At the moment in D:OS 2, Larian seems to be pursuing a revamp to the Action Points system. No longer will any attributes alter how many AP you get per turn. Instead, all characters will get 3-4 AP per turn (and possibly have the maximum capacity also fixed at 3-4 AP, although I'm not sure.) Generally speaking, all actions will use 1 AP.

For purposes of this discussion, I'll assume that system will be implemented. I have some ideas I'd like to discuss..


Abilities and Attributes shall not change the cooldown length.
  • Instead, each skill will have a fixed cooldown length. I will allow for the possibility of certain Talents and certain Skills to alter the cooldown length, but generally speaking, the cooldown shall be a fixed length no matter what your level, "class", or stats.
  • This means that skills shall have to be balanced around the fixed cooldown length, instead of trying to balance them around a cooldown length which could vary a great deal depending on your attributes.
  • With cooldowns fixed,



To compensate for the fixed cooldown length, some skills will have a 0 turn cooldown.
  • As long as you have AP, these skills can be used as many times as you want. Which in a 4-AP-max system is 4 times.
  • These skills would generally be Novice-level skills and generally of low-power, but they would be things that you could use if your other skills are on a cooldown.
  • Example: a Minor Heal spell which heals 10% of the target's HP once. It could be used to heal 4 party members each for 10% HP or one party member for 40% HP.
  • Or another spell which just clears some status effects from a single target.
  • There should be at least one zero-cooldown skill in each elemental school which can do some elemental damage at at least a moderate range (8-10 meters)
  • The elemental damage ones are mainly because Physical-damage dealers already have a way to attack each turn even if all things are on cooldown. But I suppose with wands in the game, and if Staff of Magus's cooldown returns to 0 than there's less need for this.



I also had another idea, your maximum AP was like 12 and certain high-level skills would cost 12 AP to cast, forcing you to save up for a few turns. ...but I think that part of the change was to avoid letting characters stack up a ton of normal actions, so if they could use 12 normal actions a turn, that would defeat the point of switching to a max-4-AP system.

Thoughts?