Reworking immunity

[Dwindlehop]

A post-1.0 idea:

It bugs me that immunity and saves only reduce the duration of a talent (potentially to 0). There's no way in the game to reduce the effect of a talent (except damage). Perhaps this is a deliberate design choice, but it is really really annoying to be able to get 98% stun immunity easily but have to go through some pain to get 100% stun immunity because that 2% is essentially just as deadly as not having immunity at all.

The saturation of the color of the effect line on mouse over could be the easy indication of the effectiveness of the effect inflicted on enemies. On yourself, the flash that b43 introduced to current effect icons could change color saturation as well.

Some kinds of talents are difficult to scale effectiveness. It's hard to partially swap places. It is probably confusing to have immunity work differently depending upon the type of effect. My recommended solution is for items with immunity that can scale effectiveness to grant resistance as well (e.g. stabilizing amulet gives both 28% stun immunity and 28% stun resistance) whereas effects that are binary (happened or didn't) work off immunity only. Of course the relative levels of immunity/resistance could be tweaked, and new or different egos developed with this in mind. I think a lot of the racials might be better balanced as +effect resistance rather than +effect immunity. Many class talents might be better off being +effect resistance rather than +saves. It would help give flavor and variation to the races and classes. For example, dwarves could get resistance to stun and knockback but not blind or bleeding. Undead could get 90% resistance rather than 100% immunity to their natural immunities, which gives slightly more utility to certain talent trees in the undead-dominated sections of the game without penalizing the undead player characters particularly.

One fallout in a world with less immunity is that wild infusions become much worse with many low-grade effects. That would have to be dealt with. I believe that any design that works well in that situation would be an improvement over the wild infusion design today.

The upside, of course, is that new players could get eased into the game without being clobbered so hard by the unbelievable cockblock of getting your first berserker stunlocked to death in Trollmire.

[bricks]

I agree with the motivation, but not particularly with the implementation. I think what you are describing is primarily an issue with stun, since many effects aren't great candidates for partial resists, nor are they so particularly dangerous. Confusion more or less already works this way. I think you could have stun/freeze immunity behave this way, too, and reduce stun/freeze immunities across the board. It would definitely make small amounts of stun/freeze immunity more valuable.

[Dwindlehop]

Honestly I forgot Confusion was changed to be this way already.