Make different elements prefer different DPS stats

Disclaimer: this is probably too much overhaul to do now, but it would have been cool if the game was designed this way from the start.

In Diablo 2, the Sorceress's 3 trees all dealt damage in different ways. Fire was the straightforward damage, Cold revolved around lowering enemy resists, and Lightning was high variance (i.e. a Fireball would do ~20k-22k while a Lightning attack would have a damage range from 1-40k). I thought it would be interesting if a similar concept was brought to D3 where different elements had a different way of effectively dealing their damage.

• Fire could still be the straightforward all-around damage.
• Lightning spells could have lower base damage but minimal resource costs and no cooldowns so that they favor stacking attack speed, giving Lightning builds the feel of being very fast paced.
• Arcane could have much higher base damage but have higher resource requirements, so that they favor stacking resource cost reduction. This would give it the feeling that using Arcane spells is just like slinging around raw, huge, inefficient power until you get enough RCR.
• Cold could be based around critical damage, maybe something like increased crit chance or damage to frozen targets like how Shatter works in WoW (incidentally, changing Rimeheart to a similar mechanic might help balance that).
• I've only played Wizard and WD so I'm not too sure about Holy/Phys/Poison ideas, but it seems Crusaders already like CDR a lot so maybe Holy could be built around hard hitting, high cooldown spells.

Posted in: discussion, thoughts