So, the existing elemental effects are:
- Fire, which scales well against high-health enemies and enemies that have regen (though there's almost no monsters that heal themselves in doom modding)
- Poison, which scales with attack speed exclusively, and can spec into making enemies do less damage or even become friendly
- Acid, which scales up with burst damage and as enemies fall to low health
- Shock, which doesn't do additional damage, instead focusing entirely on crowd control (plus Reanimation, which is just kinda weird)
All of these can spec into doing area damage with their Mastery upgrades, but there's not really an effect that's dedicated to area damage. So, I'm going to suggest a fifth element!
Shattering Inscription
On-hit: Applies stacks of Frost, softcapped by DPS (like Shock). Enemies with Frost stacks release 8 (scales with level) Frost Shards both once every ~1/2 second and on death; Frost Shards each deal 20% of the total Frost stacks as damage, similar to the Fragmentation Shots effect. Frost Shards should be capable of scaling higher than the equivalent level of Fragmentation Shots with sustained damage on a tanky target. Frost Shards are spawned at 1.5x the victim's radius, travel about as fast as imp fireballs, and disappear after traveling for 1/2 a second.
Fell Wind
Intermediate upgrade for Frost. Frost Shards are fired 1% more frequently per Frost stack remaining on the target.
Blizzard Omen
AoE mastery upgrade for Frost. Enemies struck by Frost Shards receive Frost stacks! Turn a crowd into their own personal icy bullet hell.
Freezing Core
Single-target mastery for Frost. Instead of spawning in a ring around the victim and flying outward, Frost Shards now rain down on the victim, turning the enchantment from a crowdclear effect into a stacking single-target DoT. Upon death, the target still releases a ring of Frost Shards as normal.
The overall idea here is that Shattering Inscription gives you an earlygame AoE option, something that doesn't improve your DPS against single targets but does make it easier to wipe out crowds. Ideally, you use Shattering Inscription on either a single-target DPS weapon (to use against tanky targets with crowds of nearby enemies) or on a weapon that already specializes in crowd control (to make it melt crowds of small enemies more easily). If you decide that your other enchantments do enough AoE and want to refit Shattering Inscription for single-target damage, you can take Freezing Core, and if you want maximum crowdkill, Blizzard Omen chains the cold death between enemies.
Color-wise, I'd go with blue/black for the effect particles, to separate it visually from Shock.
So, the existing elemental effects are:
All of these can spec into doing area damage with their Mastery upgrades, but there's not really an effect that's dedicated to area damage. So, I'm going to suggest a fifth element!
Shattering Inscription
On-hit: Applies stacks of Frost, softcapped by DPS (like Shock). Enemies with Frost stacks release 8 (scales with level) Frost Shards both once every ~1/2 second and on death; Frost Shards each deal 20% of the total Frost stacks as damage, similar to the Fragmentation Shots effect. Frost Shards should be capable of scaling higher than the equivalent level of Fragmentation Shots with sustained damage on a tanky target. Frost Shards are spawned at 1.5x the victim's radius, travel about as fast as imp fireballs, and disappear after traveling for 1/2 a second.
Fell Wind
Intermediate upgrade for Frost. Frost Shards are fired 1% more frequently per Frost stack remaining on the target.
Blizzard Omen
AoE mastery upgrade for Frost. Enemies struck by Frost Shards receive Frost stacks! Turn a crowd into their own personal icy bullet hell.
Freezing Core
Single-target mastery for Frost. Instead of spawning in a ring around the victim and flying outward, Frost Shards now rain down on the victim, turning the enchantment from a crowdclear effect into a stacking single-target DoT. Upon death, the target still releases a ring of Frost Shards as normal.
The overall idea here is that Shattering Inscription gives you an earlygame AoE option, something that doesn't improve your DPS against single targets but does make it easier to wipe out crowds. Ideally, you use Shattering Inscription on either a single-target DPS weapon (to use against tanky targets with crowds of nearby enemies) or on a weapon that already specializes in crowd control (to make it melt crowds of small enemies more easily). If you decide that your other enchantments do enough AoE and want to refit Shattering Inscription for single-target damage, you can take Freezing Core, and if you want maximum crowdkill, Blizzard Omen chains the cold death between enemies.
Color-wise, I'd go with blue/black for the effect particles, to separate it visually from Shock.