Proposal
I think with the onset of Arcanium weapons for Conjurer, i think we need more “hybrid gear” to make equal stat investment more interesting and give these classes a little more of a boost.
Details/background on your proposal
Markings
These are special patterns attuned to magical energy. They are equipped akin to a weapon or armor (haven’t decided on what would be more balanced), but do not offer any direct moves or benefits.
Instead they offer buffs while having the associated element in use, or imbued into a fighting style, if you meet the correct hybrid stat thresholds.
They drastically compensate for downsides in imbuement and can offer various buffs
the more you fulfill the hybrid stat requirement, the more complex the tattoos appear, and their designs vary depending on the element intended.
Think the Soul Weaver Looms from dragon fable.
They become more intricate and spread farther around the body. (partially this is why im leaning towards it being armor) In a sense it grows with your own skill, akin to magic sigils.
Markings are learned from meisters, and require fulfilling quests and bringing specific reagents.
Meisters spawn on islands akin to how the brotherhood of balance and knight’s proxy do, randomly on any mostly unpopulated island with their own encampment.
with a special station to turn in your materials to create the elemental ink used for markings. these stations work regardless of the meisters original element.
Albiet the meisters differ based on server and only spawn on chance, with the general measuring being to have hopefully a few of meisters of a random element per server.
Though quest progress is consistent even if you leave.
to prevent frustration, one must only speak with the meister to learn their recipe usually with a smaller associated cost, and then must obtain the materials on their own and turn it in at any master’s ink station.
So you just need to have found the meister for your element once, fulfill the smaller request, then obtain the recipe quest to obtain your markings.
Basically meisters have to be hunted down and conversed with to obtain your Markings.
Juggernauts similarly could benefit from the markings system but tied to specific deities.
Other classes (Open to ideas, not as fleshed out)
Paladins
Paladins atm benefit alot from their mechanics since two way imbuement basically means they get to mix elements together freely, so i don’t think they need a ton rn.
maybe something to give them a bit more oomph to their elemental affinities like runes that increase the strength of a specific relic/deity affinity that has to be embedded in a gem slot, and grow stronger based on your equal stat investment.
Since Paladin is the poster child of making magic the dump stat.
Since right now through imbuement, you get half of what you could potentially get with two different elements. so that 20% damage bonus on bleed only becomes 10%. Adding something like this would compensate for how much you lose by going half on your stat spread.
Knights
Knight’s could probably get weapons that are tied to specific gods and benefit from being imbued with that relic and have attacks tied to spirit and Weapons. Maybe call them Artifacts.
bit of Markings, bit of Warlord, and gets spread around akin to strength weapons/relics, seems about right.
id love to hear some ideas.
Reason to add/change
Its pretty clear that as changes are coming in for hybrid classes, they can flounder a fair bit in comparison to pure stat classes. It kind of ends up causing a situation where a class user doesn’t really hybridize, they just lean into one stat as much as possible.
Anyone can tell you the best way to play a Magic/Hybrid class is to only get to 150 magic for aura and dump the rest into the actual main stat.
What makes warlord actually interesting is that it solves this issue by offering proper hybrid gear to incentivise actual Hybridization. It expects you to properly split your stats instead of using the common dump stat system. You lose out on traditional benefits of main stats for unique benefits.
But you can still do the dump stat method and go that way, so it doesn’t railroad you, but it does give you better options than just diet “main stat class”.
Cept for paladin, its good on its own with a good magic because its basically imbuing magic onto magic.