Tristan Delaney

1 hour ago, Joanne said:

I have been on site for a while as @Symphony (using my alt account right now), so I have a bit of experience with the sword arts. When it comes down to it, I believe that proposal B sounds nice and more like a proper game mechanic. However, in boss battles and such, I can see both options as becoming a sort of problem. It already takes us months to get through one boss. I believe you should work on fleshing out boss development first or while working on sword art developments. 

Overall, Proposal B sounds like a standard progressive system. As players, we could keep track of cooldowns in our stats area of our posts. Of course, the sword arts section of site would needed to be updated with specific cool down rates for each weapon and sword art, but that shouldn't be the biggest issue. Just please work on the floor bosses and alter their development in some sort of way if you decide to go with either of these proposals or change the sword art system all together. 

I'm unsure if they use a derivative of the template I made for bosses years back and what changes, but it greatly comes down to player activity. However it would be possible to speed up fights while keeping on your toes by decreasing boss HP but increasing their attack power. But that's diverting from topic here.

2 hours ago, NIGHT said:

Now there's a key piece of the puzzle that's been missing; given this knowledge, it's a lot easier to see what might best fit the current system. The larger skills to weaker ones is a unique flow -- if it fits the theme of the game better, I'm all for it.

Indeed. I still need to get around to playing Hollow Realization to see what they used there, but to my understanding they use a mix of both energy and cooldowns. They can have that complexity due to automation though.

As the person who designed properly the first Sword Art system (based off suggestions by Daeron IIRC), interesting topic which I remember deliberating myself a lot. My main inspirations at the time of designing the systems were SAO Hollow Fragment and its PS4/PC remaster Re:Hollow Fragment. Let's talk about the distinction between these two games, as this is very relevant to the discussion at hand.
Note a key point here is that both games have an HP and Energy meter.

1. Vita Hollow Fragment. In this system, sword arts have no cooldown per se, but instead cost a certain amount of energy to use. More swanky the skill, the bigger the cost. This comes at the benefit of no tracking, but at the cost of something else. If you buff your energy to max and be consistently high then you can spam skills, but you also may not spend the energy using the "battle skills". For lack of better term, skills like sword arts that are not weapon based, but do buffs, debuffs, healing etc. I believe I stuck with this system as the basis because it led to no tracking, and cooldowns arent really what happens in the book/show. I'll explain this in the second part.
2. Re: Hollow Fragment. In this one, sword arts are on a cooldown. I believe this was done to both encourage energy usage for the other skills, but also to attempt to emulate the show, where bigger sword skills had you literally stuck in place like a doll as a cooldown longer, thus leaving you more open. This made the "Original sword skill" chaining mechanic HF had much stronger, which if you could time it right, basically stole the Kirito principle of skill cancelling by flowing one sword art into the next, effectively cancelling the cooldown of the previous, along with greatly reducing the cooldown to use them again. Problem was in HF this was incredibly difficult and we can't emulate that here without severely breaking balance or making things very confusing IMO.

Energy cost for basic attacks is a weird one, because technically any canonical attack that isn't a "sword art" is basically worth gnats piss. See Kirito slaying a pig with ease using a rock with one over Klein flailing about. So the idea I had in mind with basic attacks was that it was a sword art usage, just so basic it warranted no name. Hollow Fragment somewhat followed this principle with your basic attacks being extremely weak, though they were there.

I will say if a move from Energy to cooldown is planned, I'd stick with proposal B, but with maybe options for fixed routes to chain sword arts into weak ones to reduce the cooldown of the previous used one, to follow the OSS thing mentioned before. So you either spam big skills for long cooldowns, or chain into weaker ones after strong to reduce the cooldown of the strong. I wouldn't use both Energy and cooldown at same time, that'd be horrid. I'd thus consider Proposal B but with the chaining mentioned in this paragraph to incentivise various Art usage.
As for increasing the depth of stuff arts can do, I purposefully somewhat cut down from the original Hollow Fragment ones (and the ones I had to make up or use from other canon) but if users feel confident in the increased depth of skills that inflict self buffs or enemy debuffs I can see there being extra depth, especially for weapons like dagger to debuff for example.