ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Not all that long ago, egos got some much-needed love. --hero, --alacrity, and --wind are all top-tier egos to balance out light armors against their heavier cousins. There's nothing wrong with that, but some parts of the new egos are also mediocre in the early game and pointless later on. I'm looking at you, on-hit damage (among others).
For example, the greater ego 'tempestuous--' gives light armor lightning and cold resistance, and a token amount of on-hit lightning damage. How token? 6, on a T2 armor. That could easily be tripled for starter gear levels, and brought up to around 40ish for T5 gear.
Disclaimer: I realize that the on-hit isn't meant to be huge, as it's already like a cold resistance ego and a lightning resistance ego rolled up together.
For belts, 'insulating--' is another example of a relatively useless ego, which for some reason, belts have lots of. Averaging around 5% fire and cold resistance (each) is only barely better than nothing. Again, those values could be doubled-quadrupled depending on item tier.
Just my two cents; feel free to tear this apart.

Insulating and other multi-resist egos could probably use a boost. It is so low that it is barely worth keeping to help buffer up against a single resistance, and doesn't match up to other equipment if you are going for a multi-resist lowout.

I'm not sure about On-hit damage. It can really add up if you have enough of it on your various gears. Unless an ego is only really dedicated to On-hit damage, then I'm sort of fine with it as it is.

Monsters wear gear too.

Ask yourself how you'd feel if you flurried a monster wearing that ego. Retribution robes are an excellent example of what not to do. And I imagine it's why they've been removed

edge2054 wrote:Monsters wear gear too.

Ask yourself how you'd feel if you flurried a monster wearing that ego. Retribution robes are an excellent example of what not to do. And I imagine it's why they've been removed

I pretty well felt like that whenever I used Flurry on a Elder/Master Vampire with my Thaloran Shadowblade. However, there are warnings that tell a player about retaliation damage, and about Sustained talents on use on enemies - like Phantasmal Shield.

There are a lot of useless belts. Insulation is a fine example, but also stuff like Transcendence which gives a bonus to values that get re-scaled, so the bonus is usually numerically worthless after the t1 dungeons are over.

Regarding Tempestuous (and the others like it), those are my fault. Here's my thinking on them: If you're wearing Leather, you tend to attack fast. You're either a dual-wielder, and archer, or a brawler. All of these classes have multi-attack talents and even their baseline attacks are often faster than average, especially with Momentum.

That means that if you're wearing Leather, your expected damage benefit is already a multiple of the on-hit damage number. So I made it low.

These greater egos could be improved by adding some resistance penetration, I suppose, but the bonus damage values should stay fairly low IMHO.