Supplemental damage rebalancing

[Klapaucius]

The core concept of supplemental as 'damage that we can just hand out willy-nilly because we don't actually have to worry about balance/it stacking out of control' isn't a bad one, but I feel like some further consideration needs to be given to what should and shouldn't stack. However, I also think that supplemental is often used as a flavour-injector for skill, and the balance considerations that flow on from that additional damage not stacking aren’t really factored into the overall skill power.

The redundancy of supplemental damage also makes it difficult to use enchanted weapons and also makes them feel bad. It affects certain classes very disproportionately to others. I'm going to argue here for a sweeping balance pass that affects all sources of supplemental damage and weapon enchantments.

The status quo leads to some classes having annoying lack of synergy with their own skills, for example:

• paladin bolster attack vs holy champion fire cloak supplemental
• Ditto paladin and the supplemental that EH gets
• wizard using the council of keys ability crafts a gun with fire enchantments, but all it does is drain your mp extra hard since you're getting more supplemental from arcane marksman (actually, reading the wiki I'm not 100% sure about this because the wiki is clearly wrong but I don't know what the actual truth is)
• Advocate crafts enchanted weapons for allies, goes to a raid and prays, but gets the 'gives supplemental to all allies' result, which doesn't do anything if you've got an enchanted weapon.
• DO the same as the above, except with desecrate boons giving unholy supplemental.
• Corruptor enchanted wing and desecrate boons (double desecrate boons!)

I believe it’s also a bit inconsistent amongst the various buffs and whatnot.
Why does shadow of the wolf give regular damage, but grim mien gives supplemental? They can both affect weapon damage.
Why does eye of judgement get supplemental damage but elementalist spell attacks don’t?


Proposed solutions

The simple version is just this:
Every source of supplemental after the biggest one counts for half the basic value
This mitigates the issue – every source of supplemental becomes valuable BUT not as valuable as if they’re your only source. Boons and enchanted weapons can coexist in an uneasy peace. Bolster attack is always useful but rarely an efficient use of AP/MP.
I think it is in keeping with the core concept of supplemental damage, while sanding off some of the rougher edges in a simple and unobtrusive manner.


Here’s the more complete, messy, tedious proposal. The core ideas are:

• Avoid having cases where different class abilities don’t stack
• Supplemental should be more ‘of a kind’

To achieve this, I suggest that supplemental is for short term buffs, consumable items, innate weapons, and enchanted weapons only
So, some of the ramifications of this would be:

• Supplemental assigned to toggles gets moved to regular damage.
• Some sources of damage should be supplemental that aren’t – affinity potions in particular stand out to me.
• Some sources of supplemental shouldn’t be supplemental anymore. For instance toggles like grim mien and cloak of fire.
• +/- the half damage from additional sources in the simple solution