What's the point of Cool-Downs?

The current Cooldown rules are:

D rank: max duration of 3 min cooldown of 2
C rank: max Duration of 5 min cooldown of 3
B rank: max Duration of 6 min cooldown of 4
A rank: max Duration of 7 min cooldown of 5
S rank: max Duration of 10 min cooldown of 8
H rank: max Duration of 20 min cooldown of 10

Well, I don't particularly see a reason for a cool-down on spells, to be honest. The fact that spells cost MP in the first place makes cool-downs unnecessary in my honest opinion. An argument can be made that "People will just abuse their spells and cast them whenever they want" and to that I can respond with "So?" A person may have different fighting styles than everyone else, making cooldowns an unnecessarily limiting factor in how someone can fight.

Someone can fight while conserving their MP while someone else can fight by spending most of their MP at the beginning of the fight. If someone wants to spend a ton of their MP during the fight, then they should be allowed to by allowing them to cast spells without much limit.

However, I'm not saying someone should throw out 3 of their H Rank spells in the same post, that's not what I'm advocating. However, allowing someone to use an instant duration spell once per post would be just fine as there is an MP restriction attached to the spell as well. This would hardly be 'game breaking' in the sense that someone would need to keep a close eye on their MP. You don't see these kind of restrictions in shounen anime (nor would you really see this restriction on too many RP sites in general).

However, for spells with a duration, you wouldn't be able to cast that spell again until after the duration is completed.


TL;DR
- Allow people to cast instant spells once per post as it costs MP anyway (And any shmuck could just dodge one of those instant spells and make a person wait for X posts before they can use it again)
- Duration spells can be cast w/o cool-down, but cannot be cast again until after it's duration is over.

I mean, if someone could tell me a good reason why cool-downs should exist, I will bend and agree. But from what I'm seeing now, I don't really see a very good reason for cool-downs to even exist in the first place. If anything, cool-downs ought to be something that people can use as a weakness to a spell to help them out and let a spell be stronger instead of something that should be seen as a mandatory part of the system.

I can totally agree with this tbh. I'm not a big fan of cooldowns. Except perhaps on weapon/armor spell as a weapon/armor can probably only do so much without overheating or something.

I would say we remove cooldowns as mandatory and make them an extra thing someone can add for balance. So say I want a really powerful spell I could put a cooldown on it as a limiting factor.

I also think we should allow other factors to come into play e.g. extra MP expended on a spell to do more damage

Yup, I agree with what you stated.

However, I had a thought. 1 Type of spell should always have a cool-down (even if it's a signature spell). Defensive spells ought to have a cool-down in my opinion and really ought not to be in signature spells. I thought of doing that as one of my signature spells. But I figured that's a tad bit overpowered.

I'd say it depends how you build it. If its just like I can quickly flick up a thin layer of energy to reduce damage from an attack that would be fine as no cooldown.

I'd say its situational in most cases

Well, I guess you're right. They would, in fact, just be using up their MP by spamming those shields anyway. So yeah, you're right, shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Defensive spells as signatures are trickier, but I think still balanceable without forcing on cooldowns. Perhaps duration based defensive spells could have a cooldown...