The way the WPS of the different masteries are handled right now cause them to be effectively useless until way later down your progression path. Their low initial proc chances makes them only worth investing in when you have gear to support them and/or finally enough spare points to push them out of the low proc rate.
That handling is notably something that kinda made me ignore them because i could not see the value in them right away (same happened to me when I played titan quest). I took me stumbling uppon someone that explained them to me to actually understand their usefulness, and even then, it was still only in “endgame” setups.
I feel then that WPS proc chances could benefit from being tweaked to be a lot more front loaded, if not “all in” at one point, so investing in them is as effective as other skill while leveling. putting a point in Markovian’s advantage to only get 12% chance for one of my 2-3 attacks seconds to proc it feels bad when I can put a single point in forcewave and get a reliable skill. But if i start at 20-25%? That would be worth putting some points in, even at lvl 2.
one problem with this is you wont be able to adjust wps as needed. There are several instances where you don’t want XY wps to be 25(-30%) and you’re using them to fill your remaining pool, but don’t want that wps to reduce the chance of your other wps.
Even if 100% mono wps builds are possible right now, you’d still want to be able to tweak your pools on the ones that don’t.
Or as someone else brought up, it gives you the Gunslinger/Blademaster relic issue, where a sizeable chunk of your pool is force replaced with a (potential) not as desired one.
There’s two issues that you can encounter with them that both revolve around the same mechanic.
WPS themselves being slow to scale use chance making them kind of miserable at lower levels (Even more so when these are likely the AoE your build is using because your DAR won’t do anything unless you have some item modifiers from MI’s to help it)
While later on when using them to fill out the 100% WPS chance you get stuck not being able to max them out for their full damage because you don’t want to scale their proc chance.
Both of these things revolve around that late game 100% proc build and the mechanics of having more than 100% total proc chance (Whereby everything is then shifted to being a percentage of 100% often meaning more desirable WPS get lower activation chance which is bad)
The only way to fix this would be to have a system where you can customise proc chances of skills (Which would also help with the “I got a random crappy WPS from an item that’s ruining my otherwise nicely set up 100% proc chance build”)
Like some sort of option or screen where you can tell specific WPS to only be used as filler, so their use chance scales down to make up the difference between other options and 100%.
I.e. Say I had a build with 20/10 + 15% chance to use Reaping Strike and 20/10 + 15% chance to use Storm Spread (Which would be 30% + 15% and 25% + 15% for a total of 85%) but then I put in some points into Necrotic Edge (Say 16/12 for 28% use chance) instead of having my main 2 WPS scaled down because NE is pushing over 100% I could tick a setting to make NE scale its use chance down so it only fills in my missing chance (I.e. Pushing its use chance down to 15% only while not affecting the 45%/40% chance of RS/SS)
Whether something like this is mechanically feasible, I don’t know.
But it would address a lot of the issues that come with >100% proc chance and enable things like higher base use chance of WPS to make them more usable at lower levels before you have them hardcapped with item modifiers buffing their use chance.
tbh, I jsut hope they completly redo how they do WPS, if they even do them, for GD 2. because i’ll be honnest, they are jsut bad design.
Like, i’m pointing out how bad they are to jsut use early on, but if you also look at the bigger picture, they also are arse in general, as because they stack ON TOP of your DAR, they multiply it, so those have to be balanced around the fact WPS multiply a multiplier. Result? DAR are weak on their own because WPS have to be strong enough to justify the heafty investment they require to not make them outshine everything.
I know there isn’t many other ARPGs out there, but i feel like there is a reason why GD (and obviously TQ 1) that do their extra effects like that