Thank you a lot for your detailed answer! I'm glad that you actually like the idea and that there's a good chance it'll make it into the mod. And I like that you give us some % based physical defence combined with the earth defence. It makes sense and should make battles against specific enemy types far more interesting. (full mage or full weapon parties won't have much of a chance against specific enemy types - like it should be) It's sad that the different weapon damage types won't make a return but I think at least having the option to get reduced weapon damage is better than what we have right now. I guess you will include an upper limit for those resistances though? Especially physical resistance would be bad to be able to go past 100%. In my opinion even more than 90% is already too much for the player races. I think investing into pyro/hydro/etc. could increase the resistance maximum, too? Not increase the resistance itself - but give you the option to go higher than say 70%. Basically everything could have a 70% (or any other specific number) resistance cap and to get higher than that you need to be trained in that element school. That way getting to 100% resistance needs actual investment and still requires a lot of good gear to get. (you know how to become a fireproof being, but you still need the magic armors and weapons to reach that resistance) Ofc the earth/physical limit still needs to be at maybe 80% max no matter how high you go as it would break the game being able to nullify or get healed by normal attacks.
Btw, I really like that you will incorporate things like faster movement speed and maybe even upscaling enemies into your mod.
Pet Pal being a druid thing sounds fine to me tbh. It is not as much of a must have as it used to be in DOS1 anyways.
Aside from those things there are some other mods which I currently use which I wouldn't want to miss out on after using your mod when it comes out are. (I modified some of them slightly but you would have to tweak them to fit to your mod balance anyways) Maybe you would like to implement them in one way or another as all those are ease of life changes and no gamechangers like some of the other mods I use which I won't write down here as there are a) too many to count and b) most of them won't be needed if your mod turns out as good as it sounds right now!:
1. Let there be tooltips - This mod displays tooltips for interactive objects that don’t otherwise get them, even when highlighted. Let's put it this way: "Is that extremely barrel-looking, feeling and tasting object really a barrel? Now you know that it actually is!"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11613621512. Autoidentify - If you have loremaster 5 or higher all items added to your inventory are automatically identified without having to do it manually.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1179519817&searchtext=3. Reduced number bloat - that one looks like it is going to be added into your mod already. Far less damage/hp increase per level, including less money drop and cost increase per level. To balance it out the heal potions (and poison potions for zombies!) need to get % based heal/poison instead of flat heal/poison though. And seriously: who wants numbers in the thousands anyways? Just makes it more complicated to calculate instead of acutally harder.
I really like that you think alike in this regard.
4. toggle + long range spirit vision - makes spirit vision much easier to use to talk to ghosts etc. with the range being highly increased and the ability being a toggle
Will there be saving throws against CC btw? Or will it be a simple calculation to work with? I like some randomness in chance of CC and weapon swings missing even if you reach the needed thresholds. Never having a 100% chance for an effect to happen is great as it gives those crazy moments where either you or the enemy gets that 5% chance to not be affected by something even though all other criteria meet the requirements.
All those are minor things and nothing too crazy and might be nice to have already in the mod when you release it instead of people having to do compatible versions. It's great to see that a great modder actually has the same vision for the game as us. It gives us hope that you can fix the deep rooting issues with the combat part of the game and give thousands of players the experience they should have gotton in the first place.
