Ailments feel disconnected from the base damage of applying Hits/DoTs

[TK_Thaumaturge]

The title sums it up. While it is true that ailments are often soft-locked behind certain damage types (e.g. the Mage passive tree having nodes that only grant Fire skills a chance to Ignite, Cold skills a chance to Chill, and so on) & certain Skills (e.g. Fireball has nodes related to DoT damage and Ignite application), I nonetheless am left with the feeling that Ailments and their applying Hits/DoTs are not tied closely enough together: there is something thematically wrong with there being no inherent maluses to Igniting someone with a primarily Cold hit, and no inherent bonuses to Igniting someone with a primarily Fire hit.

The fact that the path of least resistance when creating an Ailment build will usually lead to having base damage matching that of the corresponding Ailment is too obviously a mere correlation, damaging both the fantasy of “playing by the rules” and “breaking the rules”: for example, the Soulfire Unique’s “+(100 to 160)% Chance to Ignite on Hit with Fire Skills and Necrotic Skills” attribute is probably BiS for some builds due to sheer magnitude of modifiers, but the fact that I could already Ignite with Necrotic hits with no inherent downside by scaling generic Ignite chance damages the fantasy, the flavor of this item. Imagine if, instead of Soulfire granting some conditional Ignite chance, it instead extended some inherent bonus towards Ignites from Fire damage to also be scaled by Necrotic damage? Now that could be both build-defining and highly flavorful.

To illustrate how I imagine Ailments and applying hits/DoTs could be tied more closely together, suppose every infinitely stacking damaging Ailment gained a small bonus based on the Base+Added damage of the applying Skill: something like “for every point of Base & Added Fire Damage of the applying Skill, Ignites applied by said Skill gain 1% increased Damage” or “For every point of Base & Added Physical Damage of the applying Skill, Bleed & Poison applied by said skill have 0.1% increased Duration.”

Another illustration: suppose a core Ailment was changed to buck the trend of “Rapid stack application” and instead worked like in PoE, where the ailment cannot stack or is only limited to 2-5 stacks, but the ailment’s base damage scales off the matching damage type in the applying hit; admittedly, that’s more an issue of Ailment identity than of the relation between Ailments and their applying hits, but in changing an Ailment’s identity in this way, it would also tie its scaling more closely to the damage type of the hit that applied it.

Finally, consider the idea of maluses: suppose that if a hit that is less than 50% Fire applies an Ignite, then every % of non-Fire damage over 50% causes a corresponding 1% decreased duration. So, a hit that deals 10 Fire and 10 Cold damage would have no malus, a hit that deals 8 Fire and 12 Cold would apply Ignites with a 10% duration debuff, and a hit that deals 20 Cold damage would apply Ignites with a 50% reduced duration; and so on for other Ailments.

All of these numbers & concepts in the last three paragraphs were pulled out my butt and in no way meant to be serious suggestions, merely illustrations of the overall concept I am driving at.

[Llama8]

I like that LE does ailments differently to PoE, though I’d also like ailments to be mechanically a bit different to each other.

@TK_Thaumaturge

suppose every infinitely stacking damaging Ailment gained a small bonus based on the Base+Added damage of the applying Skill: something like “for every point of Base & Added Fire Damage of the applying Skill, Ignites applied by said Skill gain 1% increased Damage” or “For every point of Base & Added Physical Damage of the applying Skill, Bleed & Poison applied by said skill have 0.1% increased Duration.”

If they did do something like that they’d probably have to reduce/remove the % modifiers being inherited from the skill. Something like that does sound interesting and could be used for uniques where they could balance it a bit more.

[Oeller]

But indirectly you already habe somethign like this. If you use a fire skil for applying a ignite dot you have the advantage that you cann skill the skills damage as well as the dot damage with increased fire/elemental damage, while a necrotic skill would not profit on hit/dot part with the same stat.

Isn’t this similar to what you want?
Getting increased flat damage to increase the ignite damage somehow is the same because flat otherwise would only affect the hit part, like damage over time currently does.

What I like msot about the ailment scaling in LE is that you cannot scale it with flat damage and thus get to use different items as BiS compared to hit based builds.

And still they are strong

[Macknum]

Yeah it’s realy frustrating that the magic in an fantasy game makes no sense when I look at it using the rules of physics from our world ^^.

I’m okay with the need to skill a specific way to make (better) use of dots because if you remove that stuff from the passive trees and skills trees the skill possibilities would be even more boring and bland.

[TK_Thaumaturge]

If they did do something like that they’d probably have to reduce/remove the % modifiers being inherited from the skill. Something like that does sound interesting and could be used for uniques where they could balance it a bit more.

But indirectly you already habe somethign like this. If you use a fire skil for applying a ignite dot you have the advantage that you cann skill the skills damage as well as the dot damage with increased fire/elemental damage, while a necrotic skill would not profit on hit/dot part with the same stat.
Isn’t this similar to what you want?
Getting increased flat damage to increase the ignite damage somehow is the same because flat otherwise would only affect the hit part, like damage over time currently does.

I’m okay with the need to skill a specific way to make (better) use of dots because if you remove that stuff from the passive trees and skills trees the skill possibilities would be even more boring and bland.

To be clear, I’m not fundamentally unhappy with how ailments currently scale, nor am I unhappy with the fact that some Skills can be specced to work best with them, I’m just discontent with the relation between ailments and hit/skill DoT damage and the lack of necessary correlation between the two.

I’d also dispute that, in the grand scope of things, a scaling based on composite base + added damage would necessitate a massive rebalance of scaling: for example, suppose you have an Ignite (base 40 damage) and 500% increased Ignite damage between increased Fire & (elemental) DoT scaling (easily achievable with a single T6 Ele Over Time mod + some t5 & passive modifiers); this would result in 240 Ignite damage. Now, a weapon specced to DoT is going to have relatively low added damage; a wand might have 60 added Spell damage, and Fireball’s base damage is 25. Even assuming my butt-pulled 1% increase per added point of Fire damage, that’d only be an 85% increase, for a total of ~274 damage per ignite. A buff? Yes, but not large enough of one to necessitate a massive rework of ailment damage for Skills that rely on multiple fast hits, since scaling fast hits will necessarily require a de-prioritization of flat added damage on both passive skills and affixes. It’d be enough to reward matching base damage to ailments and emphasize a thematic link between the base damage of a hit and the ailment inflicted, but not enough to destroy the current balance paradigm in place.

I also absolutely agree, making DoTs in LE a strict parallel to ailments in PoE is not desirable overall: there’s nothing wrong with an Ailment paradigm that emphasizes scaling via increased damage and sheer quantity of applications/second. However, I do think that ailments should nonetheless have a greater correlation with base hit damage type and not just increased damage multipliers, and if that happens to somewhat align with how PoE does things I don’t really care.

Finally, yes, fantasy physics need not be 1:1 parallels with those of the real world, but so far as I’m concerned a Skill that deals 100% Cold damage lighting someone on fire is an absurdity that deserves a mechanical penalty at best, and should some skill be capable of committing this absurdity with no penalty, it should be the exception, not the rule, and that exception should be created by some flavorful Unique affix or special Class or Skill node.

[BroncoCollider]

@Llama8

I like that LE does ailments differently to PoE

+1. I think it’s neat that, in this case at least, they decided it was better to put flexibility in the mechanics above rigidly sticking to realism or thematics or whatever. Or, as Max Landis once said: “You can kill a vampire however you want, because vampires aren’t f’ing real.”

@TK_Thaumaturge

so far as I’m concerned a Skill that deals 100% Cold damage lighting someone on fire is an absurdity

As long as you’re also willing to acknowledge that the line you’re drawing is very arbitrary, because the reality is that most of the game is an absurdity.

[Llama8]

I know, hence the second part of my post. What I would like is for the ailments to be mechanically different (is the same way that poison has innate shred & that used to scale infinitely) rather than just being different coloured DoTs.

I’d probably be ok with one ailment scaling with the flat damage of the hit that applied it (with balancing, obvs) 'cause that would completely change how you scaled it & if it also had a low stack cap (1, for argument’s sake) that would change how you used it. You would be able to use big slow hits to do lots of ailment damage rather than just lots if small hits applying lots of stacks.

@TK_Thaumaturge

Skill that deals 100% Cold damage lighting someone on fire is an absurdity

Not as much as you might think. There are some fuels that don’t produce much heat compared to “normal” fires. Plus “magic” (which is a blatant cop out since it could be used to explain anything & everything).

[Macknum]

Frost-Burn is a thing to make all of this short .