Most of my points are from the view of a min-maxer— my favorite part of the game is thinking up builds I think might be interesting and to push those to the limit.
I understand that you guys might not have the same view, and I agree that not everything should be top-tier or equally good since there’s nothing wrong with variety and some things need to be worse for other things to stand out.
However, what I strongly believe is that parts of the game that simply aren’t effective (compared to their counterparts) should be adjusted to make them less so.
Because if there are things that are outright better in the same tier, there is just no reason to use them for gameplay’s sake. Some of those buffs might end up increasing player power, but the main point is that they create more diversity.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that a lot of my posts are about casters and that might make me seem biased, but most of my builds are actually melee WD ones— I don’t even play casters that much.
But the ones I have played, I noticed they are simply far weaker than what WD characters can do and are often even more gear-dependent.
That last part is something that I always found curious about GD: in most (A)RPGs the casters are the ones that don’t require much gear since their spells do the heavy lifting.
In GD it’s reversed and even with good gear, I bet the best caster builds can’t keep up with the best WD builds.
So even though I don’t play casters that much compared to where most of my GD time goes, I do want to see the playing field leveled a bit to make the overall game more interesting.
I could write a bible-length text about the issue, but the short version is that casters’ main spells simply don’t do enough damage, which turns that spell into a proc medium. In comparison, with WD builds, the bulk of the damage usually comes from the main skill line.
Anyway, to reply to your points.
@Doom: your first bullet point made me think that you consider the 10% Ele damage damage roughly equal to the faction damage on SB, but that’s not true since the former is additive and the latter multiplicative.
And another major point is that it doesn’t just give bonus damage against UD, but also against Chthonic.
I noticed you both mention that this stat is situational, but consider how much presence those factions have in the game— they are everywhere.
Not just for an endgame build (it affects both BoC and SoT) but also throughout the leveling part of the game it has a significant impact.
You mentioned that you wanted the Runestone to fill a niche, perhaps they should be made a bit more common then.
Currently they share the same level requirement and (probably) drop rate as SB, which makes them really rare if you don’t craft them.
If they were a lower tier component, I feel they should be easier to get, to reflect that.
And as for the whole Runestone thing, believe me, I don’t even care about it that much, I just thought that it looked weak compared to SB for reasons mentioned.
But if you feel it’s supposed to be weaker, then it’s fine with me.
Concerning Lantern, I don’t think it should be a must-have or super buffed— I specifically think that the final node is bad since 2 of the 3 stats often don’t do anything at all for caster builds, while typically the last node is the best one in a cluster.
And now that I look closer, I realized that another issue is that the first node gives Energy regeneration and nothing else. That potentially makes 2 nodes that “don’t do anything” (or not much) if your build has enough regeneration already.
While most of the weapon-specific clusters are good to have in general, surrounding this cluster with those regeneration nodes makes it only appealing for very specific builds with high energy upkeep.
To bring up a comparison, Nadaan is unique, Kraken is a powerhouse, Hydra is good after buffs, haven’t used Berserker. Mace one as mentioned is weak IMO.
So I felt the combination of a semi-weird requirement, plus the way it’s just one insignificant node too many while being slightly too weak made it unappealing.
All my reports are from 002 by the way, I haven’t switched yet since I enjoy rotating between my current characters and shared stash. I might do so when I get bored of them and want a fresh start or when you stop supporting 002.
@Ceno: I don’t want to keep ranting about that SB, but I found the part you talked about the faction damage bonus baffling.
The Racial Damage on SB is as much a ‘garbage stat’ as Light Radius for the vast majority of the game (as a whole; maybe not your ‘ultra common super endgame farming zones’, but for everything entirely in the game) and a meager 1.12x damage boost when it does apply.
I don’t understand how you can say this. As mentioned above, those bonuses damage aren’t niche, since those two monster types are everywhere.
It’s not like in TQ where such a bonus is only limited to 1 or 2 zones, the final act is practically entirely Chthonic with some humans mixed in!
And undead shows up in every act AFAIK.
So instead of critting for 30k, you’ll crit for 33.6k. Yippee…If it were 3% you wouldn’t notice a difference in the long run. If it were 25+%, then maybe we could talk.
But that 3k damage bonus is actually huge, that would require a significant amount of additive % bonus to reach the same effect.
Heck, if you bring spells in the equation, that 12% might be more valuable than an entire 10 ranks in some spell.
As for Lantern— I’m curious, which part of it do you find strong specifically?
You also mentioned that it’s good on hybrid builds, but I’m not sure what you consider such a build.
Trust me, WD characters usually can’t ‘sneak’ them on easily. Most WD characters will wind up with ~340-440 Spirit from mastery investment alone (Soldiers getting even lower than that).
Funny you bring that up. My current Cadence character is actually using a Clairvoyant’s Hat since there were no good alternatives for it in my build, so I had to pump Spirit some to be able to use it.
And I’m using the Pretty Average Pants, yeah. 
And don’t worry about offending me— I don’t take it personally when you don’t agree with my opinions.
It’s you guys mod after all and I know I have a very strong stance on many things as a min-maxer.
I enjoy discussing about the game, and by posting more I can get a better grasp on how you guys feel about things too.
If I realize there are things you guys clearly have a different viewpoint on or that we just think too differently, I’ll just stop giving feedback that will go nowhere.
I’ll still keep reporting bugs though as long as I’m playing.
And I’m looking forward to your new content, new dungeons and items would definitely be awesome.
(Man, this ran too long, but there was a lot to address.)
