The Future Of Elemental Stats

[Wynn]

I wonder what will determine what shards harvesters find now. Perhaps they will only find the two associated with their abilities now?

Disappointing to be sure. The ability to control elemental affinity was a major portion of my gameplay from DoM to DoL to DoH.

[Xenor]

I wonder what will determine what shards harvesters find now. Perhaps they will only find the two associated with their abilities now?

Disappointing to be sure. The ability to control elemental affinity was a major portion of my gameplay from DoM to DoL to DoH.

Each region has a default shard that you get more of. Increasing elemental affinity in other elements currently over-rides this if the affinity is high enough. I believe La Noscea is wind, Thanalan fire, Shroud Earth and Coerthas ice.

[Rutelor]

Disappointing to be sure. The ability to control elemental affinity was a major portion of my gameplay from DoM to DoL to DoH.

Funny. I never felt in control of anything with the allocation of elemental stats in this game. I liked the idea but to my knowledge, the workings of this feature, something people understandably are sad to see disappearing, were never there. I would've liked it very much if the changes now being deployed in the game had been able to correct the elemental system's malfunctions. Much better to fix the original idea than to eliminate the allocation of elemental statistics altogether. But I guess the new dev team decided it wasn't going to work no matter what... or something. I look forward to more of this being clarified.

I don't like the feeling that elements are not strong influences in this game. Far too many times the overall elemental profile of a monster (even elementals themselves) is far too ambiguous to be useful in battle. And sometimes it seems to shift from one moment of the fight to another. I have significantly hurt fire elementals with fire spells, which doesn't seem to make much sense, but a couple of seconds later, the same spell would be resisted completely. Sometimes an apparently-fire-biased ability, like Absorb Attack, works wonders in a drake, and sometimes it fails. I've seen fire mobs resist wind spells (which in this game has supposedly supplanted water as the thing that will douse fire,) or even water ones, only to succumb to lighting or even fire. I posted several times about my puzzlement as to what the elemental bias determined by the point allocation did, but never, not once, did I get clear answers or pointers.

So if this is what we're losing, I can't say I'm sorry. However, I wish the system had once worked as it was intended to. But for it's problems we cannot really blame the new development team. Again, this is one of those wonderful ideas Tanaka seems to have had for his game blueprint... ideas he never figured how to balance and make functional in the actual game.