I miss my nukes...

It is rather dissapoining that the game lacks of any kind of heavy-hitting nukes. Well, except for Discharge...
What I mean is, the overal gameplay with spells is rather "spammy". I.e. you spam spells untill everything dies. The recent addition to the game - Storm Call - is the prime example of what am I talking about.
Personally, I would love to see some slow-but-powerfull spells in game. More... Let's say, tactical.
Something like "spend all your power charges to cast a thunderbolt from the sky. the more charges spent, the more damage thunderbolt does". Or maybe cooldown-based heavy-hitters (cold snap sucks, imo. not only it is far from being powerful, but also it is almost impossible to hit more than 1-2 monsters with it due to desync). Or channeling spells - character stays in place while channeling spell power (holding down the button key for that spell) and then fire the spell (releasing the button). The longer it been channeled the more damage and AOE it has.
There are alot of variants that could be made into the game. But so far it is generally "click everything to death" scenario.

I agree with that, it could be nice having such mechanism =).

It basically has to be this way because there are almost no cooldowns. A skill which is freely spammable cannot be a nuke or have another noticeable effect as the result of a single cast.

There are a lot of secondary skills which would be more interesting and diversify the gameplay if their power was quadrupled but they had a cooldown.
Right now offensive secondary skills have little use because it is a waste of time to chain them into your "rotation" of spamming your main attack.

Some examples:

Cold Snap: Meant as a utility skill whith a high chance to freeze enemies. Nobody uses it because the damage is so low that the freezing duration will be useless. In addition the chance to freeze is not that high to begin with. The skill is balanced around a cooldown which is too short to allow a single cast to have a meaningful effect.
Possible solution: Give this skill a 20+ second cooldown and let it deal no damage - but make it always freeze non-boss monsters - the duration is subject to balance and should probably scale with intellligence. I promise we will be seeing this spell used as a utililty cast in sticky situations if this happened.

Poison Arrow: The cloud damage can never be meaningful as long as you can fill the screen with poison clouds in three seconds and the arrow projectiles do cosiderable damage on top of that.
Possible solution: Allow ONE cloud at a time (possibly achieved by introducing a cooldown) but let it deal such heavy damage that it is worth it to use a PA in between spamming LA/RoA/Explosive Arrow/etc. This would also provide some interesting strategic depth when and where to chain a PA into your attacks as you can not just fill the screen with poison (while the enemies laugh at the damage).

More candidates: searing bond, arctic breath (make it a utility spell, right now it is a second, weaker ice spear nobody needs), detonate dead, freeze mine, puncture, ice nova.

tl;dr: secondary skills which are meant as utility abilities like coldsnap will continue to be mostly useless as long as they have to be balanced around very short cooldowns or outright being spammable. I propose introducing cooldowns in order to have the freedom of allowing single uses/casts of utility skills having a noticeable effect. Contrary to belief and common cooldown hate, this will diversify gameplay. I'd like to have some meaningful options for secondary abilities besides spamming a single skill for damage. Chaining nukes or crowd control skills into your attack pattern is fun. But in order to be worth my time, a single use of these utility skills needs to have the potential to be better than just another cast/use of my main attack.

This is exactly the point, OP is proposing to implement nuke spells.
That could be spells with a longer cast time or a big CD ( or both ).

A whole set of secondary spells with cooldowns would be interesting for PoE. Not cheese like freeze mine, but still powerful. Like you could freeze the boss for a few seconds etc. The one thing though that needs to come along with this is that you select skills that integrate into your build. Cold caster would have a freeze variant, while a melee would have something that scales of melee phys for example. A lot of work, but interesting and this way you could prevent people form just putting 5 such spells on along their main skill. No freebie nukes, perhaps a system that makes such skills scale twice as hard with the right nodes.

Or interesting downside such as "Hypnotize enemy for 5 sec with totem, enemy deals 10~20% more damage for 5 sec after that. I feel there is definitely room for more utility skills and less cheesy than freezing mien ele.prolif.

I'm glad to see there are people who share my thoughts on that regard!
The only thing left now is to hope that GGG will read the thread and maybe add something interesting into the game later on.

exactly the same thing i was always missing from poe...
for example in titan quest i was always making high cooldown based nukers because it was pure fun when you could set up an attack it did have an impact

people like to blow shit up in fancy ways

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DevilsmilE wrote:

exactly the same thing i was always missing from poe...
for example in titan quest i was always making high cooldown based nukers because it was pure fun when you could set up an attack it did have an impact

people like to blow shit up in fancy ways

I agree 100% with this!

Hopefully the devs have something in the works and we'll see some interesting new skills that will use the ideas in this thread. With cooldowns they should be able to come up with some really powerful/hard-hitting spells that will give players more interesting tactical choices.

I feel this could work well with "Heavy Strike" because well, it's a strike that you put your full force into. So, you could charge it up by holding down the button, then let it fly. Of course, then you realize you were desynced, and didn't come close to hitting something.

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vinsimbulan wrote:

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DevilsmilE wrote:

exactly the same thing i was always missing from poe...
for example in titan quest i was always making high cooldown based nukers because it was pure fun when you could set up an attack it did have an impact

people like to blow shit up in fancy ways

I agree 100% with this!

Hopefully the devs have something in the works and we'll see some interesting new skills that will use the ideas in this thread. With cooldowns they should be able to come up with some really powerful/hard-hitting spells that will give players more interesting tactical choices.

And after the nuke you wait 2 minutes (or whatever) for all your cooldowns. I so much hate that, one of my most hated mechanics in nearly every game and especially in D3 (for potions, wtf?). Cooldowns are a poor way to not balance something that needs balancing without the difficult approach doing it with resources or drawbacks.

Powerfull nuke spell, very welcome. But not with cooldowns. For discharge you have to accumulate enough charges first, thats a good drawback.