Abilities should have tags that describe their scaling properties and behavior + Feedback about LoS abilities and using this tag system to help

[jesse.goertzen2]

Reference/Inspiration: Last Epoch Abilities

Having tags that describe how the ability functions helps make clear expectations for abilities and how they should behave. One such example of a tag could be if the ability's AoE respects line of sight or not. I think there are many abilities in this game that it is necessary that they go through walls, but others feel unfun and unfair. It seems like some abilities are being changed to respect or not respect line of sight, and it could get confusing keeping track of which abilities do and don't respect line of sight. Having these tags to tell you if an abilities does or not would be clear and let Valve balance freely without worrying about keeping consistency rules for how abilities should behave -- they always follow the tags present.

Other tags could be spirit damage or bullet damage, for example, Paradox's carbine. its kind of confusing if it scales with spirit or bullet damage, and this system could clear it up.

Same with items, do they scale with aoe or cooldown reduction?

 

[LazyTitan]

To some degree, they do. Anything with a purple star scales with Spirit plus https://deadlocked.wiki/ gives a lot of detail. Also, hovering over an item in the shop will tell you all things it will affect from abilities to items. But yeah... stuff does need to be clearer without needing to look it up and tags would be way helpful especially for items since certain items increase range, cooldown, etc. without it being obvious in their name like Mystic Reverb increasing your ability range.
Also, Paradox's carbine is a percentage of her weapon's damage but it's spirit damage. Even then I had to double and triple check because it was unclear.

 

[Dashiell]

Open game > Heroes > hover over skill and press alt to see scalings. Anything that is purple is spirit damage, there's pretty much no weapon scaling abilities.

When you're buying items they literally list everything they will affect and items themselves will have small green arrow next to affected stat.

Generally speaking spirit items that modify abilities will also modify duration/cds/range of items and especially active items.

For anything else open sandbox and quickly test by buying items.

Abilities respecting LoS is a clusterfuck currently and changes monthly so