Hi,
As most people know and I’ve seen you yourselves mention in the latest build thread that ambient damage is very ubiquitous, and related to this, damage over time effects.
Besides simply lowering their damage and/or presence, another idea would be to have vendors sell an antidote/anti-bleed potion that stacks like normal potions and is easily accessible.
That way you add another layer of activity for the player and there is a countermeasure to heavy DoT effects besides stacking resists which is a passive (and IMO, less fun) method.
Often the player will defeat an enemy but he has 1-2 different kinds of DoTs going and his potion is on cooldown. In this situation the player can’t do anything to stop the DoT except hitting alt+f4 or he ends up dying even after defeating the enemy, which is quite frustrating.
The above also slows down gameplay, because you do not get the constitution regen while being damaged, so you have to wait until the effect is gone to heal up and move on.
With an antidote you could remove it immediately, heal up and continue on your way.
Another idea is to make DoTs and ground effects disappear when the source perishes, but this doesn’t really make sense.
Related to the debuffs is that the player has very few ways of removing them. As far as I know there is the Cleansing Waters devotion ability and the Arcanist one, and that’s it.
Having more skills that remove debuffs or added as a chance on proc on existing abilities would be very welcome.
Lore-wise, I would think of Soldiers being able to shrug off negative effect through sheer willpower, Occultists using their mojo to counter it, Shamans using herbal techniques, and so on.
Thanks for reading.