As I already wrote, cooldodwns simply aren't effective outside of combat, especially in a game with a low encounter rate like Original Sin. Dungeons aside, you have plenty of things to do between combats,so longer cooldowns wouldn't effect your habit about ability spam. Furthermore Forktong is right: an easy exploitable system is bad design no mater what. "It's their prerogative" is not an excuse.
Cooldowns can be made quite long. A round is 6 seconds. A spell with a cooldown of 600 rounds will take a real-time hour's worth of play to wear off. I can't see someone wanting to leave a dungeon after every encounter because they want to use Armageddon on every 10 HP goblin encounter.
And no, seriously, reagents suck HARD. It's an obnoxious system on so many levels, ESPECIALLY if they're a limited resource. That will just end up with a system where the high-level spells requiring reagents will NEVER be used, because the mentality is "what if I need this for later?" Simpler to not have super-powered spells in the first place. Or only have those spells as Scrolls, not as spellbooks that you can learn and cast at will. That would function as the same limited resource as reagents would, yes?
If reagents are not an unlimited resource, then they'll just become more complex mana potions.
They're an inventory problem because you're adding in ANOTHER ton of sh!t into a game that already has a ton of sh!t you can combine with a ton of sh!t. I don't want to have to consult a stupid table every time I find something called "pinch of moth fart" to figure out what good it is, or if I should just toss it. It's STUFF OVERLOAD. Even with the items already in the alpha that I pick up and wander around with, my inventory is full of just stuff that I pick up because of game OCD and have no idea what to do with. I do not want to have to deal with reagents on top of that, especially if I'm not even using a mage.
