Too many damage types?

[Grey]

Yeah, agreed. Even if we diversify the egos it doesn't really add anything interesting to items. The +% damage egos are just plain dull apart from in very specialist circumstances. The +% resistance egos are too diverse to actually be useful. Ultimately what we look for is more common stats to buff, like armour, HP/regen, stats and straight damage.

[edge2054]

Listen to me, listen to me. I know you all feel that there's too much archmage equipment and all that (and yeah, it's true). But different-colored +% equipment for everyone was the wrong way to go. That's the real problem here. Take away the +% blight, +% chronomancy, +% darkness and light. Replace them with, for instance, egos sculpted towards the stat and equipment requirements of those classes in a more general sense, without the glaring hammer-to-the-forehead lack of subtly that a +% bonus that affects nearly an entire class and only that class provides.

Making them general wouldn't be solving the problem, it would be enshrining it. It'd make every damage type more boring and would make equipment selection in general more boring across classes, contributing to making every class play the same way.

I guess this could work but you need to listen very carefully to me for a second.

The current system is already like this, especially late game. +damage gear for any class other then mages is very rare and very hard to come by. One of the end game paradox mages in the vault has 247 spellpower and like +30% temporal damage. He's stacking two stats Spellpower and more Magic (more Spellpower) because spellpower and magic gear comes with enough willpower that he doesn't have to think about it and because those really are the options. This makes it very hard to balance anything that works off spellpower (especially things that don't deal damage) because early game it has to be useful and late game it has to not be straight up broken.

If you have specific suggestions on what kind of egos should be geared towards each class I'd love to hear them. Because right now casters basically have the following stats, Spellpower (and Magic), Spellcrit, +damage, and to a lesser degree willpower. Without solid ideas on what to replace +temporal, light, darkness, and blight damage with that don't fall into one of the categories above your suggesting more homogenization and less choices on gear then I am.

*fake edit* I also find it interesting that of all the classes in the game that shouldn't be able to improve their damage by a percentage you're suggesting it's the non-archmage casters. Every non-caster class gets a percentage based bonus to damage through talents and has access to +physical damage gear and always has. It's part of the system and adding it to gear as new damage types became more common wasn't just about keeping up with arch-mages, it's because it's always been part of the system for everyone. Not just archmages.

[benli]

Perhaps rather than trying to target bonuses in such a broad way (by adding +dam, +res and hoping it helps classes without unbalancing them), maybe bonuses should more directly enhance the classes as they are designed. I'd love to see items that add +1 to a specific talent, cooldown bonuses, masteries, etc. Many of these could target specific items types; archmage skills for staves, fighter skills for shields. In fact that could be a good way to effectively limit how lucky a character could get. If archmage skills only show up on staves, jewelry and robes it limits the number of bonuses they could potentially get.

[Grey]

More variety on talent bonuses would be nice, as long as they're not too overpowered. Dragon armour is great for many classes because of the Rush cooldown for instance.

[Nevuk]

I thought the argument was more for the resist % than for the damage %. I would be perfectly fine with lowering the # of damage % items in the game whilst simultaneously making resist% easier to get.

At the very least, poison/nature/acid all feel like they overlap.

[bricks]

I still don't see why archmages/alchemists/wyrmics get special equipment choices, and every other non-physical class is supposed to be designed for regular stat/spellpower/whatever scaling. It's already a flawed concept; +darkness damage equipment, while needed for the "pure mage" necromancer class (using the same logic) will still benefit Doomed and Anorithils.

Reimplementing +damage egos as sets of conceptually associated damage types (storm = lightning and cold; destruction = fire, lightning, darkness; corruption = blight, darkness and acid and so on) is my preferred solution. I would like single damage-type builds to be more viable. More resistance penetration gear would also be good. Archmages are still special in that they get capstone sustains that increase both damage and resist penetration.

I thought the argument was more for the resist % than for the damage %. I would be perfectly fine with lowering the # of damage % items in the game whilst simultaneously making resist% easier to get.

At the very least, poison/nature/acid all feel like they overlap.

Poison damage is nature damage, btw.

[Nevuk]

I still don't see why archmages/alchemists/wyrmics get special equipment choices, and every other non-physical class is supposed to be designed for regular stat/spellpower/whatever scaling. It's already a flawed concept; +darkness damage equipment, while needed for the "pure mage" necromancer class (using the same logic) will still benefit Doomed and Anorithils.

Reimplementing +damage egos as sets of conceptually associated damage types (storm = lightning and cold; destruction = fire, lightning, darkness; corruption = blight, darkness and acid and so on) is my preferred solution. I would like single damage-type builds to be more viable. More resistance penetration gear would also be good. Archmages are still special in that they get capstone sustains that increase both damage and resist penetration.

I thought the argument was more for the resist % than for the damage %. I would be perfectly fine with lowering the # of damage % items in the game whilst simultaneously making resist% easier to get.

At the very least, poison/nature/acid all feel like they overlap.

Poison damage is nature damage, btw.

I think I'm thinking of blight.