Usually I'm a bit shy suggesting skills and talents, since I find it so difficult to balance these things on paper without knowing so many other factors like enemy AI, health, armor, etc, but here are a few things I've been thinking:
There should be a Purist talent for each school. The requirement is that you can only have points into ONE school. As it stands, hybrid builds (especially with all this memory) are extremely easy to pull off and seem to have no drawbacks. Maybe that's okay, I'm actually a huge fan of this kind of flexibility, but I also think it would be really interesting to give people some real incentive to become a Purist.
What do you guys think of this and what should the talent actually DO? How punitive is drawback of being restricted to one school and what is the best way to balance this? I'm thinking there should be a Purist flavor for each class, but for programming purposes, it might be easier to have one Purist talent that applies buffs to the attributes the school already modifies. For example, at lvl 5 Hydro, Putting a talent point into Purist gives 15% more healing and 15% more magic armor. Something like that.
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The second idea has to do with Pain Reflection. I really like the idea of also reflecting CC (which of course would only be effective if the enemy has 0 armor of whatever type). Maybe at lvl 5 Pain Reflection you could have the option of becoming an Elemental Mirror (better names are welcome).
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Along these lines, I think it would be interesting to have some skills or talents that change incoming physical damage to magic or vice versa. Maybe something like:
Internal Balance: 50% of physical damage received is converted to magic damage and 50% of magic damage received is converted to physical damage.
or maybe something more interesting...I'd love to hear more ideas.
Internal Balance is interesting, potentially very good on a tank. CC reflection sounds way too good, more like a skill, but perhaps has some limitation (not sure if just making it a 20-25% chance to proc would make it acceptable as a talent).
I like the concept of purist, though maybe it should only affect mages, which are almost required to take multiple trees. Warfare/Rogue/Rangers on the other hand are very self-sufficient and it's not all that much of a sacrifice to stay pure with them. I think these should be powerful, unique effects that expand your gameplay rather than being some number increase, since you're limiting your options a great deal.
Purist Ideas:
Pyro Purist: X% chance your applications of burning will pierce magic armor. Each enemy you have burning boosts your run speed by 5%, granting +1 AP if 5+ enemies are burning. (A bit much for a talent, prolly, but is fun)
Hydro: The more you heal and boost magic armor, the more water damage you deal (up to 30-40% increase maybe)
Geomancer: Earth damage leeches some physical armor and gives it to you, and poison leeches some magical armor
Aerothurge: Immunity to stun and electrified surfaces heal your magic armor and you get a 25-35% run speed boost while on these surfaces
Polymorph: Each transformation lasts 1 extra turn (Stabbey I think suggested this earlier, but its more reasonable in the context of a pure polymorpher)
