to the balance that's already in place.

However, it could be argued that it would just be overall more *fun* for the global cooldown to be absent from the game thus giving a wizard a far more sense of freedom of expression, so to speak. This game definitely does go out of it's way to hinder people who are fast with their spell casting. Would be nice if it didn't. :Shrugs:

Now that we're talking about it, I think I heard the devs (or maybe I read it in a blog) say that the cooldown on revive specifically increased tension. You know, needing to stay alive until you can revive your friends. /shrug

Freedom to express myself through dragon fire? :)

[JackBaldy]

Originally posted by Unwerth:

You know, needing to stay alive until you can revive your friends. /shrug

The thing is, with this rather short global cooldown, it kind of defeats the purpose. Magicka has never really been a game about magicka bars and cooldowns. It just reduces fun overall. And arguably, Magicka 1 had far stronger magicks with no cooldowns and things worked just fine.

Originally posted by Unwerth:

Freedom to express myself through dragon fire? :)

:D Yes. Dragonfire and any other combination or concoction you can think of to go with that. :)

[Judge Cudge]

Yeah the main goal of the orginal game was that the difficulty came from panic and puzzling out what to do, with the player not being limited by any bars, meters, cooldowns or the like in order for them to feel as "wizardy" as possible.

Like if you hear dev interviews they talk about the core concept and why they wanted it to be so quick paced.

I really don't know why they chose to cripple the game with the global cooldown in place, it's one the most pointlessly antagonistic decisions I've ever seen.