Elemental Surge is both useless and boring

[Umbrall]

In short, Elemental Surge means that if you crit with your offensive, elemental spell, then you have a 30% chance to proc a usually situational, purely defensive buff. If you need a defensive buff, chances are your first priority is not nuking things. Granted there is one offensive buff, a 20% casting speed in arcane, but chances are this means you get get to cast one extra spell sometime over those five turns. Besides all of this, buffs are significantly more boring than the debuffs of endless woes (which as a brief aside seems also bad due to characters not having a breadth of those elements). It doesn't need to be a clone of it, and shouldn't be.

Why not do the following, on a crit, you have a chance depending on the element (100% for some, maybe less for others) to proc an off-element debuff. These will be usable by anyone but synergize the most with archmages (who have most of these elements anyway). I propose the following:
Arcane - leaves a strong burning wake at the tile (regardless of having the sustain active). This makes some sense, and works well enough with the large aoe of arcane spells
Fire - slows the target
Nature - blinds the target
Light - freezes the target (this makes the least sense but has a lot of synergy, perhaps too much)
Cold - dazes the target (this procs hurricane)
Lightning - briefly silences

[SageAcrin]

Too much overlap with Endless Woes-which has inflicting negative status as its own point.

If the bonuses aren't good enough, make them better. There's always room for defense, even if offensive is preferred by most players.

Personally, I'd say the problem is less the effects and more the cooldown. With the randomized chance, you can't actually stack more than two or so anyways, and you have to both hit and damage sufficiently an enemy to get even a chance. (Or shoot yourself before entering battle, but that has its own problems.)

Endless Woes doesn't have a CD, and I don't think this needs one either. 3CD would be sufficient to prevent notable chaining; 12 is overkill.

Otherwise? Nature should probably block Mind and Magic effects, which is really notable-There's only one Nature caster, really, that can reliably get that kind of damage, and the effect should be powerful. (Well, Wyrmic can with Swallow, but not reliably.)

The barrier on Light damage really needs to scale with something, too. (200+(Cun*2))? Not like it can apply a barrier if you already have one(which the main Light damage users often do), and it applies them very unreliably. Some kind of regeneration effect(which those classes don't have) might be better.

And Fire's currently too unreliable to really use as a status cure, even without the CD; The statuses you want to clear off often will make it hard to fire off spells repeatedly, and it's generally going to be used as a last ditch(and people generally have much better last ditch oriented Prodigies to buy). 50% might be a bit much, but I think it'd be okay.

[Umbrall]

It's not about it being defensive, it's about being defensive when you crit with a high damage offensive spell.

[SageAcrin]

And?

There's plenty of times those don't instantly kill an enemy. 200 is not a particularly high value-frail endgame enemies have three times that, easily.

[Umbrall]

Oh, all those times where you really need to cure those debuffs you got after your first hit on an enemy on a mage before they could even see you. And that extra armor is incredibly useful as well when you're at 10 range and just froze the target (glacial vapors won't hit that much)

[SageAcrin]

Yeah, as I said, Fire needs a buff. If you've got a better change for that effect, it'd be welcome. Maybe something like a Providence like constant burning off of negative effects, rather than a single effect burn? That makes it more of a defense and less of a reactive heal, which would be more useful.

I'm open to Cold getting a buff, too. You're right that armor for a ranged attacker is fairly weak in general, and Cold isn't a common element to attack with either. But again, that mostly would just need a straight up overhaul. Maybe it could slow projectiles fired at you as well, by 50-70%? Seems a reasonably thematic effect.

[HousePet]

How about Elemental Surge grants buffs and Endless Woes grant debuffs (on target), and extend both to all damage types.

Also have all effects scale with Cunning.

[HousePet]

Suggestion for making Elemental Surge/Endless Woes more interesting. With more options and less overlap with existing effects.

Elemental Surge:
Physical (cos those geomancers aren't happy it was left out): Creates a damage shield (made of stone) around you.
Fire: Pyromancers already have Cleansing Flame so instead, +damage all.
Cold: Yet another ice armour effects, change to +resist all.
Lightning: Keep this as the lightning transformation.
Acid: Melts away pesky debuffs.
Light: Surrounds you with a cloud of light, increases either defence or grants evasion.
Darkness: Makes you invisible for a turn. No damage penalty.
Arcane: Manasurge.
Nature: Regeneration.
Blight: Warps your anatomy, increasing you critical resistance for a short time.
Mind: Sharpens your mind to solve minor problems. (status effect reduction effect)
Temporal: A global speed boost.

Endless Woes:
Physical: Knockback.
Fire: Flameshock.
Cold: Frozen Ground status. (not the whole talent)
Lightning: Prevents the target from criticalling.
Acid: Existing attack and damage reduction is good.
Light: Makes the target glow, reducing their defence, stealth power and invis power.
Darkness: Still Blinds
Arcane: Silences the target.
Nature: Covers the target in Slippery Moss.
Blight: Drains the targets stamina and increases their equilibrium.
Mind: Confusion.
Temporal: Slow.

[Umbrall]

The problem with doing physical is that you could use it just fine on rogues, and get constant damage shields. If anything it needs to be only magic-based. Also knockback has the potential to grief the user a lot. Properly balanced pinning or stunning is better.

[HousePet]

Firstly, a cooldown to avoid spamming.
Secondly, if you don't want the knockback, don't take the prodigy.

Yes there is a small thematic issue with the physical option, but I don't think its worth penalising physical casters and I don't think there is an easy way around it. (except maybe require a large number of spell/mind casts)

I can't see Rogue players complaining.