My individual suggestions for skills.
Dual wield - remove critical chance, increase damage to 4%.
Single handed, increase accuracy to 3%
two hand - remove critical damage component.
Suggested DW change sounds good.
Single handed also needs to have weapon skill costs correlating to the attack cost of the weapon. E.g. Crippling Blow should cost 1 AP when done with just a 1-hander equipped.
IDK if removing the crit component from 2H is necessary. If we get the other skills in line it can stay. 2H style suffered the most from the Rage nerf, and Crippling blow was nerfed too.
Then have all skills slightly increase effectiveness for the abilities that fall under those skill points. Though I have a hard time imagining exactly what this last step would look like.
I like this idea. It would encourage people to specialize in a smaller number of skills to a high extent instead of learning every ability and then pumping the 1 best passive. It could lead to multi-classing being even weaker though, and less viable build-diversity is less fun.
Outliers, geo should have a greater increase to poison damage.
The big problem with Geomancy is the split between Poison/Earth damage among abilities and the lack of any Poison wands. If Earth damage was included I'd feel good about it. With this change Geomancy would just be scaling the power of all abilities under its domain, which is your suggestion from above. I think passives doing essentially this would be great across all abilities.
How would you feel if all Skill passives were essentially "be X% better at the things these Skills do?" I would like that. In lieu of unique and interesting effects, I'd settle for balanced and diverse playstyles.
Warfare could absorb the critical damage bonus from 2h instead of bonus damage to physical armor.
In the same vein, aerotheurge should increase spell critical chance (huh?)
Oh yeah, spells should just have critical hits and savage sortilege should be removed
Maybe Warfare/Aerothurge could be a smaller boost to all Physical/Magical damage. It could be the 'safe' and 'flexible' choice. If it was just a 3% bonus to physical/magical damage, it wouldn't be 'best', but it wouldn't lock the user into a single weapon or elemental type. It would be consistent.
Perhaps Aerothurge should just increase air damage, copying Pyrokinetics.
Heck, if every skill had a passive buffing all ability types under its domain that would be a good system. We could add an ice/water damage bonus on to Hydro. This kind of system would be a lot easier to balance, and there wouldn't be strictly better options, as the spells players choose would be the important factor in determining what Combat Abilities to put points into.
For example, as-is, if I really like Ice abilities, and I want to do damage, I have a tough time finding skill passives that reward that decision. I'd like players to be able to invest into bonuses that reward playing the way they want to play, with abilities/weapons they want to use.
I like your idea of Warfare doing something different. Anything to make it more broadly appealing. I like that the crit bonus idea could create a scenario of spending some points in Warfare, and some in a Weapon Skill too. The numbers would have to be right though. Other ideas could be adding some amounts of other general combat bonuses such as initiative, movement, crit damage, increased weapon reach, or chance to knockdown. Just brainstorming here.
With the nerf to Rage, Savage Sortilege is getting really hard to get value out of. Spending the talent, for only half crit chance, and crits only do 50% more damage, it's just a bum deal these days. If not using Rage, you wouldn't want to get the talent early, cause you'd have no Crit, and you wouldn't want to get it late, cause you hadn't been stacking crit. There's never a point where picking up the talent is a good decision.
I'm not a fan of spending a talent just to unlock what should be a core feature. Savage Sortilege and Backstab are both glaring culprits of this.
I guess the downside though is that between Scoundrel and Dual-Wielding, the critical damage modifier will stack up a lot more. Perhaps too much more?
I wouldn't think this would be a problem. Each point players are only getting DW or Scoundrel, not both.
Players would get critical damage either way, and would then just be deciding between %movement or more damage.
This would make DW strong for Dagger users, so long as the Backstab was being achieved, which is more effort getting more reward, and I think that's okay.
@ivodeb
Nice research. That's the best synergy we could hope for on those 2 passives. It sounds like adding a point of Necro to a character with a lot of Hydro gives a big return on self-healing for a low investment.
