Skills and skill-like stuff from sources other than classes are opaque and confusing, need better tooltips

The tooltips and information about your character’s class-derived skills in the Skills [s] screen are, for the most part, admirably clear. In general, I can easily find out what a skill’s base damage is, how it’s affected by my attributes, how different nodes on its augment tree interact with each other, etc.

However, there are a few other sources of effects that work much like skills in the game, and they’re much less clear. Examples:

These effects leave me with a number of questions that aren’t answered by their tooltips:

  • What attribute do these things scale off of? Some of them (like the item effects) mimic existing class skills; do they inherit the attribute scaling of the class skills they mimic (e.g., Cremate, the Necromancer skill, scales off of Int; does that mean the version on Torch of the Pontifex does too)?
  • Do the passive skills that mimic class skills benefit from augment tree nodes on those skills, if you have them? For instance:
    • Does Elemental Nova from a passive benefit from your Elemental Nova augment tree?
    • Do Putrid Wraiths from a passive benefit from your Summon Wraith tree?
    • What if you have Summon Wraith, but don’t have the Putrid Wraith node? Does that change whether the Putrid Wraiths from passives benefit from the tree?
  • Shiver Armor’s tooltip helpfully does describe its effect, but doesn’t specify its duration - how long do you get the Shiver Armor effect each time it procs? Can it stack with itself?

Several of these questions I actually know the answers to, because I’ve been bugging the devs about them over on the Discord. However, that’s not really a scalable solution - unless someone happens to be reading our conversation or feels like exhaustively searching the history of the ask-the-devs channel, the next person who wonders about this stuff will just have to ask again.

These triggered skills and skill-like effects need better in-game explanations of how they work, either in their tooltips, or in some other repository of information (like the recently-teased Mechanics Guide).

2 Likes

Thank you very much for the detailed, well-articulated, and constructive post.

I’m going to link to this thread from our internal issue tracker. We’re still in the process of designing the Mechanics Guide, and we may not address the examples you’ve raised before we have a firmer idea of what will - and what won’t - be available in the guide. I can guarantee you that we will be discussing this, and we’ll address each of these at some point.

In the meantime, I’d encorage anyone who would like to add additional examples to do so. The only caveat being to please add them in new posts, rather than editing existing posts we may have already seen - this helps ensure that nothing ‘falls through the cracks’, as it were.

Thanks!

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.