I notice that several of the ailments just do varying amounts of damage without a secondary effect that matters, making them effectively the same thing
to list the ailments(excluding skill/passive tree specific ones)
Resistance shred:unique ailment
Armor shred:unique ailment
Bleed:53 physical damage over 4 seconds - GENERIC
Blind:lowers enemy attack accuracy and reduces crit chance, unique ailment
Chill:reduces movement speed, unique ailment
Damned:25 necrotic damage over 3 seconds, 20% reduced health regen - the reduced regen is only useful in niche cases, so while this is unique in theory, in practice it is GENERIC and WEAK
Electrify: 42 electric damage over 3 seconds, GENERIC
Frailty: deal 6% less damage, stacks 3 times, unique ailment
Frostbite: 30 cold damage over 3 seconds, -200 freeze avoidance. as this results in frequent freezes, it is a unique ailment
Ignite:36 fire damage over 3 seconds, GENERIC
Plague:150 poison over 4 seconds, does not stack, spreads. unique ailment
Poison: 20 damage over 3 seconds. -5%poison res(-2%on bosses). Unique ailment, also incredibly strong
Shock:stacks 20 times, -5% lightning res, +10% increased chance to be stunned(-60% effect on bosses) Unique ailment, also responsible for a significant amount of the damage of lightning blast builds.
Slow:Stacks 3 times, 20% less movespeed(50% less effective against players) Unique ailment
Time rot: 45 void damage over 3 seconds, 10% increased stun duration, stacks up to 12 times. The stun duration bonus is not all that helpful as if you are doing enough damage to stun you should be killing enemies fast enough that the stun doesn’t matter. So unique in theory, GENERIC in practice, also WEAK due to limited stacks
in other words, out of the 15 base ailments, 3 are generic even in theory, 2 are unique in theory but generic in practice(they are also weak as a result) and 10 are unique in both theory and practice.
I’m not sure what criteria you’re using exactly to classify things into generic, unique etc. An argument could be made that poison and shock are very similar and therefore not unique. Do you have a suggestion to add to something?
I am differentiating based on if there is anything that fits the same niche, in the case of damage DoTs, if they do not do anything else special they are almost exactly the same as each other.
Poison and shock are not the same as shock is the niche of increasing your hit damage while also stunning everything very often even with low damage - poison however increases your hit damage yes, but it also has the role of an exponentially increasing dot. The fact that they both do TWO things and that they only have partial overlap is why I concider them unique.
And before you ask why I consider shock stun effect useful, but time rot not - the difference is shock causes stuns at lower damage numbers, but time rot requires your hit to stun before it affects it.
As a whole I think ailments are ok… some could use some tweaking to make more interesting…
I MUCH prefer the ailments with the additional effects vs the plain DoT types like Bleed/Ignite/Electrify… My reason for this is simple… the additional effect is something to be creative with and can sometimes be a whole new variation on a traditional build
Frostbite for example is, imho, an undervalued ailment because of its freeze avoidence debuff and freezing is a very powerful mechanic - perhaps much more so than stun at the moment…
The normal Dot ailments without secondaries are ok and can do massive damage, I just find them just lacklustre in designing anything new…
i dont think theres anything wrong with a number of them being simply damage over time. if another secondary effect can be added to them to make them more interesting… sure? why not? but i dunno if its needed.
direct damage doesnt always differ either, a direct hit of one element might essentially just be damage dealt in the same way another is.
the thing is what we are ultimately doing in games like this is killing monsters, so stuff has to do damage to them, thats the primary goal of all our characters. the damage can be instant, over time, you can apply it, a totem can apply it, set a trap, but theres only so many ways that can happen.
the damage types do open things up for each type of damage to be interesting and unique in some way, sure. but part of them is also fluff, its thematic, the big man with the axe chops at you with phys damage and the magic storm woman zaps you with lightning. in practice that might just equal a direct damage number being taken off the enemies life, and in that way they are identical. but its thematically correct that one is phys and one is lightning, and that then opens up space for the gearing jigsaw to work where different itemisation combos come in for scaling the different elements, and that means different skills synergise together because they share scaling…
so theres more to it than just different damage types need to be different in how they apply damage. if we say well all these other dots are basically the same as bleed, they just do damage over time so why have them? lets just have bleed? well how many classes feel right having phys and bleed? if we have instant damage and damage over time, should only a phys class then be able to do damage over time? that makes the skill design of the classes who could have fitted with burn more limited now right? then by extension their itemisation. so even if theyre essentially the same they create a space within which other systems can be different and interesting.
I think that if the DoTs had a secondary effect it would heavily increase the number of good builds, as the secondary effect would not only mean that builds that use those DoTs are better, but that they may use the DoT FOR the secondary effect.
For example if ignite lowered armor or if electrify lowered attack/cast speed. They still would be used in builds for that element, but other builds would use it for the secondary effect. Currently lots of builds use chill for instance.
