And you got 2 for 1.
Piercing and Bleeding might be inferior with this solution.
Please don’t axe both. Both damage types are awesome, though Aether is a bit on the powerful side right now.
I think this is to support increased dot duration. I’m no programmer but it seems easier to code increased duration if dots have their own damage type.
@OP I don’t think it’s right to exclude itemization from evaluating damage types. As Chthon said, it will just serve to make Aether even stronger due to Aether not having spectacular skill support. Also, itemization is like half of what you do to your character so it’s always relevant when talking about issues like these.
Pierce needs to be buffed devotion and item-wise. Chaos needs better itemization, esp. for non Occultists. Vit decay needs a set, doesn’t really matter if it’s for Cabalist or Defiler. Trauma needs another skill besides Forcewave. Something non-soldier too for a change. Top 3 damage types right now are Fire, Aether, Physical in no particular order.
Agreed Trauma needs more diversity. They should give us something to build around Demo based Trauma skills since Demo has the second highest trauma potential to my knowledge
It adds diversity to Trauma builds, adds diversity to Grenado/Canister Bomb/Jacks builds and makes the people who want non-Soldier Physical happy as well
Decay doesn’t just need a set but more items and some devotion procs (Fetid pool looks like its available)
Lastly, x1x1x1x2 according to Z we weren’t supposed to get them in the first place. It makes balancing more difficult according to him 
I highly doubt it was an accident that we got it. They meant to give it to us, or they wouldn’t have. It just wasn’t in his original plans. As in, “we weren’t originally going to get Aether and Chaos”, but they obviously changed their mind. I do think the game would have been better off with fewer damage types.
I can agree that it is quite illogical, but on the other hand it gives more diversity to the builds. Maybe uniting bonuses to dots and respective ordinary damage types and make a separate stat for all the dots would be a better solution though.
The story with Aether/Chaos is that they were originally intended to be damage wielded by enemies and not by players, but somewhere along the way in an effort to distinguish some classes early on, we ended up adding those damage types to mastery skills.
I think if we went back and did things all over again, we’d have stuck to those damage types being exclusive to enemies. Makes Aetherial and Chthonian powers feel more distinct than just “things players also do”.
Having less damage types is also something I think would be good if we did a sequel. Too many damage types means it is harder to overlap skills between masteries, makes gearing more difficult and muddies resistances.
As for dots being separate from flat damage for % bonuses, that’s a relic from TQ. By the time we had a moment to breathe during development and think about it, it was too ingrained in GD to rip out without significant time invested. That said, most end-game sources of damage that boost a flat damage now also boost the respective dot, so it’s not that big a deal anymore. For clarity’s sake, we would not do that again for a sequel.
Grim Dawn II: Fall of Empyrion confirmed I guess?
I see GD2 looking good. Can’t wait.
On the note: Can we add more augments with a more prominent chaos resists, please?
It is great to see that Crate are not ultraconservative 
Still, I am glad that we have Chaos and Aether for player characters too, because they are the most “immersive” damage types and give the player characters of GD some special feel.
Thank you for the response. This is interesting material for my game design teaching. I wonder what the optimal number of damage types : resistance types is for a player character in this type of hack&slash rpg genre in your professional opinion.
Diablo 2 for ex. had 6; lightning, fire, ice, poison, physical and magical, with the first four being able to build resistance to easily to a 75% cap, physical only getting direct reduction or complete blocks from shields and magical only some flat resistance. Additionally, the only dot was poison (and it was always a dot).
The devil for D2, and in my feeling sometimes this is for more of these games, is in the detail. There was quite a bit of hidden math (crushing blow, crits, bleeding effects) and I do really enjoy the clarification GD brought to the table on some of things. TQ was a good inspiration as well but games like D3 and GD prove to me how hard it can be to let go of classic models and actually improve upon them. It requires very significant creativity and design insights.
Personally I think that nothing should be hidden from players behind math. The cleanest math would be that whenever a player thinks something will increase their power, will actually increase their power in they way they predict. That is a clarity I still miss from many HSRPGs, but perhaps it’s inherent to the type of game and hard to fix. Diablo 3 does this to some degree, but gives up too much on complexity of builds (another problem unrelated to damage types though).
It also brings us to the reason of having multiple damage types in the first place. They are just numbers in the end, so why make them different. The core reasons are aesthetics (fireball should have a different type of impact to an arrow) and gameplay (build complexity). But this second point can sometimes conflict with the first, and cause the muddiness in the damage type : resistance types. What is the value of having 12 damage types over 4 if it makes the builds watered down (by having to add more and more niche-items to buff all unique damage types)? This inherently causes a frustration problem for players; they want to play a certain build but can’t get the loot for it to drop, because the chance of getting the right stuff is significantly lower the more different damage types there are.
Thank you for your consideration
I would be sad if this happens for GD2, personally I enjoy taking a “fight fire with fire” approach and also enjoy their visual effects, plus it’s hilariously ironic to kill Log, or Theodin with chaos/aether. but I do understand wanting to trim down all the damages to a more manageable number of types.
Theodin has only 53% Aether resist, but 71% to Vitality and Poison/Acid
We need a class for physical damage and internal trauma that has few attack skills, many mobility skills, including a mobility skill without weapon restriction, one aura buffing movement speed, stun resistance and also defensive ability, one aura modifier buffing attack and cast speeds and also reducing cooldown, one passive for movement speed, stun resistance and also defensive ability, one passive for attack and cast speeds and also reducing cooldown, a mobility attack skill for ranged weapons that reminds Dota2’s Hurricane Pike, a mobility skill for being invisible without weapon restriction, and more…
Also who ever has chaos and aether damage must have those damage types changed to something else, although it only applies to players.
Most of that is just Soldier.
Log and Theodin have very similar resistances and it’s on purpose. Loghorrean is the final boss of the base game and having him have really high Chaos resist would mean Chaos builds would have a pain in the ass time to kill him. Same for Aether and Theodin.
No, is not equal. Its rather a mastery that has mobility a lot, and its based on evasion, something that reminds me both Soldier and Nightblade, although the focus is not attack but defense through not being hit and also being flexible on weapon use. Also the new mastery would have the only ranged attack with mobility available for players from masteries.