Due to the rework of “thorns” in the latest patch, I suggest the following:
Remove “thorns” enchantment from all armor pieces and shield. This mechanic is of interest to a small number of players and only ruins items for most.
Restore the ability to apply “damage on damage taken” enchantments to Magical and Plagued versions of body armors.
Rename the “damage on damage taken” mechanic to “thorns.” And make it dependent on the amount of damage taken. But keep the physical nature of its damage.
Create a legendary thorns-themed body armor with a slight buff to the corresponding enchantment (e.g. 15% → 25% thorns).
Thorns was fine as is, as it’s primarily a tool for tanks. It’s a way for tanks to damage their opponents while they’re absorbing hits from said opponents, to compensate for the tank’s weaker weapon and rune attacks when an opportunity to strike the opponent opens. Tanks have traded damage for survivability and mitigation, and tools like thorns, damage-on-block, damage-on-parry, damage-on-dodge, deal-damage-on-damage-taken, etc. allow tanks to add some additional damage output to their below average weapon strikes.
The problem is how healing interacts with it. Builds which allowed players to stand around while bosses die to thorns worked because the stacked mitigation, thorns, and life-steal. The idea being that if the mitigation lowers the amount of damage taken to a small enough number, the life-steal from the thorns damage can recover whatever the player lost to each hit, allowing the thorns to eventually kill the boss because the player is essentially immortal from the healing.
Decreasing thorns damage obviously breaks this, because less thorns damage means less health can be recovered through lifesteal. But the problem with this approach is that it makes thorns useless. Nobody wants to waste an entire enchantment slot on dealing only 1 or 2 points of retaliatory damage to an opponent.
Another (perhaps preferable) way to fix this would have been to limit the effectiveness of lifesteal when paired with thorns specifically, allowing thorns to still deal reasonable damage so it’s on par with other retaliatory damage enchantments, but not providing enough healing when paired with lifesteal to keep an idle player alive long enough for thorns to kill the opponent.
Another method would be to add diminishing returns to the amount of damage thorns deals on each subsequent hit, to the point where it eventually deals zero damage (because beyond a certain point additional pin-pricks are superficial damage on the bloody pulp that is your opponent’s flesh). Meaning thorns can’t actually kill anything, only wound it, and the diminishing retaliatory damage would have caused lifesteal to decrease in effectiveness with each hit.
I’m sure there are other solutions as well. I’m not sure why the developers chose the route they did of simply nerfing thorn’s damage into the ground - I suspect it was because it was the simplest fix to implement. But simple isn’t always best.
I agree, there are a lot of enchantments that suck, or are very similar to each other, feeling redundant.
Thorns is on top of that list. It also means that the meta choice is always Armor Penetration. They should really rework Thorns as you said so it is a viable alternative.
Other stuff like ‘On Kill / Backstab’ just feel a lot worse than ‘On Fatality’ and also don’t really serve a purpose and should all get merged into one instead of being so specific.