I have over 125hrs into the game and have a few thoughts about the enchantment system. This was partially brought up by one of Thomas’ recent posts about introducing stealth and having modifiers around it.
Right now, enchantments are pretty simple, passive modifiers. Almost every build right now is focused around just a few specific enchants (now some of that is likely due to some enchants not working currently). You mostly hunt for specific enchantments for Focus gain, Health Gain, or Stamina gain. Even with these enchants, you aren’t really making any interesting choices. They just modify how much of your resources you gain passively.
The same goes for Curses. Right now curses range from non-issues to being totally brutal and avoid at all costs. Some examples of non-issues are durability halved and exp loss. Some reasonable curses are things like reduced HP and increased damage taken because you can mitigate those negatives by playing well. A brutal curse is stamina loss on damage taken due to how you go negative on stamina and can’t react anymore until you get stunlocked and die. But all of these curses are once again passive effects that are always active. You don’t really have to think about them when you have them.
I’d like to see enchantments and curses that are more interactive and force players to make both gearing and actionable choices while in combat. This list may be more suited to something like a talent tree. Here are several examples of enchants and curses I’ve thought of as examples along with my rationale.
New Enchantments
One thing to note with this list of suggestions is that a lot of these enchants encourage certain playstyles and build options around status ailments. I think it’s more interesting to say something like “I play a Shattered Sun Fire Build” rather than just saying “I play a str/int build”. Also note in pvp, these would have reduced effectiveness.
- Ignition - dealing damage to a burning enemy has a X% chance to cause the enemy to flare up and explode with damage
My Thoughts - When you have a burning enemy, this would encourage a more aggressive playstyle to trigger more flare ups while the burn effect persists
- Long Winter - Extends the time an enemy is frozen by X%
My thoughts - This gives extended time to continue hitting an enemy, building resources and dealing damage.
- Plague Doctor - Hitting a plague-infected enemy with a rune attack or charged attack heals you for a X% of the damage dealt (only applies to first hit of rune)
My thoughts - This could help build into a drain-tank type of playstyle that we have today, but with reduced effectiveness since it’s limited only to charge or rune attacks and only the first hit of the rune.
- Thunderstruck - Lightning elemental damage is increased by X% while dealing damage to staggered enemies.
My thoughts - if I’m not mistaken, lightning element deals increased stagger. This would play off that strength
- Crash Lightning - Landing a charged attack or rune attack marks an enemy as a conduit, striking them with X lightning damage after a short moment
My thoughts - This is meant to synergize with Thunderstruck. Enemy is staggered allowing you to follow up with a guaranteed charged attack that deals lightning damage, benefiting from Thunderstruck
- Like a Hot Knife Through Butter - Landing a charged attack against a burning enemy causes the attack to ignore X% of the burning enemy’s armor.
My Thoughts - I just liked the theme of cutting through enemies like butter with strong attacks 
- Weakened Immunity - Landing a charged attack or rune attack increases the duration of the plague status effect by X up to a maximum of Y.
My Thoughts - This would let you continue to function like a drain tank for longer periods of time by synergizing with Plague Doctor
- Coup de Grace - Charged attacks have a chance to “crit” and deal X% increased damage.
My thoughts - Was inspired a bit by Phantom Assassin in DotA 2 with this one. Maybe the animation for the coup de grace crit in Wicked can be similar to the DotA animation with the blood splatter. It is a powerful charged attack after all!
- Intangible - Having light armor increases your move speed by X% and allows you to ignore unit collision
My thoughts - simple weight class modifier to incentivize light armor. This would allow you to more easily dash through an enemy and get a backstab, but that could be overpowered. But maybe similar to Blink today.
- Evade Extension - Normal equip load’s dodge roll now rolls farther while keeping the same time to roll
My thoughts - Was thinking of evade extender from Monster Hunter. This would mean you have to dodge less, saving stamina
- Masochist - While in a heavy weight class, taking damage while performing an attack causes that attack to deal X% increased damage
My thoughts - you’re a heavy tank and shouldn’t expect to roll. Instead you’d want to trade hits and by taking damage as you’re swinging, your attack is powered up. Also because of how much poise you have in plate armor, your attack is unlikely to be interrupted
- Shock Absorption - Blocking attacks with your shield accumulates damage up to a cap of X. Parrying an attack then consumes all the accumulated damage and deals that damage to the parried enemy
My thoughts - this would give shields a more interesting version of “block to reflect damage” by giving a purpose to blocking, but still requiring them to risk taking damage going for a parry to pull of the burst of damage
- Hit and Run - Damaging an enemy with a focus-consuming bow attack grants the attacker X% increased move speed
My thoughts - I was thinking of making bows a little more hit and run. But that may not be necessary if a bow user equips Blink in its current form. This was more trying to build off blink without making it a required rune slot
Curses
Curses will be similarly interactive effects that can stack up to create a negative scenario the player must deal with. These won’t be “always active” passives such as halved durability. They require certain conditions to be met which then presents the player with a scenario they must deal with. As you stack up duplicate curses, it would increase the chance of that bad thing happening which will be the scaling variables X or Y you see in the descriptions, almost like a negative crit effect. I did not come up with any names for these curses, only descriptions.
- Taking damage has a chance to X% chance to slow the player’s overall move speed by Y% for a period of time. The player landing an attack ends the effect early.
My thoughts - This gives the player 2 options to deal with this curse: play defensively by rolling around, or play risky by trying to attack to end the effect early.
- Taking damage has a X% chance to cause wither, reducing armor and increasing player equip weight for Y period of time. Eating food will remove the effect early
My thoughts - It’s scurvy! You likely feel weakened in a sickly state, but eating food can end the effect early.
- Taking damage has a X% chance to cause the player to combust, taking rapidly burning fire damage. Roll Y times to remove the effect
My thoughts - Stop, Drop, and Roll. Y is the variable that increases how many times you must roll to end the effect and this would scale with how many stacks of the curse you have.
- Dealing damage has a X% chance to call down a lightning strike on the player’s location, dealing a large amount of damage to the player after a short time.
My thoughts - simple curse, but the player would be forced to avoid the attack while they’re on the offensive. This would be intended to hurt hype aggressive playstyles
- Running out of stamina causes Exhaustion, reducing damage dealt by X% and move speed by Y% until stamina has fully recovered
My thoughts - This would make a player second guess being too aggressive and overconsuming stamina. That being said, I wonder if this makes stamina less appealing as a stat since the recovery period might be longer for larger stamina pools?
- Using a rune attack has a X% chance of increasing the focus cost of your next rune attack by 50%
My thoughts - This curse would be designed to prevent rune spamming to some extent. Another solution instead of focus cost could be a short CD on the rune after use.
