Originally Posted by Arsene Lupin

A couple ideas of what more could be done with cooldowns:

-Cooldowns could "pause" at the end of combat and "resume" at the start of the next combat action. That way, instead of being able to use the most powerful spell at the start of every encounter, players would be encouraged to think more carefully and use their magic more sparingly--lest they find themselves in a difficult battle with no powerful spells to use (right away), because they wasted them burning crabs.

-Cooldowns could persist in the non-combat mode. It would achieve a similar effect to the first idea, but would also effect how players just mess around with the world. Telekinesis, for example, would become an ability that could only be used sparingly, instead of the constantly-ready tool of mischief it is now.

........

Also, as for the difficulty in clicking on NPCs or chickens... DOS needs a pause button. Every top-down RPG needs a pause button, IMHO, where you can issue commands w/ the game world frozen in time. Makes things a lot simpler.



For a moment, I thought that you were on to something with the "cooldowns pause after combat ends" idea, but that means that you won't be able to use spells indefinitely until you get into a fight. I'm not sure how workable that idea is - especially since there are limited spawns and therefore limited fights you can get into. Here's an example:

I entered the Black cove with an Archer and Mage and reached a point I couldn't pass:
the static cloud. I did not have the strength to move the barrels. I tried almost all my spells, and finally got Ice Wall to work. If I had used Ice Wall as one of my last moves in the fight outside, I would not have been able to solve that puzzle.

After I passed the puzzle, I got into a massive fight. Remember that I used almost all my spells on the puzzle. If your system was in effect, I would have started with no spells for a couple turns.



Cooldowns DO persist in the real-time world, it's just that a round is so short that they don't last long in real-time. I am in favour of longer cooldowns.

You can click on chickens, the problem is that they remain in motion, so you either go to where they are or shoot at where they were, meanwhile they've moved on farther away. A pause button won't do anything for that.


While I am likely to make most of my classes at least magic-using hybrids, I disagree with your idea that anyone who plays a warrior in Original Sin is playing the game wrong. That's almost suggesting that Larian remove the class entirely. I'm sure there's some meeting ground between "Warriors are useless" and "Mages are useless".