Some skills have an added damage effectiveness that is not 100 %. Skills with a low attack speed, long cooldown, or high mana cost get more from added damage, skills that can be spammed get less from the same amount of added damage.
Similarly, some skills that hit very frequently have a reduced effectiveness when it comes to applying ailments like Ignite or Bleed.
I wonder if it would make sense to combine both into one effectiveness. That would make things slightly simpler, as there would only be one effectiveness value for a skill. And it could make slow, expensive skills viable for DoT builds.
PS: I didnāt think this one through. Itās just an idea that was floating around in my head. Feel free to ignore it
Iām not sure. On the one hand, yes but on the other hand, not every skill needs to be good for everything. Currently, faster hitting skills are better for ailments than slower hitting builds, just like aoe skills are better for clear than single target. Does that mean that aoe skills should get a damage buff if they only hit 1 target?
I think it would be nice to take it a step further, and actually apply the attackās added damage to ailment base damage (restricted according to the damage type). So Added Physical Damage applies to your Bleeds, Fire Damage to ignites, etc. In exchange sources of ailment chance and ailment effectiveness could be nerfed somewhat.
For me the big letdown with ailment system rn (and itemisation/stats in general) is that even a halfway optimised build tends to end up using only a tiny corner of the potential stat pool. The moment you decide to build around ailment DPS, all nodes and items with Added Damage go straight to the bin. All kinds of exalts/uniques that thematically/intuitively match your build are useless because they fall on the wrong side of the arbitrary line between ailment and non-ailment damage. On the flipside, if you are building around direct damage you may as well ignore all the ailment content.
This has significant consequences for the itemisation experience. Imo a major reason that LEās actually-quite-generous crafting system still causes frustration is that the items you are looking for are just too specific, long before you get into serious chase item territory. A āfantasticā purple item is still often not rlly worth using if it has 3 of the desired affixes as opposed to a yellow item with 4. By making flat damage available to ailment builds and letting direct damage builds benefit a little more from odd sources of ailment, you increase the range of affixes that are āusableā (if not optimal), which expands the range of drop/crafting items that you can get excited about without necessarily intruding on the availability of actual chase items.
Locking slow attacks out of scaling ailments has some particularly larger + more negative implications though.
Specifically, a whole chunk of the weapon bases + some other mechanics are heavily specialised to attacking slowly, which generally means they need big attacks with big multipliers to be viable. Is it actually desirable that any weapon with an attack rate below 1.05 is worthless in an ailment build? Clearly not what EHG were thinking, since they made a bunch of Bleed content for 2H axes.
Slow-attacking skills and weapons are underwhelming and niche anyway. I donāt think itās great to corner them even further by excluding them from 50% of the damage-scaling content.
