Current issues with build diversity

spoletta

After one month and half of test, a few issues which are limiting the viability of many builds have become apparent.

Going in order they would be:

The current thick skinned talent (reduce physical damage by 8/16/24/32) is applying to all kinds of damage. This means that if an archer hits with an arrow, it will take 32 from the arrow piercing damage, 32 from whatever elemental conversion the bow has and 32 more from the burning/chilling/acid arrow skill. This completely kills the damage capabilities of archers in pvp and also limits a lot the viability of mages.
Fighter builds scale a lot better than casting builds. This is caused by 2 factors. The first one is that fighters have many instant skills which also apply the weapon damage, which means that improving their weapon improves their overall damage by a lot. 2h users highlight this issue, since the instant skills allow them to apply their big weapon damage without being impaired by the usually slow attack speed. The second factor is that mages don't interact with their weapon, apart from gaining a mediocre auto attack. These combined mean that at mid-high equipment levels, casting builds have a huge handicap against fighter builds. This is aggravated by the next points.
Maxing evasion is way too easy. All builds can reach incredibly high levels of evasion (and usually some block on top of it).
Elemental Stacks don't really matter right now. The decay rate is too fast. There is no way to apply stacks with fist and arrow skills. A caster can throw a lot of spells at a target and never reap a real benefit from all the stacks. In general, stack decay needs to be a lot slower. Builds focused on elements are currently made unavailable by this.
Some set bonuses are clearly better than others. The weakest one is currently the scholar (and is probably the only one at the right power level for a set), while battlemage, slayer and warlock are dominating over the other ones. Hunter set is also incredibly powerful but due to the limited scope of it, it probably isn't an issue.
Strike wounds on arrows currently works only if you have an elemental arrow skill active. This hurts a lot the longbow builds and imposes a really steep mana cost on the shortbow builds.
Poisoner talent does not work on arrows, so if you wish to use poisons on archer builds, you have to face an impressive resource consumption.
Entangling web is a memory 1 skill, which means that it can be affected by Cantrip Expert. With this, the cooldown becomes lower than the duration, allowing a permanent snare of the victim. It should be a memory 2 skill considering how much better than entrapping net it is.
Poison is hugely OP but it is getting reworked so it isn't an issue.

OlivePit

all this.
And the fact that channeling abilities are simply not worth it and are basically 'kill me now' advertisements.

Clinion

I agree with all of the things mentioned and I also would like to add a comment to this one:

@spoletta said in Current issues with build diversity:

Some set bonuses are clearly better than others. The weakest one is currently the scholar (and is probably the only one at the right power level for a set), while battlemage, slayer and warlock are dominating over the other ones. Hunter set is also incredibly powerful but due to the limited scope of it, it probably isn't an issue.

I agree that battlemage, slayer and warlock armors are a bit overpowered right now, but I also think there could be other OP builds which are not sufficiently tested and unknown to us(for example Rogue armor with high attack speed/accuracy). For rebalancing the aforementioned armor sets, I think lowering some numbers for slayer and warlock sets would be enough, however, battlemage set bonus needs to change completely. Right now, it is not battle-mage armor but more like a battle-dagger-user armor because it provides huge bonuses to spell channeling + high attack speed weapons(a.k.a. daggers). I think battlemage set bonus should increase the weapon damage as energy damage by a certain %, not a base damage increase for each attack. This would mean that, assuming a dagger has 30 damage and set bonus gives you +300% energy damage increase, a dagger would deal 30 physical + 90 energy = 120 damage in total. This change enables staff users to utilize battlemage armor because if we assume a staff basic attack deals 100 damage, with set bonus it becomes 100 + 300 = 400 damage per hit. The difference between daggers and the staves are basically the attack speed, which overall should not change the DPS drastically. We can change the battlemage set bonus advantage from spell channeling + attack speed weapons to spell channeling weapons only, which should help the balancing.

spoletta

The battlemage set definitely needs to be looked at. In my view, it has 2 issues (apart from being too strong):

It is too easy to keep the buff up. You just need to throw a spell every 10 secs. Any spell is fine. Compared to the scholar set which requires it every 5 sec, or the ranger armor which requires you to actually hit something every 10 sec, this bonus set is definitely a lot less restrictive. In fact going around with the bonus maxed is very easy.
It doesn't keep in any consideration all the mana spent on toggled spells, which seems kind of counter intuitive for the purpose of the set. The mage-warrior hybrids use a lot of toggled abilities.

I would propose to have its stacks deplete by 5 per second instead of having them disappear after 10 seconds, but also let toggled effects charge stacks.

Edit: After a quite constructive discussion I have come to reconsider this. It wouldn't solve the set problem (the fact that it is focused on attack speed) and it would make it too cumbersome in pvp.

Also, I should explain what I mean by "too good" because it occured to me that I used that definition without explaining what I mean by it.
In my view, if a set bonus is such that you feel "forced" to have it for your build in pvp or pve, then that set bonus is too strong. A player should feel capable of playing in tier 1, and the tier 2 equipment should provide an edge but not a solution. While the game is now integrating equipment progression due to popular demand, let's not forget that this is still technically an horizontal game. Winning by pure virtue of equipment shouldn't be part of this game.
That's why I defined the scholar set as the right basis. I bit of mana reduction and a decent but not oppressive bonus damage allows players in tier 1 and tier 2 to play the same game.

Rife

I agree with the OP post as well.

I'd like to add in addition to the set bonuses, the native properties of the light armors also don't seem to be equal.

For example, assassin armor set in total gives you about 8.5% crit chance, while scholar armor set gives you 11% mana reduction. This is simply not equal, 8.5% crit chance is way more valuable to have than a measly 11% mana reduction.