What kind of secondary effect that elemental should offer in D4 instead of just dealing more damage to the monster with no resistance?
Cold - Chilling and Freeze for obvious reason.
Fire - ???
Lightning - ???
Poison - Damage Over Time
Earth - ???
Arcane - ???
Holy - ???
I was thinking to give Lightning the ability to stun/paralysis/shock but it kinda same-ish as “freeze”, so I don’t know. The only thing that I have to differentiate between stun and freeze is frozen enemy takes double damage from physical attack or fire attack and the stunned enemy takes double damage from cold/water attack.
I also want to make Fire elemental deals damage over time thru the burning effect like a fire does but once again, it feels like a red color clone to Poison elemental. Maybe having all Fire elemental skills have built-in AoE/Splash damage due to burst and explosion?
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From what I remember, they experimented with status effects per element in early D3 testing (?).
The conclusion was that everyone used Ice because if had the best effect (even with it doing less damage). But this was a lifetime ago.
Unless the DoT effect is strong it’ll be pointless. Better to do stuff like enemies on fire take more damage, enemies hit with Lightning are stunned and are more susceptible to critical hits, ice freezes and slows (and leaves no corpse), light damage blinds enemies and does extra damage to undead. Stuff like that.
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Cold - Chilling and Freeze
Fire - Burning (damages enemies over time for a shorter duration than poison), and while enemies are burning, their defense are lowered a bit.
Lightning - Chance to stun enemies with paralysis, while stunned with paralysis, enemies take bonus lightning damage.
Poison - Inflict poison damage over time (duration is longer than burning)
Earth - Chance to inflict crushing blow
Arcane - not sure if arcane would even return, but if it does, then arcane could probably slow enemies movement and attack speed
Holy - Have enemies deal less damage for a time.
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The potential problem with elemental effects is that whatever effect has the most power or most useful utility will get the call. Then all other effects won’t see the light of day by the majority.
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Kept crit off poison dots allow crits to effect fire dots so if you like dot builds fire would be a viable option compared to poison.
For arcane I would incorporate that ability arcane mages have in WoW with a modification. The arcane builder(signature spell) creates an arcane energy stack. It will stack to 5 unless another arcane spell us used. Each stack increases the effectiveness of a different arcane spell used.
That’s not true. There will be peoole.that do what they want as long as they can progress. If they plan to not have timers with endgame stuffs, using the “best” builds won’t matter nearly as much.
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City of Heroes was such a game without timers and almost all heroes (that weren’t themed builds) used Hasten/Stamina combo before Enhancement Diversification (ED). Prior to ED a six slotted Hasten with all recharge enhancements mean that Hasten was perma. That was like slotting two recharge enhancements in all of your powers. Lowering the cooldown by about 70%. Stamina six slotted was like putting two endurance (mana) cost reduction in all of your powers. Reducing the cost of your powers by a lot. It was considered dumb by the great majority to do anything else.
I had made a lot of characters without hasten/stamina and still made progress. But that was only about 1-2% of the heroes that did that, and that might be a bit high.
I personally think that:
Fire (burning) should aditional to DoT lower physical attack speed and damage of foes.
Posion inclusive to DoT should deal increased DoT damage, the longer the duration of the poison debuff lasts.
Arcane should be some kind of mana/ressource burn (as an affix for players as well as for mobs to be unable to cast skills).
Holy should be a blind debuff on enemies so that their % miss of attacks increases.
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Cold causes significant shrinkage to enemy size and a chance for them to scream “I WAS IN THE POOL”
Enemies on fire should run around flailing like every Hollywood stuntman.
Lightning only hits each monster one in a million attacks. Instant kill
Poison forces enemies to watch Jake Paul videos
Earth has a chance to launch an environmentalist at the enemy
Arcane damage has a chance of teleporting the player into the Arcane Sanctuary where the correct path is always the last chosen.
Holy actually hurts the player’s intelligence stat when used. Double damage if under age of 12
sorry ---------
Cold - Chance to cause full body frostbite, turning enemies a dark colour then shattering as the cold spells stack.
Fire - DoT that spreads flames to nearby enemies and if wind physics are in, the flames can be fanned to many monsters at once. FarCry 2 and BoTW style. Can work against the player if used carelessly. Extinguished by any cold or holy spells.
Lightning - Chance to weld certain rock/metal/heavily armored enemies to the ground for x seconds. Lightning does +% damage when enemy is in water or it’s raining.
Poison - Applies a fever that leaves enemies less effective over time.
Earth - Chance for vines to wrap around enemies, incapacitating them
Arcane - Leaves enemies very susceptible to all other schools of magic
Holy (water element) - Chance of removing beneficial demonic buffs. Holy water damage increased in hell
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This sounds OP to me. Everyone will be using poison because the enemies won’t survive their first attack. 
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I’d give fire damage a small AoE, DoT effect that stacks, potentially with a debuff to enemy defense. Poison would be single target DoT that does NOT stack, potentially with a debuff to enemies offense or attack / total speed. Lightning damage would have a chance to do area damage and stun all enemies. Cold damage would guarantee chill with a small chance to freeze enemies. Magic/holy/arcane or any equivalent I think should be pretty generic like physical damage… or possibly give physical damage crushing blow or open wounds chance exclusively and then magic/etc. can do something but I don’t have anything I think would work thematically and gameplay-wise.
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So you’re saying that poison damage wouldn’t benefit from crit, while burning fire damage would benefit? Unless crit chance and crit damage is a rare and limited stat, I’m not sure I’d be for that honestly, as that seems like fire would be better than poison in almost any scenario.
I’m afraid that my knowledge on WoW is incredibly limited, but that sounds interesting.
I suppose rather than act as a resource burner, arcane could have a chance to silence enemies (make enemies unable to use certain skills) for a short duration.
Sounds good. The problem however is that I don’t think “% to hit/miss” will be returning in Diablo 4 for enemies, let alone players (besides the dodge mechanic that is).
I like this, especially since arcane is sometimes treated as the backbone to most sorcerery in Diablo lore.
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That definitely is a risk.
Though if the benefits are small, it might not have to be a big risk.
Another risk would be pigeonholding dmg types into specific builds that synergizes well with the dmg type bonus. I’d be careful with dmg types that scales with Crushing blow, crit, proc chance etc. I’d also be careful about DoTs… but then afaik we have seen no indication that Blizzard will have gear and skill affixes that interacts with dots, for some weird reason, so that might not even matter.
In any case, monsters should have resistances so that it would be hard (but not impossible) to rely on a single dmg type.
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Just saying if fire is to be shorter duration than poison, itbshould behave differently for balance sake. Poison dots last 6 sec, fire dots last 3 but can crit.
My general ideas and preferences:
Cold - Slow, with chance to freeze.
Fire - DoT, can spread, lowers defense.
Lightning - Stun/paralysis, prevents using special abilities.
Poison - DoT, prevents healing.
Earth - Chance of crushing blow.
Arcane - Lowers damage dealt.
Holy - Heals allies, extra damage to undead.
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That’s why fire would lower an enemy’s defense while poison would instead last longer but it wouldn’t lower any stat.
For those who want Poison to deal with Damage over Time without 2nd effect, why? As I have seen, poison tends to be a weakest negative status effect whether in Diablo or Final Fantasy or any RPG game, especially when it is against monsters.
The only time I remember that Poison status can be deadly is from Castlevania SoTN where it reduced your character DPS and take double damage from monsters for a very long duration.
Maybe Poison can be a useful/powerful elemental if you can stack the poison DoT effect.
Not sure about having the dot effect stack for poison (unless there’s a cap that is). However if the poison dot effect does enough damage on it’s own, then it doesn’t really need a secondary effect. Diablo 2 poison necromancers were rather powerful, most of the time their damage were lacking or non-existant was mostly because of immunities; which unfortunately a lot of enemies had in Diablo 2 Hell.
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I must have missed that while reading the original post.
OMG, Bio was one of the most powerful spells in FF4 and 6(when it hit).
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