I feel like stances would benefit from being able to be toggled on/off instead of being cast for a duration. A stance is a change in your posture and positioning for varying effects in combat, like dropping down into a defensive posture, or taking a wide leaned forward aggressive stance for a berserker. You toggle the stance and it stays active until you toggle it off or toggle a different stance.
So you want to have it have a practically unlimited duration. Let´s take Berserker Stance - in history and folk tales a berserksgangr was someone who, in battle, fought without regardss to his own safety. All out attack, lowered defence - and after a time that meant being winded for a while. In SotA there is a cooldown before the skill can be used again, which would be pointless if it would "always on" without duration. No fighter can keep up fighting without pause and so can´t keep on one combat stance forever. If there is no duration and cooldown then those skills would need to have a focus cost to see when the fighter is exhausted.
The cooldown to activate could stay in place to prevent rapidly toggling the stance on and off, if necessary. I haven't played in the last few weeks but pretty sure I was running berserker stance continuously on my tanky character, the glyph duration being longer than the cooldown at his skill levels. Having it as a toggle with reserved focus cost/small penalty to focus cost per second would be a welcome change. Only other objection I can think of is that if you don't have to keep refreshing it, you free up a glyph slot for something else (or reduce the need to switch to and from a separate buffs deck) so it slightly increases the utility of the skill from that perspective. I couldn't say whether that would really affect skill balancing in a significant way, it wouldn't make any real difference to how I play.
I personally don't want any focus cost and I prefer to charge it up, just like any other buff, in order to get the maximum benefit.
+1 No focus costs and give maximum benefits without having to charge/stack. I would also like for spellbinder stance to stay on well moving even if all benefits were disabled till you stood still again.
I think it's worth mentioning that the current method has important implications for deckbuiding strategy. If stances were a simple toggle that would be lost.
Unfortunately this won't likely pass. I suggested this stuff back in 2019 and it got stuck in the archived list and poo poo'd. But i figured after 5 years it was worth mentioning again. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/standardized-buff-durations.149054/ If you go through those posts you will notice i was much more heated on this topic back in 2019. This was a source of frustration for me back then. I've come to accept it since then... but 5 years is a long time for something not to change that is obviously the source of frustration for multiple players. That topic back in 2019 caught a decent amount of attention... But it is what it is. I just thought it would be neat to have less to worry about.
Nah, that's not how the stances should work. The time it takes to stack a stance and use it is the reason why they are so powerful while stacked. If you remove that... you must remove the stack power. Your suggestion only makes sense if you make all the stance work at their 1 stack power and your just removing strategy and deck building tactics and overall power for everything. Just straight up making things easy to use without consequences, is not more fun. It will just ruin gameplay in a game like this, where everyone can use anything at any time.... we don't need more power at this point. Especially with no drawback at all. The MASSIVE issue with this suggestion is everyone could instantly switch between any stance at 5 stack power. That is what this would do lol...
This really pokes the heart of what I enjoy most about the game. I make new characters very often and we run through them on stream in all sorts of ways. Build studies, role play, speed runs, adventurers, crafters. I'm just addicted to it, and to the progress you can make. That's why I still love playing my high level character as well; there are still ways to for me to get better. It would be a shame to shorten that road.
