[0.3.1] Support gems shouldn't give raw damage.

Support gems shouldn’t give inherent bonuses to damage or DPS. I constantly find myself using the same supports (especially in the early game). The damage supports I like the most are the ones that change how the skill works (by adding a cooldown, for example) or that apply only under specific conditions (like execute effects).

Right now, I feel almost forced to include whatever provides the highest damage in nearly all my setups, except for utility skills, where removing a single unique support seems to work best. It feels a bit like an illusion of choice to me.

+1
Funny enough I firmly recall this was one of the major bullet points of their original vision of the game. Sadly they dropped it somewhere along the way even before the launch of 0.1.
I was attributing it for the lack of variety consider it was the first version of the game and stat altering supports was easy to implement and give people choices, but so far that have not change and I dread to think it going to stay this way to launch.

P/S: quoting from exilecon 2023
https://youtu.be/yP7XhyQNG18?list=PLt5SL2R19SuJYs_X6Heh_ZeMMgkB5BsSR&t=1551

It's kinda sad they ended up with things like elemental armament: raw more elemental attack damage. I mean, if they have some drawback besides mana cost, in the example of elemental armament something like "supported skills doesn't cause elemental ailments", they could be acceptable, but the raw damage kills the fun, also there is a lot of supports that could be removed

They shouls give flat-damage. But not much as now. And gear affixes +1-2 lvl should be ONLY in corrupt-list. Now if you have skill lvl less that 30+ you are sucker...

The logical solution is to make sure these gems always had a drawback or something that "changes" the skill somehow like you mentioned the cooldown.

I play sorc without Attacks so I wasn't exposed to Elemental Armament. IMO a lot of these "raw damage" supports seem connected to Attacks.

Elemental Armament could simply be changed to reduce physical damage or something. But if this was support gems for spells rather than attacks, then the thing I would expect a gem that just adds raw Elemental Damage to do would be to come with a restriction that makes it unable to do elemental ailments.

I don't want to be even more dependent on actually getting good damage rolls on gear than I already am.

I would much rather push in the direction of more of my build coming from passive tree and gems, so I can be less gear dependent, not reducing the gains from elsewhere making me more gear dependent.

+1
I also think that making several similar supports available in different skills was also a bad change.
It was cool previously, made more supports viable if you're using multiple skills, making you think more about what to putinto skills and they were actually for different purpose.
Now with this change there are "mandatory" supports like faster attacks/cast in attacks/spells, brutality for all physical damage etc. Probably those supports are just overpowered.

Yea they should.

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vexorian#9572 wrote:

The logical solution is to make sure these gems always had a drawback or something that "changes" the skill somehow like you mentioned the cooldown.

I play sorc without Attacks so I wasn't exposed to Elemental Armament. IMO a lot of these "raw damage" supports seem connected to Attacks.

There are things in casting that resembles "more damage". For example, deliberation (more movement penalty) or considered casting (-15% cast speed) are huge boosts in damage in my builds that i'm not considering other options.

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The_Song#4903 wrote:

I don't want to be even more dependent on actually getting good damage rolls on gear than I already am.

I would much rather push in the direction of more of my build coming from passive tree and gems, so I can be less gear dependent, not reducing the gains from elsewhere making me more gear dependent.

I think they can balance the damage output just with gear+passives, and let the supports to change the behaviour/purpose of your skills. Ofc if they remove raw damage supports (or the ones with little drawback) they should balance the rest to compensate.