A Trope in the Exile-Like genre that need to die: Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Chaos resistances.

No one ever says "Dude have you tried cold resist build over a fire resist build? It's SO FUN!"

Why do we have 4 arbitrary resist schools? Does it make the game more engaging? Or is it a rock paper scissors nightmare that creates another annoying gear check to fulfill alongside chance to hit, evade, etc?

We put so much effort into systems in this genre that are simply a reskin of other systems. And at the end of the day it doesn't make the gameplay more engaging, it doesn't invite more interesting gameplay, to the contrary, it locks us into the dated mechanics of yesterday where all gear and itemization choices are hindered by, "Does this pump this arbitrary number I need?"

There is no gameplay difference to being better at resisting fire, or lightning. There is no unique challenge one poses the other doesn't, outside of which section of the game you can complete or not. It's a mindless check that adds further annoying randomness on top of other unfulfilling randomness (maybe I'll do a post on item randomization if this post does well).

If all magic were a combination of two types: instant and damage over time (DOT), it would be far more engaging and adding nuance to each school would do far more to make the building of resistances to magic engaging, nuanced and fun. Mechanics would feel far more interesting and focused on more obvious mechanics that FEEL a certain way, rather than just being yellow, blue, green, or red.

Imagine there's only one magic "type" but lightning skills all tended to hit REALLY hard with instance damage. Imagine that Fire did about half that burst damage and 1/2 that damage in a short DOT, and then chaos damage was all DOT. Ice would also be short burst like lightning with higher spikes for shatter.

Now imagine you pair this with resists that protect against sustained damage and then some that protect more against bursts.

I wont theory craft too much, but I hope i've properly illustrated the point that magic as it stands is a trope without compelling depth or mechanics, it just ands up being an ABCD gear check, and if you wanted to play optimally you'd have some script that auto loaded the right gear against the current encounter, rather than a personalized and deep mechanics that could allow you to counter these attacks in more interesting ways.

How about a shield skill that reflects projectiles for a second with a few second cooldown? How about a skill that converts all existing dot's into a heal with a cooldown? How about an item that converts a portion of DOT to mana?

Players who get skills that provide short bits of damage mitigation or reflect damage would be more apt at standing toe to toe with creatures that shoot out huge bursts of magic damage.

Players who get regen, and abilities that reduce duration of spells could survive those pesky necros poisoning them. How about abilities that amplify your damage output based on the current DOT you are suffering?

By reducing spells to 2 main categories, instant and dot, we add more nuance and play between the elements and we shift the focus away from these tired tropes to new possibilities of fun interplay between offensive and defensive builds, and we remove that random feeling of "Oh, it's a fire mob, the one element that I don't have a resist against".

Why do we make games like this? Why do we make so much of balance arbitrary and random? It's not fun!

We could better balance game, and have a better feel for what defensive capabilities a player has if you unified all this, and we could build SO MUCH COOLER mechanics once we shifted our focus away from these arbitrary gear check mechanics!

I think there is positive nuance to having the schools in regards to damge output. It's nice to have "ice mages' and "fire mages" but maybe this too could be revised. If talents were changed to be "instant magic damage" and "Dot magic damage" there could be a similar change to how we view these systesms.

This might sound too simplified at first, but the nuance and depth would grow from here. Instead of thinking of things as "Ice" and "Ignite" we would start to think of things as "Slow" and "DOT", and we could build advanced systems and abilities and mods that make these far more interesting, and the code and systems necessary to handle all of this could be made to be more compact.

The entire system would ulitmately be more organic. A player could see their life chunk down in an instant and know, OH DAMN THAT WAS A LOT OF INSTANT DAMAGE! But if they saw their life drop fast but steadily over a few seconds they would know that was DOT damage from poison or fire, which again would be handeled the same under the hood to make all these systems more entwined, less arbitrary, and more engaging as a whole.

Edit: I almost forgot! Possibly most importantly is if we do away with 4 different stat values, players will have more predictable levels of resistance and the game is far easier to balance!

So many people get a random few rares that happen to randomly have cold resist and they'll be strong against some enemimes and weak against others.

This is so dumb! This design has always been terrible.

But it's a trope now, we just do it because 1 resist is supposedly too simple. Well let's make it less simple but add nuance and actual inventive systems around it!

shameless bump

I dunno man, I'm not really seeing what you're saying. Why don't you mock this up in like.... gamemaker or something and let us play around with it.

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Andromansis#4714 wrote:

I dunno man, I'm not really seeing what you're saying. Why don't you mock this up in like.... gamemaker or something and let us play around with it.

No one ever says "Dude have you tried cold resist build over a fire resist build? It's SO FUN!"

Currently your resists are something like

Cold: -10%
Lighting: 30%
Fire 0%
Chaos: -10%

From here we end up just grabbing whatever random buffs we get on gear, or if we're fighting a big boss we know is coming, we tune our gear around that.

I keep a set of trash gear for each type of elemental encounter for different bosses I might know i'm going to encounter. Outside of this, whatever enemies I encounter, it's totally random and whether I have resists to one element or another just ends up being random depending on which items happen to give the biggest damage and mana for my build.

There's no strategy, it's just a random decision that doesn't affect play style or preference. It's an annoying means of forcing players to roll more failures on loot hoping for gear that happens to have enough stuff of what they want while providing that final resist type.

It's SO lame.

But what WOULD be fun are builds that increase...

Chance to reflect projectile

Remove all existing Damage over time spells damaging you and convert half of it into a heal (long cooldown)

50% reduced spell damage for 2 seconds (strong against big instant hit spells, less effective against DOT)

Enhanced damage output for each DOT afflicting you.

(These are just off the top of my head, but I hope I'm getting the idea across)

These mechanics are much more organic and feed into gameplay more than "you take less damage from all yellow magic because you have the big yellow resist number".

I enjoy playing tanks/vanguard/offensive utility whatever you want to call it in most games that let me and resistances in path are the least interesting thing they have for defenses.

Keystones and modifiers that do different alterations to the way you play is always peak. Even more basic things like the "reverse recoup" effects where damage taken is delayed is far more interesting than making sure all my gear totals up to the same +135% or +150% number for every build every league.

It would be such a nice touch caring about people and realizing runes MUST be replaceable if you want a healthy game.. I get the dismisal of the crafting bench is working intended but is it that hard to allow us to actually enjoy playing a videogame without forcing us to worry about needing X resistance WITH NO CHANCE TO SWAP? eliminating crafting bench is a thing, not allowing us to fix our gear more than once in a continuously gear-swapping videogame is a completely different thing. Runes MUST be replaceable or resistances reduce its impact, otherwise, we are just stuck farming for a piece of gear in placees where we should not. PLEASE listen to your community, devs. Please.

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FrahjkzhiT#2114 wrote:

It would be such a nice touch caring about people and realizing runes MUST be replaceable if you want a healthy game.. I get the dismisal of the crafting bench is working intended but is it that hard to allow us to actually enjoy playing a videogame without forcing us to worry about needing X resistance WITH NO CHANCE TO SWAP? eliminating crafting bench is a thing, not allowing us to fix our gear more than once in a continuously gear-swapping videogame is a completely different thing. Runes MUST be replaceable or resistances reduce its impact, otherwise, we are just stuck farming for a piece of gear in placees where we should not. PLEASE listen to your community, devs. Please.

Why fix a small symptom of a much larger problem?

Instead of making it easier to deal with an unfun mechanic, just get the unfun, arbitrary mechanic entirely!

Reduce magic resists to just one and then add more in depth and fun mechanics on top of it for dealing with magic in inventive ways that expands on gameplay and is actually FUN to gear towards.

The cherry on top is it makes the game EASIER to balance for GGG and they can more reliably know the magic resists of players so they can tune bosses to be perfectly challenging!

Giving this a bump, because the archaic overdone resist system needs to go