Element Balance (Fire / Wind / Ice / Water / Earth / Lightning / Spirit)

[Echo]

I've been wanting to open a discussion on this topic for some time now. There's no better opportunity than now that we have a dedicated forum section :)

Having played for a good number of hours now, I've noticed there's quite a big discrepancy between elements in terms of usefulness and synergy. I keep wondering if I'm missing something (quite possible) or whether the elements actually need some tweaking to make them comparatively viable.

I'll just note the mastery set guide for reference here, since I'll be discussing particular ones.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1349483727

What I would like to know from other players...
- How would you rank the elements in terms of usefulness and synergy?
- Do you consider any element masteries/sets overpowered or underpowered and why?
- What is missing? Does a particular element lack something that would make it good/better? Perhaps an additional effect, or perhaps a new mastery set that covers a deficiency. Spell out your ideas if so.

[Echo]

I'll start. Sorry for the wall of text, there's a lot to say on the subject.

My ranking for the elements goes as such:
Wind > Ice > Earth > Fire > Lightning > Water > Spirit

1) Wind
By far the most useful mastery simply because its powers lie concentrated in just 2 sets: Blood Wind and Second Wind. Any wind user can take just these 2 and fill the other slots with class and common masteries.

The bonuses for both of these are insane and combined with the effects of their component masteries, make the other sets (including Wind) look bad in comparison.
The other 3 wind sets don't even compare.

I would do a balance pass over the other 3 wind sets and maybe find a way to make them attractive in comparison to Blood Wind and Second Wind.

2) Ice
Thanks to most enemies having stun resistance in some form, Frozen is now the best stun-type debuff in the game. Apart from a few select foes, it's universally viable and will make your life a lot easier. The Ice mastery sets also have good synergy with physical damage thanks to Frozen Blade.

Overall, I'd say this element is pretty well-balanced and strong enough. The bonuses are split fairly evenly across all mastery sets, with none being an extraordinary outlier.

If I were to pick a set that underperforms, it would be Frozen Soul Reaper. There's almost no opportunity to trigger this set bonus. Unlike the other elements that act on both the basic and advanced form of their debuff (eg Flame of Vengeance), by the time the target is frozen (and still alive) that character's turn has already ended and another non-Ice character will take the kill. The only way to make decent use of this would be a Leton + Ice beast combo.
Otherwise, I would just suggest to change this to act on Frostbite as well.

3) Earth
The most defensive element, it focuses on armor and physical resistance. There are some good options here with Sand Castle, White Sandstorm and Verdure Magician.
There are also some problems:
- All masteries that act on Flash-type debuffs are limited to Anne, since pets trigger Infection/Corruption instead
- There is literally nothing for other Earth debuff types, like the above
- Apart from the above mentioned mastery sets, the others are too situational (depending on weather/light/time of day)
I think adding a couple of masteries focused on improving or making use of Infection/Corruption would go a long way to making Earth-focused pets more viable.
Additionally, I think making the situational sets a bit better would be ideal.

4) Fire
A good offensive element.
You get revival through Phoenix, debuff removal through Cauterize, HP recovery through Final Flame and various buffs related to fire.
You won't find any hard disables or damage reduction here, which means fire-based characters are innately more fragile than the previous 3 elements.

In theory, there are some interesting themed mastery sets here, based on Conflagration and The Joy or Burning. Unfortunately, most fire skills in the game either don't cause burning ground at all or do a pathetic amount of 1 tile per attack, making those masteries pretty much wasted.

What I would suggest is to increase burning ground caused by fire skills all across the board, and have Fire Bolt cause additional 1 tile of burning ground.

5) Lightning
A jack of all trades, but doesn't do anything particularly well.
Wind? AT reduction and excellent damage reduction.
Ice? Freeze anyone.
Earth? AoE slow, death prevention, good tankiness.
Fire? Revival and debuff removal + healing.

So what does Lightning give you, then? There a couple of cool things in theory.
Thunderbolt gives you a chance to stun directly, but at 20% it's just too low to be usable (even with the Giant Thunder mastery set).
Condenser gives you Attack/ESP Power for the next attack, but the fact you need to take significant damage to use it makes it less good.
Apart from those 2, you get bonuses to your basic stats and damage. Not bad, but not terribly good either.

What I would change here is buff the Thunderbolt to at least 30% chance, and double the Attack/ESP Power gained through Condenser.

6) Water
I guess this element sees very little gameplay, since only some pets can actually use it.
It has few sets (just 4, one more than the Spirit type), few masteries (all generic), focused exclusively around poison and pretty much lacking in every way.

7) Spirit
I am really disappointed by the Spirit element.
- It only has 3 mastery sets, less than all other elements despite the fact it's the most common SP type
- It focuses on buffing attack and damage against enemies of lower level or higher level, which makes it absolutely useless in both Challenge mode (since enemies will be of exactly the same level, thus neither bonus will apply) and end-game (where all enemies except 2-3 bosses will be lower level than you, thus only half the bonuses will apply)
- There are no interesting or special bonuses to this element type

Spirit is the worst element of all currently, and needs a major rework in my opinion.

[Seswatha]

It kind of depends on the build, all of them are useful in certain situation and not so useful in other. E.g. Blood Wind is good but if your build has other means of AT reduction it's not needed.

Overall I would say that
Ice >= Water > Spirit > Earth > Wind >= FIre >= Lightning

but it really depends and lightning can also be really good in some cases.

Ice - Freeze/Absolute Zero is broken, especially if you have AOE attacks that freeze or can counterattack with 100% freeze chance which is possible on some beasts. Ice SP is very easy to gain on tanks (can overcharge every turn if you don't go for max SP boosts). The SP bonus itself is meh but who cares. Frost wind + shatter combo is also strong on a melee tank as you can set enemies up to get frost debuffed without spending any action points and then hit them for double damage.

Water - Posion is really strong, especially on Yashas if you have Neurotoxin. It's also giving dodge per SP, so if you go for awaken/overchage duration/max SP build you can easily have a bonus of +90% dodge for like 6 turns 3 times/mission on demand making a water user more or less immortal if you have decent base dodge. You can't get it on humans right now but it would be even more OP on humans who can use gear.

Spirit - Somewhat controversially I put this rather high. Yes, it doesn't have any good sets. But again, who cares. With awaken + double SP effect + sharp spirit you can have +40-50% hit chance and -40-50% enemy block when overcharged making this a very strong combo for a damage dealer e.g. Giselle who can hit and crit anything in a huge radius with this. The only real complain is the lack of the "overcharge" spirit set like other elements have, so your overcharge is only 4 turns without items. Still plenty to murder everything on sight.

Earth - Similar to Water in that it gives really strong defensive stats from SP, but block is not as strong as dodge at these super high levels as you still get hit and take damage. Verdure magician + awaken set gives you 7 turn overcharge with like +150% block, plus the mastery has some nice self healing and AT reduction masteries.

Wind - as mentioned, haze and blood wind. Blood wind eats up a lot of your attack slots though and haze imo is really not that strong (30% damage reduction is ok, but what you actually want is very high block and/or dodge because 30% dr won't save you from crits) and shares no masteries with blood wind so it really limits the build. Wind SP is crit damage so it can be pretty strong but in the end a bit of an overkill cause you'll kill anything without impulse fields if they don't dodge/block and you crit anyway.

Fire - Fire has self resurrection and cheap debuff removal. Which is good, as long as you're good in other departments. +Damage from fire SP can be fairly strong to buff up your attacks to lethal levels if you lack damage (can be up to +1800 base damage with the right set).

Lightning - even though rated last, can be still pretty good. Lightning SP is good for beasts who don't get high crit chances otherwise (although you do need decent base crit to build it). Lightning tactics can be very OP with the right skills as confusion is super powerful for obvious reasons. If you go full lightning atom decomposition is extremely strong, making you basically ignore target's resistance. Nerve stimulus is really good for SP gain and extra speed, and is almost "free" in mage builds. Overall pretty good for damage and sometimes CC and probably could've arguably been rater higher but not the "I can't die" or I guaranteed CC everything I see levels of OP.

[Xaxil Nightsun]

Hmm never put too much thought into this because I always felt it was the characters that made the elements powerful but sitting down and looking it over made me think and this is my thoughts on them.

Ice > Earth > Fire > Water > Spirit > Wind > Lighting

Ice : Well for one Freezing is busted hands down, and ice has some really insane mastery options for it, from reducing damage to passively debuffing enemies from just standing near the ice user which set's up units for it's other masteries. Very few unit can deal with Ice type debuffs other then units who use the element as well or have other ways of dealing with it universally. It can easily hit high damage like Fire or lighting and can be tankier then Earth or Wind. Tbh I don't think Ice needs to get any stronger then what it is now.

Earth : Really soild element and has some really powerful tools under it's belt, both for melee, ranged, or casters of the element. Plus it's really hard to take down a sturdy earth unit if they are built with defense in mind, hell even Anne can become virtually invincible due to some of the earth mastery options, plus the aoe slowing and the extra bleeding effect with some sets really make it shine when used with other units who center around bleeding. I would mostly say that Earth is a bit on the slow side which is understandable but it would be nice to have so form of self AT control but since it can just slow down everyone near them then it's fine.

Fire : It's has a lot of merits that makes it hard for me to not place it higher but compared to Earth and Ice, it falls short when it comes to endurance which means a lot to me. It's a strong element, it's easy to understand and build, and it has good AT control and strong regen options as well as the only element with debuff cleanse, and unique revival mastery. It's pretty much a super well rounded element which kinda shocked me considering fire is normally the " basic kids" element in games if you wanna be a damage dealer, so the extra utility options are a nice surprise. If I was to add anything it would probably just be to adds ways to reduce the Revive debuff.

Wind: It very strong element when in the right hands, it has really strong CC and AT control and decent damage mitgation as well as a self regen option. It feels pretty lack luster on anything other then a wind caster unit and I think that's my main gripe with the element. If I were to add anything It would be more masteries that can effect your units abilities when they aren't just using wind element. Could give it some Bleeding based wind masteries so it can capitlize more on bleed since some wind units can bleed enemies when using wind attacks, or maybe a set to further interfere with ranged attacks.

Water : I only have thoughts on this from beasts so I can't really rate it too high till I have a character who can use, poison is okay but not super useful since it isn't fatal on it's own, and dodge rate is nice but block tends to be better since there are very few ways for you to increase your dodge when you get attacked and failing to dodge normally means death for water users since water element doesn't have any other options outside of dodging to protect it. On a caster water pretty great as screwing over groups of enemies but my only issue is how reliant on crits it is to be effective which kinda of renders it useless against high block units.

Spirit : While it had limited masteries options at the moment it's the only element with a reliable way of lowering and enemies block and dodge as well as raising your own block and dodge. It also has surprisingly good SP generation plus it hard to miss as a spirit user when your at max SP making it an even more reliable element. This is the main reason I like the element because it doesn't have many ways to fail you and gives you a good number of ways to strengthen not only yourself but your allies as well which other elements can't do.

Lighting : As a damage dealing element it's kinda unmatched even by fire, but if it was only about damage then this would be at the top of the list for me. lighting feels strange to me since it seems like it was designed for melee units over ranged and a good bit of it's masteries demand you get hurt for them to take effect so it further puts this mind set in me. I know you don't have to use them but since it's there it make me wonder the direction the dev team are trying to take with the element. There were some nice new additions to the element that moved it up the list for me like more speed, armor, resistance, based on lighting masteries in use, so on melee units I would like the element but on anything else I rather just use common or class masteries.

I generally find it a bit hard to rate elements apart from units mostly since the units abilities also play a pretty big role and how well the element can perform imo, so I would say my rating is pretty biased based on how I play with my units who use these elements, though this is making me think more about the elements themselves now.

[Seswatha]

The thing with water, you can get something ridiculous like 150-200% dodge. The only thing holding it back a bit atm is that it's beast only and there are limited ways to get decent base dodge as beasts. If Leton was a water user, he probably could've had 250+% dodge. At that point any accuracy bonuses enemies might have is not enough, the only thing that can probably touch this is the "halves dodge on attack" perk AND very high base accuracy.

It's true that the rest of the kit relies on crits for the most part and feels a bit unfinished (there are no water PCs for a reason) but it's really whatever. When overcharged a proper water build is just untouchable.