The problem here is the concept that fire hitting one of your characters is intrinsically a bad thing. It's not. Get your resistances high enough, and elemental damage becomes elemental healing. Do this on enough characters, and a big messy high-level spell has less ways to "miss."
yeah, if you only have man-at-arms as melee, take the trait, and stack resist gear then finally you can use your aoe spells. in my opinion that is just broken in multiples ways.
a person should never get so much resists that damage spells actually heal them. at least in my opinion. that is just stupidly overpowered against enemies. there should be a hard cap where you never become immune or better.
then all of this just to make spells functional? archers dont hit their team, even with aoe effects. melee doesnt hit their team, even with aoe effects. just spell casters suffer this annoyance, on top of the other issues.
at the least it should be equal across the board. if an archer can use ricochet and magically direct the arrow around enemies, then spell casters should be able to do so as well.
or go the other way with it and have archers and melee aoe hit the group if in range.
it just seems like they chose spell casters to pick on in this game. your spells hit your team. you gain virtually zero benefit from better weapons or crafting. you have hard caps on intelligence benefits. resists can cripple you against bosses. its just one thing after another.
i am not saying they are broken, because you can most definitely make it work with specific builds, but the treatment is nowhere near equal.
