Question about Elemental Damage Changes:

[robopirateninja]

If you don't want to flex your creativity in a forum where you aren't being paid and your help is largely unrecognized, that definitely is your prerogative. I happen to agree with your idea for a WoW-style damage bonus to elemental spells and I think it could replace the current system of 2/4/6 focuses and make for a smoother progression, as well as a more interesting variety of gear especially for int casters.

I don't want you to think your creativity is unappreciated, but that doesn't mean that nobody else's opinions are valid, even as pertains to your ideas.

I really don't appreciate you trying to make me out to be a bad guy when I've seriously been making an effort to phrase my posts in this thread in a nice way after our interactions in the past. I'm not trying to stifle your creativity, I'm adding my input in a public forum that was designed for that purpose.

I can appreciate that balancing a shitload of items across jillions of combinations of classes and slots and tiers is a time-consuming and irritating task. My conception of how much work it would take to do a good job is the reason I did not apply when a design position was available a while ago, even though I do feel so strongly about improving the game. I realize that I tend to post more about things that upset me than things I enjoy and this might give a distorted view of how I feel but in all seriousness I do enjoy SoD and I think that overall a lot of the game feels well-polished.

In conclusion, please go bananas with creativity when you design Ikisith and its items, just please also be a little more thick-skinned when other people have opinions about them.

 

[Cyzaine]

My tenure here as a dev for SoD continues to teach me new and important things that no class room game design course could ever hope to cover. Its pretty amazing in a way.

That being said, let me completely ignore one of these lessons, and explain more about the change as I saw it. Let me state that my original idea for elemental damage was something purely for int and wis casters. Unintended consequences of the code changes, in a hey thats cool lets roll with it, sort of way included:

1) Bards benefiting on their DoTs
2) Melee benefiting on their Procs

These were allowed to go live, under the understanding that we had a skilled item designer, who was going to continue to do an amazing job on the new items. The second one, at least, is going to go away for now, not that it would ever have been an issue to begin with.

This part is important, and pertains to the major issues people seem to be taking with this change (a change, I might add, that you can only speculate about at this point because current itemization does not support any of the dooms day scenarios in the least). More than anything, we were concerned with balance.
Balance is the reason it doesn't scale. Balance is the reason its not a percentage.
Balance is the reason we are not going to be giving it strange multipliers and modifiers.
Unchangeable client issues are the reasons we can not just 'add a shit ton of new focus effects that scale like everything else' (and the reason behind the change in the deity gate necklaces, and NUMEROUS other changes).
A flat figure is controllable, and has no unintended side effects.

So why the change. Why add this non-scaling damage increase for casters? In my eyes, it was to give a method of increasing caster DPS, with gear, like every other melee class. To give the option to us, to allow for easily controlled, easily calculated, increase in DPS in situations that call for it. To maybe add a bit of fun to outfitting your character as you want them to be. Maybe you'd like to give up some hp and mana for a bit more glass cannon fire ability. Maybe the flow of Ikisith is going to be... different... than you are used too.

In short, as far as I am concerned on the topic, and unless I am overruled...
a) Elemental Damage in its current, non scaling, flat form is staying.
b) You will be free to ignore, and not take the bonuses if you so choose. Like always the choice is yours.
c) We will not negate all the work that has been done with previous tiers and gear gathering, by destroying the foci effects currently in place. It makes no sense, and this change is an addition to them, not a replacement for them.



In any case, I'm locking this thread, as it has served its purpose in terms of answering questions regarding how Elemental Damage works. If you have any issues and concerns once the itemization to back it up is released (Ikisith), bring it up then.

 

[Ikaa|LoveYums]

I dont think players will ever understand that having to listen to their constant negative "opinions" of a devs work really crushes any kind of passion they may have had for it in the past.

So when you criticize their work, dont be a douche and tell them not to take it personally, because yes, it is personal.

As policy now, Devs will be adopting the answer - "This is the way i think it should be. When you design XYZ, you can make it however you want" - which will be the standard retort to any question regarding any content they have worked on, heard about, or looked at.