what "features that worked before" are you referring to? before what?
Elemental damage on weapons, it was fine in D:OS1, here it doesn't work that well, since the system pigeonholes certain damage dealers to always attack certain enemies and you'll never really make use of that effect, because the enemies just absorb all of that bonus damage. I guess you could say it's useful for helping your mages killing low magic armor enemies once your low physical armor enemies are dead, but really, since that damage also scales with intelligence, the damage is so pitiful it doesn't even matter even if their magic armor is already down.
At least in D:OS1 it was always helpful in some way and it could also be useful against enemies with high physical resist.
elemental damage on weapons works better in other RPGs with different combat systems. in this game, it's less effective because of how armor works, so it'd probably be better to change how runes affect weapons, if something actually needed to be changed.
the subject of traps, i think they just haven't been appropriately tweaked; give them more effects, make them do more damage
Honestly, I'd rather fix the source of the problem instead of fixing all the other things it broke, and it's not only elemental damage on weapons, see my first post.
I don't even think the whole system needs to be scrapped, just changed and better balanced. For example you could make it so that some damage always bypasses the armor, maybe based on the percentage of how much you still have left. Another thing you could do is make soft status effects like shocked or burning to always bypass the armor.
that being said, i don't know where you got anything about elemental damage in my post, since those can at least mesh (using a 2 handed weapon that does air damage can interact with a wet target, for example). i was talking about stats on weapons, like +1 scoundrel on a piece of intelligence armor, which will almost never be of any use other than for niche hybrid builds
I see. I picked elemental damage since the quote you replied to included it along with two others, and I thought you talked about all of them.