Why do spells have fixed damage?

Why do Spells have a fixed damage amount per skill level, instead of a damage% modifier, like Melee and Physical ranged skills?

It brings a lot of issues:
Spellcaster is less gear dependent, which means it's too strong early on (without gear) and not strong enough later on, because there's nowhere near as many ways to increase your spell damage as Melee/Ranged skills, which benefit directly from weapon damage (among other things).
Once your skill gem reaches level 20, once you get all the +spell damage affixes and +skill level affixes, there's no other way to further improve spell damage.

Melee/Physical ranged can further improve skill damage with all of the above PLUS weapon base damage (which is the main source of damage). Once everything is capped and the only way to further improve your character is to get better gear and weaponry (that can become insane with POE level of customization), what's left of spells?

You can already see this issue with Poison Arrow, which is part % part fixed damage. The greater the bow, the better Burning Arrow becomes and the more useless Poison Arrow is.

I agree, there's a different standard for spell mechanics. In addition to the scaling issue and non-gear dependence of casters:

1)Skill gems for spells are far more dependent on their level making level ups for non-spell gems lackluster.

2)Armor has a relational curve to physical damage but spell resistance is an additive flat modifier to spell damage.

3)There is no miss chance mechanic for spells.

4)Physical damage scales with strength. Spell damage does not scale with intelligence.

I wonder why have two separate systems. Surely it makes game balance a nightmare.

Edit: Added 4th observation.

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Blackguard wrote:

3)There is no miss chance mechanic for spells.

This had always bugged me and still do, this is in the first place is a humongous advantage over any fighter builds literally.

I had a discussion with Chris regarding this issue, but i think implemention was problematic a bit, maybe it needs a lot work to handle, but never returned with a precise result.

If anyone has a good suggestion about how implemention could be done in what ways, those would be handy indeed, thanks.

I guess OP played d3...

As far as I know, in most rpg, physical skills depends on weapon, spells have flat damage. So GGG has actually chosen the most common mechanic.

D3 made the choice to make everything weapon dependant, probably in order to make everything easier to balance. This is were I'm highly disappointed by Blizzard, I've always thought they were good to balance their games, but this time they prefered eliminating the obstacle rather than overcoming it. I guess they've become lazy...
Homogenizing all mechanics has a big drawback, it kills build identity and theorycrafting, all synergies become obvious. It makes everything easier to understand, so it fits perfectly the audience d3 is aiming for. But I'm pretty sure that all the best builds in d3 have already been "theorycrafted" in few seconds whereas the game isn't out yet. (I'm probably exaggerating but you get the idea)

On the contrary, it seems GGG wants to make things complicated, I'm happy with that :D As long as mechanics are clearly explained somewhere, which is not really the case at the moment...

In the end both physical and spells base off some flat number that gets multiplied. Spell base tops out at lvl 20, and physical base tops out with the highest class of base weapon (and is enhanced damage on the weapon still additive with other mods?).

Physical benefiting more from weapon and casters benefiting more from gear in general is harder to balance, but ultimately better than homogenization IMO (as long as you don't let things get completely out of whack).

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BrecMadak wrote:

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Blackguard wrote:

3)There is no miss chance mechanic for spells.

This had always bugged me and still do, this is in the first place is a humongous advantage over any fighter builds literally.

I had a discussion with Chris regarding this issue, but i think implemention was problematic a bit, maybe it needs a lot work to handle, but never returned with a precise result.

If anyone has a good suggestion about how implemention could be done in what ways, those would be handy indeed, thanks.

Which is a minor bonus at best in the grand scheme of things, since most people have rather solid hit chances or take the technique in question to eliminate it entirely...

That said, spell scaling is completely based on gems and certain modifiers. The weapon itself is nothing more than a stat stick, typical standard for virtually any game anymore, sans a few ... such as D3. The problem is one that is easily noticeable, melee increase directly proportional to their weapon, casters weapon means basically nothing. Get the right mods, put it on, never look at it until you find better.

At endgame is where the issue is going to rear its ugly head. Casters are going to be stuck at a ceiling that cant be exactly surpassed and odds are will be hitting it much sooner than weapon based classes. Those classes will have a far higher ceiling to work with, and can still find random improvements solely by getting a just a bit better weapon.

I'm not quite sure how you can alleviate the problem either, because this isn't even factoring in support gems. Right now the balance is certainly in favor of weapon classes, but it's not something that can just be BAM and fixed.

I'm with Aimless. In the end, there's a series of defined base damage numbers for either weapons or spells, each increasing with level.

Spell base damage comes from the gem level.

Weapon base damage comes from the defined weapon types in the game. Just like with the skill gems, there is a final weapon tier and it does represent a cap on base, unmodified damage.

If the devs have not properly calibrated the highest level weapons against the highest level spell skills, that's just a matter of tuning as time goes on. It doesn't seem like a permanent unsolvable mechanic issue.

Similarly, if the total number of available mods or the way they interact is out of balance, that too should be solvable.

I agree with everything in zriL's post.

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Raelena wrote:

That said, spell scaling is completely based on gems and certain modifiers. The weapon itself is nothing more than a stat stick, typical standard for virtually any game anymore, sans a few ... such as D3. The problem is one that is easily noticeable, melee increase directly proportional to their weapon, casters weapon means basically nothing. Get the right mods, put it on, never look at it until you find better.

I disagree. Both weapons need to have the right mods and to be the highest level tier of weapons, because spell damage mods get better and better with item level, just like your weapon damage.

Maybe spell damage mods should scale faster to make it as important as physical weapons scaling. But if you look closely, it looks balanced. A weapon can have +200% physical damage (roughly), a wand can have +100% spell damage (hardly), so with 2 wands you have +200% damage as well.

Behind that, as Aimless said, this is your flat weapon base damage or your flat spell damage that get multiplied.

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Blackguard wrote:

1)Skill gems for spells are far more dependent on their level making level ups for non-spell gems lackluster.

2)Armor has a relational curve to physical damage but spell resistance is an additive flat modifier to spell damage.

Yes I find these to be particularly problematic personally. Evasion is the same way as armor as well.

Heck even for spells I find +1 level isn't really that useful compared to many other mods. I think +1–2 would be better than just +1.