Fire mages should bring a fuel barrels with them. Where all that fire came from?
Frost mage getting cold himself. And warm up near fire sources. Items with fur upgrade the resistance.
Lightning mage should use only leather armor, because all the cloth catches fire on him, and metal armor get shock himself.
Plague… I don’t know… Shouldn`t this be forbidden? In a world suffering from the plague?
Summoner mage.
When you summon single tough monster-jojo-stand and act only like a support healer when it do all the damage.
Something like that, but not too broken.=_= It should be “harder to die” but “harder to control”.
in my opinion to make element and status effect builds more viable, we need some sort of rock paper scissors type weakness system.
all elements lay the same, because their difference or usage does not matter. it does not matter, when your character caught on fire, if it rains or u roll in water.
it also feels irrelevant of u target a enemy wearing cloth with fire and an enemy wearing full metal plate armor with lightning.
each element should be usable in every situation, but it should matter for specific enemies, maps, weather etc, if u use fire, lightning, plague, whatever. like for example in elden ring, where lightning dmg to all enemies is increased when it rains.
same goes for resistance. a fire mage would likely have some sort of fire resistance (not fireproof!) when handling fire every day, like blacksmiths wear aprons or get calluses on their hands. so as a fire mage u should be harder to set on fire by enemy fire attacks.
even more distinction could come from specific sets or accessory as u mentioned.
I don’t often play elemental builds or wizards but when I do I tend to enjoy the Ice element a lot.
I played a Death Knight in WoW and always enjoyed playing Frost as a DPS spec. One of my favorite abilities was the one where I had a snowstorm channeling around me and it slowly froze my enemies. Or the one where we could bind an enemy to an icy pillar slowing their movement.
As for a ranged build I would enjoy being able to play as a Winter Witch or an Ice Queen or something. Focusing on freezing and controlling enemy groups with AOE spells. Having some kind of ice wave that travels forward and creates spikes. Some kind of icy howling wind, a frost minion, ice shackles, frost mines that we can plant and then lure enemies on top of.
Minions and summons would break the game i think, since the combat is more soulslike that will give you the advantage of one of those ashes from elden ring, imagine a necromancer here summoning skeletons from corpses and the whole game becomes trivial hehehe.
I like the idea of mages being specialized on an element or two, i think it all comes down to the skill tree they will implement.
The 4 elements feel and play exactly the same atm. I see 3 reasons for it:
Enemies do not have resistances or weaknesses to specific elements.
Right now elemental damage is not negated by armor and only affected by elemental resistances. From my observations enemies with cloth armor (like the fire mages) have higher elemental resistance than armored enemies (like the knights).
When enemies and especially bosses are assigned with weaknesses and resistances the element selection becomes more meaningfull.
Elemental status effects hardly matter outside of boss fights, because the trigger condition is harsh.
Atm in order to apply a status effect an enemy must take ~45% of its total HP as pure elemental damage. This means only weapons with innate elemental damage like Spirit Edge, Moonshaft, several staffs or pure elemetal runes can cause a status effect in the first place. On regular enemies this hardly matters as they will die long before the condition is fullfilled.
The status effects are also unbalanced, electricity being the best one while heat/plague the worst, because their DoTs are just too weak. Personally I also thing having 2 DoTs is redundant, plague should do some debuff, like “enemies deal less damage” and not a copy of another DoT.
The most grave issue are the runes! All elements have access to the same rune attacks, which in return erases their identity.
There is Fireball, Ice Bolt & Plague Breath, which is just one rune recollored 3 times to match the elements. Then there are 4 [insert element here] Wave runes; or 4 [insert element here] Nova runes; or 4 [insert element here] Hellfire runes. The only exception is Chain Lightning, which replaces Fireball.
This issue extends further to elemental martial runes. There are [insert element here] Flurry runes; or [insert element here] Dash runes; or [insert element here] Throw runes etc.
My point here is, the elements must reflect a playstyle that you as a developer associate with an element. Then the runes must reflect those playstyles. Eg. you associate electricity with speed and mobility, which then translates into gapcloser runes like Lightning Assoullt/Lightnig Dash or into fast series attacks like Lightning Flurry. As a censequence other elments should not have access to similar attacks to not errode elmental identity; this means no more 4 [insert element here] Nova runes.
If I were to briefly describe the elements, I’d say electricity should be associated with speed, AoE’s and blinking all over the map. Fire with high damage, including damage over time. Ice with battlefield control and defensive buffs plus freezing enemies. Plague is already kinda compete with fire, so instead of DoT it could feature a vast array of control tools and debuffs, while being more risky (and effective) than ice. There could be a balance between elements, where some offer high-risk/high-reward mechanics, with greater risk tied to potentially higher damage. Obviously, I’ve only thought about this for a few minutes, but this direction seems promising.
The looter shooter Outriders had a small amount of what you’re talking about and I appreciated it. If enemies were inflicted with Ash from a fire skill, it would stun them like Freeze. You can definitely find ways to make it work for other elements like you say.
And warm up near fire sources. Items with fur upgrade the resistance.