Seasons just need to be stances

Mullinstron

Seasons should just be stances. There's no reason they need to be four separate spells with long cooldowns when you load them. The current implementation just makes them unnecessarily awkward and frustrating to use.

Now that we have Spring and Fall spells, why not make all of the seasons stances that you can switch between on the UI, while keeping the same cooldowns they have now? It wouldn't change their balance or effects at all. It would simply make them much more user-friendly and enjoyable to use, instead of adding unnecessary friction to a core class mechanic.

Gunburner

[unknown] I agree. Except for the devs might say "you need to decide to use a spell slot for it for 2 seconds" 😛

TheStranger

I'm confused... So you're not wanting the Seasons to be stances, but the Mantle spells to be stances?

Mullinstron

Sure, the mantle spells should be stances. Not sure what the diffrence is but we are talking about the same thing. All 4 of them should just be buttons on your UI with the same lockout timer that the spells have.

Gathbard

I'm pretty sure it is intentional.
Seasons were not designed to be stances from the get go, otherwise mantles wouldn't have a shared cd.

You are not supposed to regularly swap between season on the fly, unless you keep alternating heal and damage and ride the line between summer/winter and their mana regen seasons (spring/autumn),
The spells you cast determine the season, unless you want to lock it in for a long time with a mantle/slowly move into another season with repeated casts of "non seasonal" spells.
It's a choice you're forced to make.

Summer is for when you want to go full healing, and it gives you 20% heal bonus and the bonus summer heal spell
Winter is for when you want to go full damage, and it gives you 20% damage bonus plus the winter damage spell.
That is how it should work according to the notes.

It's completely fine to dislike this mechanic, but it doesn't look like it was ever intended to be a traditional stance swap system.
I for one would like for each class to simply have a bar dedicated to 1 hour buffs, or to be able to cast them from the book.
Sitting down, swap in the 1 hour buffs in the hotbar, cast them all, swap them back off for your actual combat spells and resume playing is ridiculously convoluted and time consuming.

Now, if the buffs only worked as long as they were actually on your hotbar I could see it make sense because it would force you to make hard choices and make players diversify their spells more.
That would probably leave buff classes with 9 buffs and one spammable skill on their hotbar though.

Mullinstron

Im sure it is too and I think its pontless and just annoying for no reason. It should be a stance swap system. There is zero gameplay benfit from the way it is. I dont think its as well thought out as you think, Its an idea that they seemed to have throw down and it kind of works. You can see that they almost aready agree with me by adding in Fall and Spring spells.
We just dont gain anything gameplay wise for these to spells.

Gathbard

The point is:
If you make them stances the idea becomes that you can swap them at any time with one push of a button, and the entire season system is designed for you to NOT be able to do that and it has to be intentional, or it wouldn't make sense.

Love it or not, on demand instant swapping between season is not what they wanted for the class, or the mantle spells would not have a shared 20 minutes CD.
Asking to make them stances is asking to fundamentally change the concept of the class, which is fine, feedback is feedback, but it's not just a minor tweak, especially when they basically just released the seasons system.

Druids are not supposed to swap their 20% bonus from damage to heals whenever they want, or they wouldn't have set it up this way.
You can still heal in Winter season, you'll just heal for less, the reverse applies to winter, with the middle seasons for mana regen. Is the system perfect, or even fluid? I don't think so. It definitely needs more work, but with instant swapping you would have a class that can optimally fill 2 roles in a group at the same time: dps and healer
That is not only the opposite of the seasonal system's design, that's basically the opposite of what they want the game to be.

You join a group as dps, you do damage. You join it as healer, you heal.
We can swap things around during a break or a party shuffle, but no one can swap roles in the middle of a fight like Druid would be able to do with Season stances.

They didn't even add a second hotbar to force you to make choices (and I for one think that we could really use a second hotbar), I don't see them turning one class major system from spells to stances just like that.

tuesday

The class would absolutely play better if they were stances. Right now it’s just a silly mini game that increases APM for the sake of it.

Verily

Gathbard I think instead of the second bar solution they should just fine-tune the mechanic they already added to expand some of the limits on casting, that being cantrips. The way they work now seems pretty counter intuitive because they take up limited space reserved for "prepared" (memorized) spells. The whole point of a cantrip is you dont have to prep it and it doesnt take up space. In MM cantrips only got half of this (at best) and it feels like they really missed the mark.

Ive seen a good idea mentioned about this subject before; that was choosing a cantrip would move the spell to the innate section of your spell book. This would keep all the functionality it already has and be much more in line conceptually. Casting off the Innate pages directly sounds cool too. Limiting the level of the spells you can choose from, making it a permanent choice, and allowing for only a small number of known cantrips are usual factors to balance them and would work fine here imo.

It wouldnt necessarily eliminate the problem of too many spells for some of the buffing classes like you describe, but could fix OPs mantle problem (I think?). And as far as problems go "too many spells" isnt the worst one to have.

Gathbard

Y'all keep talking as if Druid was supposed to switch between Winter and Summer constantly.
They're not supposed to. The theme of Seasons is intentional. You cycle through them, you don't skip them.
It is not meant for you to go from DPS to HEALS with a mantle on a regular basis, that's why the cooldown is there.

You're supposed to sit in that particular season and eventually change it when you switch role or for emergencies (you main heal but there's a sudden need for burst/you're dps but the main healer goes down), otherwise why would the seasonal counter stack to 10 and require to go back to 0 before the season changes?
Why is there such a long CD on the mantles?
I really don't believe they expect you to slot all 4 mantles on the hotbar. That's 4 slots out of 10 for a skill you can use every 20 minutes.
It's the only explanation. Otherwise their whole skillset would make no sense.
It could be tweaked: the stack of 10 could be lowered, the mana regen for mid seasons increased, but turning Seasons into stances means to fundamentally alter the class and its skillset. We're 2 months away from EA (allegedly), I don't see that happening.

With that said, if they do expect you to constantly swap then I agree, for such a purpose the current iteration is horrible, but I strongly doubt that's the case.

Verily

Mullinstron The gameplay benefit is you reset the stack of seasonal charges to the one you want to benefit from, thats pretty far off from "zero benefit". All you should really need access to from your spell slots is one mantle out of the four, two tops.

How would swapping them to stances with the same cooldown be better from your point of veiw? It doesnt seem like that would change anything to me. Would the stacks be removed as a mechanic entirely from this point? Or is your problem that you wanna keep them all in your spell bar?

Arkamedeez

[unknown] How would swapping them to stances with the same cooldown be better from your point of veiw?

I asked in another thread why people are so obsessed with stances. I am told because it frees up spell slots.

I do not agree with that reason, especially in this case. As has already been said I don't believe it is intended to constantly swap seasons. I also believe there needs to be choices made and not to place all four mantles on your spell bar.

TheStranger

I'd be fine with the Mantles being stances, as in they don't take up a spell slot. However, they should retain their shared cooldown. The power of the Druid is the flexibility they have via seasons. If you take that way, you have to weaken their healing or damage or both. You can't just have a class that can swap between high healing and high damage at any point, with the simple click of a button. At that juncture, why not just roll the benefits of seasons into the mantles themselves and not even have seasons?

The entire purpose of the mechanic is to give the class flexibility and differentiate it from the other healers in this way. I think it's gonna take awhile, but folks are gonna have to shed themselves of the WoW-mentality on classes. That every class should just be able to do any thing at any time. I don't mean this to sound harsh, as I too love and enjoyed WoW classic. However, class homogenization is a HUGE issue in the genre and it's actively killing games within it. We need to do our solid best to lean away from that and embrace unique class identity again.

tuesday

A long cooldown makes sense, but what I don’t like is that it’s kind of like a silly mini game you have to play to stay in your preferred season. Needing to throw out nukes or heals that you otherwise would not want to cast to maintain your current stance just seems like it would be frustrating.

TheStranger

[unknown] What is specifically silly about it?

tuesday

TheStranger
The unnecessary increase in APM in the sandwich game. The fact that you literally have to play inefficiently by casting spells you don't really want to cast just to maintain the stance you'd like to stay in.

Verily

tuesday I welcome our new mini-game. It will hence be dubbed Silly Seasons.

When engaged in a game of Silly Seasons, ol' dad taught me: always remember the five P's! Proper planning prevents poor performance.

TheStranger

tuesday I don't know what APM is. However, the way to get around this is to simply ask the group what role you're being invited to fill. If you're being invited as a healer, then simply staying in Summer or Autumn and using your heal, buff, CC and support spells won't move you out of those seasons. If you're being invited as DPS, staying in Winter and Spring and using damage, buff, CC and support spells won't move you out of those either. The feature of the class is to give you the flexibility to choose your role.

I don't mean to be coy or facetious, but I'm failing to see the issue with just simply using the season that fits your role within the group. If you need to quickly shift into a different role (DPS > Healing) if your healer needs help. Just use the appropriate mantle or spells to do so. I'm not sure I'm understanding what silly mini-game takes place that you're talking about.

Verily

TheStranger I assume theyre refering to solo play, where keeping your Silly Seasons stack up is more effort because you heal yourself and hurt the enemy.

tuesday

TheStranger So the way to get around the minigame is to completely lock yourself out of entire lines of spells? Don't love that for the jack of all trades class.