Losing 25% of possible damage just for 10 or 20% of possible magic armor does not sound like a worthy deal.
You will notice that extra 20% armor a LOT more then you will notice that extra 25% damage. In fact it oddly works to even put no points into an attribute and still use those skills.
PLUS the additional skill types are impressive and good.
Mind you this is because you have sort of two options in the game so far.
1) You can either have more skills then you have AP and cooldown ability.
or
2) You can have less skills but more individual skill damage output.
The funny thing is? #1 outpaces the second by a huge margin. People complain mages suck? They are building them too tall and are trying to get unreasonable damage output from like... 2 spells.
This also encourages cross classing... In fact almost too much.
10% armor is absolutely incomparable to 25% damage for virtually any build. (Unless they changed the armor bonus from 2 to 4%?) 10% more armor is like a third of a hit or a couple ticks of running on burning ground, even with 100 armor. Even 20% armor isn't that much, but it's in the ballpark for a tank maybe. 4% damage bonus and 4% armor bonus per point might make the attributes worth going to just for the armor for certain builds.
As far as mages go, I think as they add more spells, things will balance out -- there's like, 5 non-healing buffs in the game, nevermind the fact that intelligence gives NO BONUS to support spells. Would be awesome if intelligence improved buffs, though this would probably require some systematic change for how buffs work in the game (which is probably needed anyway to make modding in statuses less of a pain.) Say, intelligence boosted the movement speed bonus of Wind of Change by 1% per 1 or 2 points of intelligence (limited to a certain point perhaps.) Healing and even armor recovery spells could get like a 2% boost from intelligence (incomparable to investing in the relevant abilities, but a little bonus anyway.)
Perhaps higher level investment in intelligence could even give brand new effects to spells. At 20 int, maybe Armor of Frost also cures frozen, and for every status cured, it heals the target, or perhaps it offers chill on contact and an water damage bonus.
