Some ailments in LE lack an identity compared to others. For me the top three outliers are bleed, ignite and chill.
Chill: while chill is great defensive mechanic, i do not like how every build that hits uses it for defense. I want to incorporate cold damage into its identity. Therefore i suggest the following
Make chill’s effect scale with a % of dmg dealt as cold dmg. This could be 100% effectiveness for a 100% cold build down to 50% effectiveness for a 0% cold build. The ratio could be adjusted to 150% to 50% or even down to 0%, i would just like to see chill more closely linked to cold damage builds.
Bleed: bleed is a DoT that does not shine out when compared to poison or ignite. My idea would be to make the enemy do less damage based on the amount of bleed damage received recently. I was mostly just thinking thematically, if you are bleed your attacks are weaker. It could also frontload its damage so that the damage per tick starts high then decays down to zero as your platelets build up, reflecting how bleeding works in real life.
Ignite: I don’t have great ideas that like for ignite so im going to steal from Mike’s random idea about ignite spreading to nearby enemies. There is a large implementation problem with it from what I remember when Ziz had his conversation with the devs designing his unique.
If you have any ideas on how these or other ailments could be improved lets hear them!
When you mention Chill are you also talking about Frostbite? I did dabble a little with both ignite and frostbite. It was very frustrating as some classes can’t even fathom to begin to scale one versus the other. In mage for example, spell blade you can scale frostbite, but sorcerer don’t even bother. Ignite for me was more successful down the sorcerer tree.
I like to walk a different path and not just stack 1000’s of spell power/crit/crit multi to see giga numbers. I would enjoy seeing mobs melt to death because of how many stacks you could rip into them in a short or long time.
So Time Rot already get’s a rework/overhaul in 083, so I can definitely see them overhauling other ailments too in the future, to give them more character.
Also one of the new Creator Uniques coming in 083 will have some cool interaction with Damned.
Damned is also in a weird spot, it dies have a unqiue secondary effect and does scale with spell damage (which is unique to it’s for being an ailment), but it’s still not in a good spot, i nterms of how good it is.
Now the question is: Is that good or bad?
I think it’s great that not every class has access to everything.
There should only be some of those potetnial build opportunities on Uniques, like Rogue with the Frost Bow and Quiver for example, but generally Rogue doesn’t have much Cold stuff.
same goes for Primalist (Shaman), it usually does have physical, cold and lightning but no fire.
I like restrictions like that, sicne they give the class more individuallity.
I meant chill but that does bring up a different idea to combine the two. Then all frostbite effect would only be accessible by cold builds mostly and it would always be an opportunity cost. Though I just remembered that frostbite stacks infinitely while chill is capped to 3 stacks so maybe keep the chill effect capped but have frostbite effectiveness raise the cap.
