It’s no secret that some skills greatly favor ailment vs crit/hit scaling. I believe that skills should be flexible and that every class should have a hit-based or ailment-based support and sklls that support their archetype. That way we have more variety in builds!
Damage and ailment effectiveness. Ignite Forge Guard is one such archetype and is struggling because its signature damaging skills (forge strike and smelter’s wrath) favors hit-based builds. Both of these skills have high damage effectiveness (400%) which multiplies hit damage. They also have 100% ‘ailment effectiveness’; with 100% Ignite chance forge strike/smelter’s wrath does 1 ignite stack! Usually skills and ailment effectiveness should be the same. Other skills like rive, multistrike, or smite have a similar ailment effectivess to their damage effectiveness (100/100/100% vs 100/100/150%). A skill like Rogue’s flurry has 60%/60% effectiveness for hits and ailments.
The current situation. Their slower cast times and high damage effectiveness means that their ailment passive nodes need to make up the difference for ailment based builds. Unfortunately, this is not the case; getting a 4x multiplier for ignite only builds is impossible on the tree. Thus, a skill like rive will vastly outcompete forge strike/smelter’s wrath for ignite-based builds because they have the same ailment effectiveness.
Several solutions present themselves. One, either add crazy passive tree support for forge strike/smelter’s wrath to compete with hit-based builds. Two, or just increase their ailment effectiveness to 400%; 100% ignite chance would be 4 stacks of ignite for forge strike for instance.
This argument is just for forge guard, it’s for all builds with chonky hit skills. I won’t speak for other classes. This was just my experience with ignite forge guard.