I mean in terms of defense, Witchmail is weaker than Spirit Resilience.
Witchmail's main strength is CDR, or did you mean Spellbreaker?
There's already Plated Armour and Juggernaut for weapon damage or Spellbreaker and Witchmail for spirit damage.
How is bullet damage reduction different from bullet resist other than proposed different form of scaling (percentage vs flat amount)?
The idea caught my eye, but I just can't wrap my head around it.
An item that increases weapon damage, but reduces fire rate would be cool.
I was thinking about something similar, because I don't like that I run out of Ammo on Mirage before I can apply my 5th Djinn's Mark on a target.
Frankly, when I started playing I thought that old Weighted Shots (which I call Elephant Rounds btw XD) would reduce Fire Rate until I found out bullet velocity is something else entirely haha
On the other hand if you bought such an item and enemies also bought some form of Fire Rate reduction and/or Plated Armour, it would suck to play with it, but I guess you could just sell it then.
Hey, I get the confusion because I was a bit torn whether I should call it a spellbreaker or witchmail equivalent myself, but the logic here is that while spellbreaker is the one that reduces damage taken by a lot (metal skin), witchmail is the one that while giving less resistance, really punishes lots of light spirit poke which was more my goal here.
The problem I have with plated armor etc rn is that armor piercing bullets exist without a real counterpart for spirit res, and as a sinclair main, spellbreaker singlehandedly will just ruin my day.
The reason I didn't simply suggest an item called 'Hex-Piercer' is because, imo, it'd be lame to have the same item for the damage types. Instead I'd prefer something to punish high fire rate like Witchmail punishes constant tick damage from spirit.
An upgrade from Return fire was my first idea where it would actually just act like you got hit with 0% resistance and fire back 65% of that damage (subject to the shooter's own bullet res ofc) while maybe disarming you as a tradeoff, but I wasn't too confident in that idea since I could already hear the haze mains crying about not being allowed to W+M1.
So instead of that I thought I'd settle for something that forces people to hit you harder instead of more often, just like witchmail.
For the fire rate issue, there's still nothing stopping you from slotting fire rate in the other 11 slots to compensate, in the end it comes out to about the same in my head, just more damage and either less greens or 1 less fire rate upgrade for a huge spike of damage.
Quickly addressing the other points here:
- Counter to juggernaut is more fire rate as you know, just making the issue worse.
- Plated armor is a nice damage reduction to high fire rate, but is quite a gamble at times and mostly is there to counter on-hits instead (not saying it's bad, I love it).
- Not mentioned much yet but worth noting, armor piercing rounds is an extremely strong item to counter current bullet res builds with and will continue to be even with this item (assuming we count this as bullet res)
- The difference with bullet res is indeed just that, the way in which it calculates the reduction, it's meant to counter things like wraith, haze and billy more than plated armor while leaving people like silver, vindicta and future slower firing characters less while still being something that the more affected characters can counter-counter-buy by grabbing the proposed sister-item.
