Cooldown recovery in skill trees unclear/inconsistent

[Stein]

I’ve determined some inconsistencies in how cooldown recovery works with nodes inside a skill’s passive tree in combination with sources outside it.

With Volatile Reversal, the different cdr nodes are additive with each other, but sources of cdr outside the tree add up to a factor which is multiplied against this rather than added to it.
For example, if I have Timelost Vitality (+60% cdr) and Traveler’s Fatigue (+50% cdr) , and outside the tree, I have the Sentinel passive Valiant Charge (+30% cdr) and a pair of boots with T6 27% cdr, I would expect all sources to be additive and produce:

24 / (1+0.6+0.5+0.3+0.27) = ~9.34 seconds

But I actually get a 7.3 second cooldown, likely due to the following math:

24 / [ (1+0.6+0.5) * (1+0.3+0.27) ] = ~7.28 seconds

This can also be thought of as 2 steps, in which the skills cooldown is “reset” to a new number from it’s tree nodes:

24 / (1+0.6+0.5) = ~11.43 → ~11.43 / (1+0.3+0.27) = ~7.28 seconds

I confirmed this by starting naked with a 24 second cooldown and taking these nodes (or the 300% from Timelost Wisdom) and outside sources in different combinations.

However, testing other skills, I get mixed results. Some of them will add with sources outside the tree (as in the first equation above) and some will multiply (as in the second/third equation above). So far, I’ve tested:

Volatile Reversal: multiplicative

Void Cleave: additive

Snap Freeze: multiplicative

Volcanic Orb: multiplicative

Teleport: additive (going left, increasing the cooldown to 11 and then reducing again)

I noticed 2 different wordings in the tree nodes, in case those were intended to represent the difference in logic:

“Cooldown Recovery Speed: +X%”
“Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed: X%”

But Teleport uses the former language and Void Cleave uses the latter language, and both of those are additive.

Not sure what is and isn’t a bug or typo here, but consistency would be nice.

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Suggestions:

I personally would like cdr on gear to be good, and they’re competing with some strong suffixes (and you can only get it on belt and boots), so I would prefer the Volatile Reversal multiplicative scenario to simply be universal to cdr on all skills, so that the first cdr affix on gear isn’t already giving diminished returns.

On a related note, I think it would be a good idea to have increased area of effect do the same. I haven’t tested this (I don’t know how to without counting pixels), but after trying the increased area affix with some skills to see a dissapointingly small increase each time, I imagine it’s because it’s additive with the area increases from nodes in the skill trees (which often offer about 100% already, halving the effectiveness of the stat on gear).
It would be nice to see the area affix actually compete with others, since it’s a stat that actually results in a change in gameplay, and a really satisfying one at that.

Also, in these cases, the nodes should clearly state “multiplicative with other modifiers” as “more” damage nodes do (If you still want Volatile Reversal nodes to add together first, then they would need some extra explanation).

[Reimerh]

We’re investigating where these inconsistencies are and we plan to make them much more consistent throughout the game.

[DirePenguin]

Yes, please. It’s confusing when 100% turns out to be ~50%. Like the Mana efficiency node for Shield Rush.

[Heavy]

But that is not even the topic of this thread.

LE uses cooldown recovery speed as a Stat and not cooldown reduction. And 100% “recovery speed” makes the cooldown cooling down twice as fast, which leads to having half the cooldown. This is way easier to balance and will lead to much less abusive cases, because it’s impossible to reach 0 cooldown and it will have an inherent diminishing return, which allows the devs to give good access to the Stat without making it abusively good or mandatory. Same with mana efficiency. Both of these use the same formula.

But I think the formula needs to be presented better I game so people with less math skills will be able to find out how much a certain value will give them.

[DirePenguin]

Yes, but it’s related. The descriptions of the bonuses are not clear. When I see “100% mana efficiency/100% Cooldown Recovery Speed”, my first thought is “Down to 0 – ie, 0 mana cost or 0 cooldown/instant”. The guide has nothing to say about “mana efficiency” or “cooldown recovery speed”. It doesn’t even have to do with maths skeeeeels, y0. It has to do with clarity in descriptions, or at least the topic being presented in the game guide, so it can be referenced.

Enough games already play word-salad, making pre-existing understanding of terms confusing (read as: Undecember counting Physical as “element damage”).

[Heavy]

The formula is presented in the character sheet when you hover over the stat.

I definitely agree that there needs to be a dedicated thing in the game guide.

[DirePenguin]

Oh wow, it is! Never even realized that – never even knew mana efficiency was a stat on the character sheet, since so much of it is skill-specific.

[Bakageyama]

But, 100% cooldown recovery is just 2x faster?

4s becomes 2s.

This is the exact same for increased damage? So I don’t see what the confusion is.

If they changed the name to “Cooldown duration” then I’d be fine with it being 50% instead. But then you have to understand that having 50% cooldown duration in two places is not 100% cooldown duration but instead 25% since it becomes multiplicative. This would require rebalancing regardless since the math changes. So you could make it additive.

200% cdr is 1/3 of the base cooldown. Which makes sense because it’s 3x the rate. Just add 1 to the cdr.

113% cdr is 2.13x faster. 524% cdr is 6.24x faster. Very easy.

[DirePenguin]

Because I’m used to cooldown reduction and mana reduction being stats. And those, traditionally, work very differently than recovery/efficiency. You can lead a duck to water, but you can’t teach him new terminology.

[Llama8]

And the should both be mentioned in the in-game guide (if the aren’t already).