[Slydria]

So I think we should talk about how the scaling on Youkai Skills are generally too strong.

This is especially the case with certain skills that scale on Defensive Stats with potent effects. Hunter Wind, Parraeta, Drown, Ruby Beam and Black Rose come to mind.

Honestly, I don't think these skills are a problem when the Youkai themselves use it but when players do it, it becomes overbearing due to players being able to heavily focus in Elemental ATK.

[MegaBlues]

It's 340% Elemental Attack at Youkai level 60.

It might be a good idea to give each Youkai skill its own scaling, rather than making it global. Otherwise, you would have to make different stats give different amounts of elemental attack, nerf it overall, or rework the entirety of Elemental Attack (Which I would prefer, but I know it won't happen).

[Kameron8]

I agree. Making something exclusively scale off of elemental attack and not weapons leads to, as we've seen many times before, full tank builds with obscene damage. The Youkai are restricted by their preset stat spreads, 6 momentum, and inability to skip, but when players use the spells their Youkai have, they need a different formula.

This speaks for itself.

[Reikou]

While I'm extremely biased against lowering their damage output, as that would throw my jack-of-all-trades character's effectiveness down the drain, I do think its a bad idea to let any of their skills scale purely on defensive elements, such as water or earth, and would like to see these changed a bit to something less Tank-Friendly, such as half elemental ATK + Half insert-scaled-stat-here instead of 100% Elemental ATK.

[Neus]

Thing is, even with 340% scaling, the damage is comparable (at best) to most offensive skills when you take SWA into account. It also makes them more limited, because maximizing your weapon of choice's SWA is easy, and it'll be equally effective for all weapon skills of that class, depending on the scaling, but for youkai skills, you need a larger variety of stats/equipment. Not to mention the amount of time required to level up the youkai; you can argue that, where balance is concerned, effort isn't a very relevant variable, but I think it has some value to consider.

[Rendar]

Being able to deal 150+ damage, and heal for 150+ damage is insane.

No amount of 'balance' should be included in that.

[Neus]

If you're not going to put any effort into your argument then I don't know why you'd bother to post. It isn't constructive.

[Autumn]

Ok well, the most ice attack achieved by one of my characters is 135 by a Papilion with a shit ton of SKI and double arctic spine leash, a ice jet by that would hit for 459, I can double tap that for 918 ice magic damage per turn, that's not fair.

The mechanation girl in that gif that Kameron8 posted had 90 water attack and parratea spammed someone to death, because she was able to deal more damage than he can deal and HEAL for more damage that he could heal.

[Kameron8]

Just to do a brief comparison, an elemental attack heavy build that uses fire attacks and a very, very strong scaling weapon with the two-handed talent (spelledge sword) gets the following stats:

Fire attack: 115
Scaled Weapon Attack: 165

The best fire spell accessible to mages that isn't an invocation is Explosion, with 100% SWA and 140% Elemental attack. This is noticeably higher than most other mage spells, which usually max out at 100% SWA and 120% Elemental attack. With these numbers in mind, you get the following damage:

Explosion: 326 + Tome Power damage.
Fire Jet: 391 damage.

You're correct that maxing out elemental attack takes some odd build tweaking, but at the same time, some of these elements are strictly defensive. While it might be a fair fight to go up against someone crushing your existence with ice and fire spells in the Summoner tree, it's a whole lot more hopeless when the insane damage is coming from stats that boost your defense, resistance, or vitality. Some of these summoner spells, like the aforementioned ice ones in conjunction with two spine leashes, Hunter Wind, which scales itself by 1.3x once you hit it once, get very out of hand very quickly. And those are only the offensive outliers -- Parraeta, Ruby Beam, and Black Rose generally boast an enormous resilience alongside their 300+ damage.

Also, to avoid seeming like I skipped over your point, I simply don't think effort should be taken into consideration too much with things like this. It's the same reason we don't have boss ten star items being blatantly more overpowered than any of the others by design -- SL1 was very effort-driven and walled behind grinding, and it was a huge issue for a lot of people.

[Neus]

I think effort should account for something, but regardless of if you agree or disagree with me on that, this topic is currently just a lot of bellyaching. No one's put forth any suggestions at specific adjustments (with reasoning) and the discussion really isn't going to go anywhere until that's so.