Building Cooldown
Personally I believe the 5 second cooldown in between placing gem collectors is far too long. Its not long enough to where I can drop the collector and move around somewhere else and its not short enough to spam them. So I end up gyrating in the same section of the map just waiting for it to pop back up.
I realize it might be so that you must fight the enemy in an area and can't collect them all super fast but I feel like the gem collectors being destructible already does that. Its possible that this is just my gripe but I can't help but feel it can be improved upon.
So my suggestions are:
Lower the number of gem spawns but make them count for more so they're farther apart and you can move from area to area (might need to increase the health of the gem extractors?)
Lower cooldown but longer gem extraction time (this course of action might have the same problem as mentioned above)
Or just a lower cooldown in general
I'm curious how everyone else feels though!
Comments
In solo play this happened a lot. However, in party play this didn't really happen at all for me. You should be pretty much always be doing something, and there is plenty to do with the different titan camps across the map along with the enemy players. Getting the gems isn't an issue with party play because everyone else is doing it, so by the time you get to your respective gems, your cooldown is already over. The bot AI could use some work though, which is probably why it felt a tad long during solo play.
@Arkoniel, we spoke a bit about this in the chat so I'll repeat some of what I said there right here!
Gemming is an EXTREMELY flexible system -- We can tune number of gems, location of gem spawns, duration of gems before they disappear, duration of collection, radius of collection, HP on collectors etc.
As we encounter concrete problems, we'll always twiddle gemming to make sure it supports the gameplay. As Rundar has said, it feels VERY different when you have a real ally. AI's tend to get in the way quite a bit lol. Also, as others have noted, there is potential degeneracy in an ally taking literally ALL your gems and you wind up with inter-team competition.
At the core, though, gemming is there to drive interaction in a resource-focused way. As a result, we can focus on OTHER systems that need work instead of tuning gemming.
In short, agreed there are issues. We have the knobs to fix them later. For now we focus on other things (economy/mercs/charms woo!)