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:
- Item procs that mimic skills, like the Cremate effect from Torch of the Pontifex or the Entangling Roots effect from Eterra’s Path.
- Passive skills that trigger skills or skill-like effects, like the wraiths from Acolyte’s Putrid Retribution passive, the Elemental Nova triggered by Mage’s Elemental Reflection passive, or the Shiver Armor effect from Mage’s Shiver Armor passive.
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).