I never quite understood why all the active artifacts all have the same cooldown. If you open up for changing the cooldown, then things get more interesting and there is one more parameter to tweak the balance.
Agree ... I recommended that the cooldowns change as the level rise up, making Epic truly Epic, Legendary truly Legendary, then some of them may not even need to 2x each step up if the cooldown is adjusted as well.
That doesn't necessarily solve the problem, though. Sure, this can help with artifacts that exceed a limit that they technically can't (like the Quadruple Strike or (potentially) the Discount artifacts). If the problematic artifact exceeds its limit, scale down the effect and also scale down the cool-down. But this approach makes them more and more like a passive artifact. At some point, it wouldn't really be an active artifact anymore. And we already have more passive ones than actives. To be clear, I wouldn't mind if some of the actives that don't have a passive counterpart yet would become more passive-like because I still prefer the passive ones at this point.
Not really - no one is saying to make the cooldown 15 mins. I think it has potential to minimally help with problem. Perhaps it won't "solve" the problem, b/c I think the "problem" is viewed differently by players & Fizzer. We see that Actives aren't useful, and he sees that Actives aren't overpowered, and we're both right, and the "solution" is somewhere in the middle where they be both useful & yet not overpowered.
But Fizzer definitely wants active artifacts in their current form (or at least similar to that) so he won't probably make actives more passive.
Not necessarily. He's outright asked the community for ideas on this, so he just needs to hear the right idea that strikes the right balance. I've found that he won't just implement a suggestion b/c many people think it's a good idea, you have to convince him, and it has to be beneficial enough to warrant spending time on. There are many "good ideas" that are on his list but he's just 1 guy with limited time, so he will pick the ones that give the biggest benefit and/or the ones he feels strongest above. But once you've convinced him it is a good idea, he's actually pretty open to implementing those ideas. We've seen that a number of times. His specific question to the community was regarding Swapping, but definitely included use of Actives, their power levels & cooldowns. He directly stated that he's looking (and asking us) for good ideas on this. We gave him lots of ideas, but never got any final word of what he took away from it, if he saw any 'good ideas' in the bunch, but he did then buff Actives and left everything else the same, so not sure if he didn't find anything worth implementing, if he has something else in store, or maybe you're right and he really likes 16h cooldowns.
And having one global cool-down value for all artifacts makes it easier to judge their value for each player. Imagine you also had to factor in their cool-down in your pros and cons.
Np by me to factor in varying cooldown times. I already have to factor in various %'s, cost to acquire, quantity, etc. And still simpler for example than recipes, figuring out if crafting X is more beneficial than selling its ingredients A,B,C, etc, while considering smelting times/crafting times/varied ingredient requirements, etc, and factoring in Techs, time to completion, etc. Cooldowns really has no basis for being even across the board, other than that it is a "long period" that means you really have to make the invocation value worth it - and that's the problem and has always been the problem, many just simply still aren't worth 16 hours. The game simply has complex math, and varying the cooldown times doesn't increase it by much.