Earth’s threshold for causing its own Bleed is 33% damage in one hit, or 16.67% with any Ultimate Art. In exchange, it gains 15% damage against Bleed, hitting for a whopping 1.15x damage (highest non-clear interaction damage in the entire game). It hits far harder than Metal on Bleeding targets, with Metal only possessing 5% self-synergy and equal base damage to Earth.
Can we buff snow at least that would be pretty cool 
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snow is getting a 5% bleed synergy which didnt exist before so itd be better on stuff like conjurer
first of all, that’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about
second of all, why are speed imbuements specifically the problem? Shouldn’t the stats of different magics theoretically already be balanced?
Not exactly. When you look at the formula for Magic imbues vs. Fighting Style imbues, this is the comparison.
(New) Conjurer formula:
- Magic damage affinity + 0.075x = imbued damage affinity
- i.e. Fire Conjurer has a 0.9x damage affinity on imbue, ignoring DoT and synergies.
- Magic speed affinity from 1.0x, halved = imbued speed affinity
- i.e. Light Conjurer has a 1.4x speed affinity on imbue, granting 40% reduced startup and 20% reduced endlag for all skills.
- Magic size affinity - 0.1x = imbued size affinity
- i.e. Earth Conjurer has a 1.2x size affinity on imbue.
Warlock formula:
- Fighting Style damage affinity ⋅ Magic damage affinity + 0.075x = imbued damage affinity
- i.e. Metal + Basic Combat Warlock has a 0.975x damage affinity, ignoring DoT and synergies.
- Fighting Style speed affinity ⋅ (Magic speed affinity from 1.0x, halved) = imbued speed affinity
- i.e. Light + Thermo Fist Warlock has a 1.82x speed affinity, granting 82% reduced startup and 41% reduced endlag for all skills.
- Fighting Style size affinity + Magic size affinity from 1.0x - 0.1x = imbued size affinity
- i.e. Explosion + Iron Leg Warlock has a 1.35x size affinity.
Warlord formula:
- Fighting Style damage affinity + 0.15x = imbued damage affinity
- i.e. Boxing Warlord has a 0.95x damage affinity on imbue.
- Fighting Style speed affinity = imbued speed affinity
- i.e. Thermo Warlord has a 1.3x speed affinity on imbue, granting 30% reduced startup and 15% reduced endlag.
- Fighting style size affinity = imbued size affinity
- i.e. Iron Leg Warlord has a 1.15x size affinity on imbue.
Lengthy explanation, but you might’ve noticed that Warlord’s imbue damage bonus was double that of Magic’s imbue damage bonus (0.15x added, vs 0.075x added). Similarly, you may have recognized that Warlord directly takes the speed affinity of what is imbued, whilst for Magic imbues, the effect of Magic’s speed affinity is halved.
This is intentional, and is a byproduct of the stat relationships between Fighting Styles and Magics. In this case, we’re concerned with speed.
The range of speed affinities within Fighting Styles ranges from 0.8x (Iron Leg pre-nerf, and now post-buff) to 1.3x (Boxing). That’s a gap of 0.5x speed. By all logic, Magic should be double that, if the formula serves correctly. However, that is incorrect. Magic ranges from 0.5x (Metal) to 1.8x (Light). That’s a staggeringly large gap of 1.3x speed, resulting in Magic having far more outlier imbues that do not comply with the formula.
These changes would have corrected this discrepancy in the formula, and reigned in the absurd outlier that is Light Conjurer in its current state. We’ll likely be taking the approach of changing certain Magic’s speed effectiveness on imbue (Light, Lightning, and Wind) in order to ensure that these imbues aren’t as absurdly stat-efficient as they are currently without harming their efficacy on Mage.
If I use a magic unimbued, then light’s stats and lights interactions are theoretically equal to metal’s stats and metal’s interactions, if they’re balanced, so again, why is that not the case with imbuements? Pretend you didn’t also mess with damage and magic size affinities for imbuements
Because by virtue of stats alone they wouldn’t be equal. No damage or size changes, let’s compare.
Metal:
1.0x damage on imbue + Bleeding (Bleeding II for Conjurer) + 2.5% self-synergy.
0.5x speed on imbue.
1.2x size on imbue.
Light:
0.85x damage on imbue + up to 5% Blinding synergy at max stacks.
1.8x speed on imbue.
1.0x size on imbue.
Equivalence of stats is balanced around damage > size > speed. But even in theory, these two are not even close, especially not in practice.
Light suffers with 15% less damage than Metal and 20% less size. In exchange, it has 360%, or 3.6 times Metal’s speed. On Mage, that can be justified in certain scenarios. We’re in a speed meta, maybe Metal will have its time to shine. On Conjurer and Warlock, however, absolutely not.
Ever since speed affinities and Attack Speed were made to affect endlag at half efficacy, speed has become a more important damage stat than damage. A Light + Thermo Fist Warlock outdamages an Earth + Iron Leg Warlock anyday, and it isn’t even close. This is why imbues need to have special care taken in regard to their speed affinities; unlike Magic, speed directly affects damage output for Weapons and Fighting Styles.
Are you saying that speed affinities don’t affect endlag for magic
They do on Explosion and Pulsar, neither of which are an important part of playing Mage currently.
so if speed affinities affected endlag the same way for magics, fighting styles and weapons, then there’d be no need for the halved speed imbuement for magics?
No, there very certainly still would be. Light + Thermo Fist would have a speed affinity of 2.34x if Imbues weren’t halved, and Attack Speed (armor stat) is multiplicative. I don’t even think you can comprehend how fast that would be. It wouldn’t even be reactable, and we’re only at a Level 125 cap.
The endlag efficacy of speed affinities will never be completely rolled out to Magic, else cycling Blasts would easily out-trade Fighting Styles and Weapons at point-blank, and anything below 1.0x speed would never, ever be viable or usable again.
If you’re worried about attacks eventually becoming unreactable with enough speed, then it sounds like high speed in general is the problem, so why wouldn’t you just implement diminishing returns to speed instead of just targeting magic imbuement?
why wouldn’t you just be able to re-balance fighting styles, weapons and magic to make them equal again, and why is cycling blasts a problem, but not cycling other moves that fighting styles and weapons have
The new alt-stat formula already has diminishing returns, and level is a factor. Speed will continue to increase from this point onwards, but shouldn’t ever really reach the comical levels of un-halved Magic imbue affinities until very late-game.
Mage is the Zoner class. Blast-cycling has very high DPS, and used to beat both Weapons and Fighting Styles at point-blank before the endlag changes. If endlag reduction was added to all Magic spells, nothing would have changed aside from overall power-creep. Endlag efficacy from speed affinities should only be applied to certain Magic skills, else the damage output of Magic simply outshines that of the other classes even at point-blank, which should never be the case. If you want that changed, you’ve opened up a whole different can of worms, which would inevitably cause community outrage if we had to nerf Magic damage as a whole in exchange for speed affecting endlag on all spells.
so that means you can nerf an imbue without gutting the magic/fighting style, well that’s usefull
My point still stands. If the issue is that combining the fastest magic and the fastest fighting style would make attacks too fast to react to, then it sounds like you should just punish that kind of speed and leave everything else alone
No, because it would favor speed affinity on magic as much as speed affinity is favored on fighting styles and weapons, and thereby make most magics as balanced, compared with other magics, when imbued, as they would be when used alone, if stat imbuements weren’t messed with
The balancing team has caused community outrage for lesser reasons. Plus, I’m not convinced that the community would necessarily be outraged. The community most often complains about changes that make things less balanced, that make magics or builds less specialized, or that make things less convenient for PvEers. I’m speaking as someone who has been a part of community outrage. There’s also the fact that you could put it to vote if you aren’t sure
But ‘everything else’ isn’t fine either. Unhalved Light Conjurer has 1.8x speed affinity. That’s 80% reduced startup, 40% less endlag, and 1.8x effect on all Attack Speed gain for pressing H once on your keyboard. How you can think this is a good idea is beyond me. Let’s even take something more tame, like Lightning + Iron Leg. That’s 0.9728125x damage on every hit, 1.2x speed (almost current Thermo), and 1.05x size. There is no world where that’s fair, or a good idea in any way.
While this makes fast magics absurdly valuable on imbue, it makes slow magics even worse. Earth Conjurer would have a 1.075x damage affinity and a 7.5% Bleeding interaction with 1.2x size, which is good, but it currently suffers heavily from 20% increased startup and 10% increased endlag on all imbued skills. This alone is enough to make Earth Conjurer unviable. Now, unhalved, it would have 40% increased startup and 20% increased endlag, gutting what is already nigh-useless. Also keep in mind that it would have 0.6x effect on Attack Speed, even worse than its current 0.8x effect.
There is no world where unhalved Magic speed affinities on imbue would be fair. You have to be beyond out of touch to believe that would be healthy for the game. We want to encourage more buildcrafting, and less free stats from imbuing. Similarly, we want to make it so you can build out of having poor stats, rather than being stuck with certain low stats just because of your imbue, as long as you invest enough into those armor stats.
Speed affinity is already heavily favored on Magics. Fast magics are the best choice for Mage, and slow magics are in the gutter. This change makes fast magics leagues better and slow magics leagues worse. Not too hard to understand why that’s a bad idea.
Buffing what is already powerful and kicking what is already weak further into the gutter is just not happening. Would also immediately drop us into a full-magic meta, where no classes aside from Mage, Conjurer, or Warlock are useable, focused around stat-checking and speed alone. I don’t think your take here is shared by a single other soul.
Hence the nerf you said you would have to do earlier if this happened. Any kind of core change to the classes will inevitably involve re-balancing some things. If you nerf a balanced magic in some way, then you have to buff it in another way, and vice versa. This is nothing new
I’m not talking about the game in it’s current state. Again, the point of making endlag affect magic speed affinities is to allow magics to be re-balanced with that in mind. The problem stems from the fact that magic speed affinities don’t affect endlag, so magic’s speed affinities can be higher than that of fighting styles and weapons or accompany fewer downsides in other stats or interactions, while still being balanced. Having a magic imbuement work with 100% effectiveness would be problematic because the magic speed affinity would essentially become more valuable since it would then affect endlag, once it’s imbued onto a weapon or fighting style. That would mean that if a slow magic and a fast magic were both balanced so that neither one was better when used alone, then the fast magic would be better for imbuements, since imbuements would favor it by making the stat it has more of more valuable. If 2 magics were balanced when not imbued, and one had higher speed, then they would necessarily be unbalanced when imbued, if they were imbued without any halving or reductions for speed affinity. That’s a problem that can’t just be fixed by changing up base magic stats or interactions, unlike the issue of fast magics just being too strong in general. If magic affinity had the same effect when imbued and when not imbued, then you could still re-balance it to be balanced in both cases at the same time, without adding any special rules for imbuements
Also, what is the formula for endlag? Cause these startup reductions don’t seem to be proportional to the speed affinity, and that’s probably part of the problem
This whole thing, even if possible, is not practical for two reasons.
Number one: sweeping affinity changes to every magic in the game, in order to bring them in line with Fighting Styles and make them having reduced endlag on all spells balanced, is just not going to happen. Balance changes are done at the end of an update, meaning we only get a day or two of testing per balance patch to ensure the changes land. Such sweeping affinity changes are never practical and would inevitably lead to huge problems, as there’s no way we’d be able to cover all our bases with numbers alone. Extensive testing would need to be done, and extensive testing is not something we have access to.
Number two, Vetex doesn’t want to change magic affinities, hence the veto of the first changes. Far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the line. Vet isn’t someone you can convince.