Your Strawman was “i need” OP Focus because i must fight vs 3 enemies.
You could also achieve this with passive runes. Imho something that rn misses anyway.
Edit:
Also you could just add a passive perk on the existing runes that modifies the other runes. With this the rune combination is quite relevant suddenly, even when you dont use the others.
The fated day where I disagree with one of your takes. 
I’ve never been a fan of cooldowns in games that are rooted in ARPGs. Wicked is not fully rooted in ARPGs and I haven’t played a game similar to them such as V Rising. What I can say is cooldowns have usually felt too limiting and relegating players to a very passive playstyle.
Commonly in ARPGs, players run around waiting on cooldowns to nuke large clusters of enemies they’ve gathered during the cooldown period. It becomes a much lesser active playstyle and one that’s purely rotational rather than reactionary as well. It also takes away the feeling of investing a good amount into maximum Focus. You gather all this Focus and just let it out on a boss. I feel like a rush is taken from us with this.
I can understand the argument for runes such as buffs. Many of us now carry around a second weapon purely for runes with utility so we can place only offensive runes on our DPS weapon. I really want to have a Healer playstyle in the game, just like Evocator1000, and the second weapon that most carry essentially invalidates this idea. On the flip side, how do you make it so mages can still feel like mages? The basic Fireball still hits hard but now is behind a cooldown and mages are forced to go melee, more so than now.
To summarize:
Pros:
- Decreased reliance on secondary weapons for utility.
- More methodical gameplay.
Cons:
- Less feeling of power and control over it.
- Potentially limiting the mage fantasy.
- Potentially devolving into a waiting game for runes to come back.
1 Like
You guys wrote so many comments during the time I was at work it would take me too long to actually address them all right now (tired), but I’m glad you had a discussion between yourselves.
Regarding cooldowns, there are ups and downs to it from my perspective, but I wouldn’t want cooldowns to be the solution immediately. The game is still in early access and I think we can still do some more in-depth brainstorming.
The latest idea that I mentioned regarding multiple resources similar to how wow had them seems to be stuck in my mind and I would wanna develop it further, why? Because in a way it fills the different roles or playstyles…
Again I’m going to borrow the names from Wow… for example:
Resource:
-
Rage - Melee weapons & Runes that use Rage - promotes active and aggressive playstyle, starting the fight with zero resource - the intention is to be aggressive and fill up the resource by attacking the enemy, intended for close combat fighting style.
-
Energy - Bows & Runes that use Energy (For this example imagine Bow being a mainhand weapon - normal attacks would still only use stamina) - promotes opportunistic playstyle, starting the fight with full resource - the intention is to keep track of your resource regeneration and plan your dmg accordingly while keeping the distance and actively dodging. Intended for people who love ranged arrowy playstyle…
-
Mana - Staves, Wands & Runes that use Mana - promotes crazy damaging playstyle while resource is up, starting the fight with full resource - the intention is to unleash damaging spells and kill the enemy before you run out of resource. Intended for people who love unleashing magical attacks on the enemies from range and doing their best to prevent them from coming close.
So if I give an example from NRFTW…
- Piercing Flurry requires X Rage to use.
- Cone Shot requires X energy to use.
- Glacial Spike requires X Mana to use.
Wielding a specific weapon would provide you with its resource. Meaning having a staff, your resource is mana; a melee weapon, your resource is rage; bow, your resource is energy.
Regarding rage generation… Fast and light weapons would generate less rage per hit than slow and heavy ones.
New hybrid runes that can be used on multiple weapon types. This would provide even further variations and diversity among the runes and weapons. For example:
- Rune A requires X rage or Y mana to use. - Melee weapon or Staff
- Rune B requires X rage or Y energy to use. - Melee weapon or Bow
- Rune C requires X energy or Y mana to use. - Staff or Bow
depending on the weapon you are currently using.
This is just a simple and broad idea of what could be a nice in-depth system with many possibilities for combat styles, talents & gearing possibilities and so much more. I would like to develop this further so we can see where it leads us and what the possibilities for this are; what challenges (besides implementation and balance) we run into and how to overcome them. If any of you find this idea interesting and would like to help me out, I’d appreciate it. Contact me on discord: Rakunish#2596 so we can brainstorm together 
Cooldowns are barely half a solution. If you try to fix it with cooldowns, then you just put your best damage rune on slot 1, second-best on slot two etc. and your in-combat decision tree is as follows:
Q. Which rune should I cast?
A. The lowest slot that is currently off cooldown.
This tree has no branches. Again, I’m not necessarily against cooldowns. PART of a solution could be to nerf all the current damage runes, and then introduce some harder-hitting runes with a long cooldown - and possibly a mechanism for lowering them. But that’s still a bit spammy for my taste.
I’m sticking with runes needing far more mechanical distinctions so that you can make situational choices or chain them for greater effect.
I will say you have at least made me intrigued, haha. You intend to make a different post so I’ll have most of my thoughts for that. A main one I want to mention is Moon would probably have to bend and give a non-rune magic attack to staves if this route were explored, otherwise there will be some upset players about the mage fantasy.
I didn’t have time to read through everything, but what about implementing a “focus refund” mechanic instead, and balance it to ensure it can never get near 100%.
For example, instead of the current focus gain on hit system, we could have something like “regain 20% of the focus spent when using a rune attack”. This ties the focus gain to the cost of the rune attack itself, and it means that the rune attacks can never serve as the focus generator. Staves and mage weapons could have 20-30% built in, and Topazes could grant another 30% or so. As long as the player can never accumulate close to 100%, it should be relatively balanced.
I just want to add that after thinking about it for a while:
If you have specialized resources, balancing is much easier.
However, you disadvantage various different hybrid game styles.
With this you effectively could also just re-add classes, because this is what you favour in the end.
So in the end i like a single resource more, not specialized ones.
1 Like
So basically we mostly agree, but with a different sense of emphasis/priority
You mention customization. The devs have been asking what other enchantments we’d like to see. This is a match. I’d like to see enchantments on weapons that customize the runes on that weapon.
E.G.: Multi-projectile runes on this weapon get +1 projectile.
Or: Channelled runes on this weapon can be channelled for +1 second (for increased effect)
EDIT: Sorry for straying from the topic a bit.
My idea for spell / arrow reflect is to have it act like parry and not active all the time. Right now there are enemies who can parry you but they don’t do so all the time.
1 Like
I think the cure to playing plate and emphasizing focus is a 2-second delay after creating focus (through combat) before the degeneration of focus begins. This would force plate wearing heroes to chain together groups of enemies if they want to have focus-dependent builds. Ups the tension. Having focus pots available to start fights would also be key.
Now if a player wants to wear plate AND be a great mage who plays at range - tough luck - that would make the game incredibly boring (although a casual single player mode that would allow it would be fine).
For mages, the staff damage could either scale with the abilities and/or be the primary source of positive focus generation over time.
To be clear: I don’t want the game to force a playstyle identity onto me. I want to be able to create my own!
From my pov the build identity comes directly from true opportunity cost. Limited Rune Slots with Cooldowns would be one way to force it. When you ideally want to keep all your Abilities on Cooldown, what you can and can’t do and what you can do more of is strongly dependent on what Runes you equip.
But…
This only works when it is somewhat balanced. True opportunity cost = There are multiple great things, that NOT only differ in numbers), but in function as well - Gapcloser, long range, pull / push, status buildup, defense, specific buffs of any kind, … etc.
- Look at Hades/Hades II and their Weapon/Boon Choices and combinations. There is true opportunity cost there. You want it all, but you can’t have it all. Once you have it all you can’t even use it all, because you can only use one thing at any given time. That’s how that particular Game handles ressources btw (with a few exceptions).
Also there have to be enough choices and a little bit of freedom. Diablo 4 for example is far too restricted imo (you are limited to 6 abilities in total, which includes basic attacks). In that game you have to fulfill some requirements for a decent build - You simply pick the best performing option for each requirement and your build is set in stone.
Wicked is on the right track with Runes and hotswapping weapons (I think 2 Mainhands and 2 Offhands would be enough though, and allow to make it more intuitive and fast).
Yes, when gems are strong enough that would work. Problem solved 
Actually I was not planning on proposing that. It was a mere conclusion, more a con than a pro - If we had cooldowns, more Runes would mean more abilities more frequently → more power → Whites and Legendaries have to be tuned down, or the others up relatively.
Support Runes would be nice though - But not high on my personal priority list.
If I had to choose between 150 Runes and 150 Support Runes resulting in 1 Rune with 3 support Runes that i spam all day, vs choosing between 300 Runes with distinct advantages and disadvantages resulting in 4 different Runes I use frequently i’d much prefer the latter.
If you’d like we can spitball how you would achieve this with a Focus based system without cooldowns… I think its tough. Much harder to balance than cooldowns for sure.
This is a very nice idea.
1 Like
You don’t need cooldowns to force people to use different runes. You just need to balance them better and/or have mobs deal with them better.
If a rune can be used at distance and does same or more damage at the same cost it of course is going to be abused. It’s not rocket science.
Just balance the runes AND stop having enchant remove 2 rune slots. Removing gem slots and giving a curse is enough, don’t kill build variety.
1 Like
100% agree that once you have focus regeneration combat becomes boring. It ruins the sense of risk and reward if I can enter any combat scenario with a full focus bar. You could even just back off the enemy and wiat to refill .
They appear to not want a game to be fun, replayable, and build diverse. They want the one-way-only solutions that is
- “rofl-evade”
- “ridiculously-op-parying”
- “by-hart-memorizing-attack-patterns”
what is the same since ages for basically all soulslikes.
They do not want or maybe are not able to
- plan out a character beforehand
- accept that there can be multiple solutions to a problem
- develop new approaches based on failure
- let other people be happy
Seriously, why in gods name cant you just NOT use a mechanic YOU do not like, but want to enforce that NOBODY can use it. I just dont get it… you dont discuss about adapting, improving, balancing… no, you just want to remove it… why?
1 Like
Oh wow, many interesting points here.
If you don’t like cooldown, and I really get why, change it up to a charge meter. Abilities wont hit as hard as long as they are “charging”, but you can however. This would also enable gems like: “gain charge on focus use” maybe. This would require you to cicle through your abilities I think.
Just guessing here.
Please keep in mind, that multiplayer will be a thing, which is why many playstyles must be viable and go toe to toe to each other.
Basically, there is a fear (and it has been proven in other games), that in the end there will be one rune builds and they are so strong, that the meta will evolve around them. I want to be honest here: I never liked that…
I absolutely agree with the first suggestion.
On suggestion 2, I’d have an alternative suggestion, where runic abilities should have a cooldown. Remnant 2 actually has a nice way of managing skill abilities. Most skills have only 1 charge of use to refill based on given cooldown duration once used, and some others, have 2 charge of uses, meaning they can consecutively use the 2 charges, while it refills each charge by it’s cooldown duration. So a runic ability such as blink, could have perhaps 3 charges, and each charge cooldown is maybe 5s-10s.
The third suggestion could instead just have the ability to reduce runic cooldowns.
Just wanted to add an insight about, what Focus actually does and a bit of conclusions.
Focus, as long as it can be solved, adds a puzzle element to the game.
Solve the puzzle → Spam abilities
Don’t solve the puzzle → Gain other boni in return
I like puzzles. I like that players have systems that can be learned and solved. Are these necessary for the game though? No. It can be good, if the opportunity cost and different ways of solving it are interesting.
Currently the issue is, that the puzzle exists, but solving the puzzle is very easy and requires little investment. Also, solving the puzzle trivializes the game. The other boni you gain by not solving it, don’t compare.
TLDR
If we keep the Focus system, as it is and we want dynamic movesets:
Option 1:
Make Focus HARD or even IMPOSSIBLE to solve completely AND make all runes either VASTLY different in cost, depending on their powerlevel or close to EQUALLY powerful (which is much harder to do).
I think this is what OP is trying to suggest.
Option 2:
Balance with Focus being solved in mind → Make all Runes and also non-Rune combat equally powerful. Use Focus Cost as a secondary balancing factor only.
Other Balancing Factors to consider:
- Cast Time
- Versatility
- Effect / Status
- Number of Hits
- Movement / Distance
- Reliability
1 Like