[Perdition]

So, a previous balance update made silence much more scarce, or relegated to many auto silences to being inflict checks. This has made mages the de facto strongest builds in the game. The reason for the change is understandable--when silence is easy to access, playing a mage feels miserable. But that's the nature of silence in its current iteration.

I suggest changing silence to have a LV associated with it. That LV % would be the chance you have to cast a spell successfully while under the silence, similar to how hesitation works for basic attacks and basic attack skills. This way, you can add auto silences back, but simply give them lower LVs to compensate. Mages get more counterplay but don't get outright suppressed by the status. Harder to land silences are rewarded more, etc.

[Autumn]

Hesitation does not apply to skills in this way so I don't consider it a fair comparison at the current moment, I don't think any % chance to completely deny an action is a healthy form of balance and I'd rather see problem spells with 140%+ elemental scaling be lowered in compensation for actually retooling silence to deny invocations for the most part, instead of denying an entire mage's kit. That or making silence immunity an innate deal similar to knockdown immunity/immobilize immunity.

I know that many people are currently frustrated with mages, but delegating them back to where they would have been before is not the way to go and will not be fun for said mages, and instead its either limiting them as a mage role through the use of armor class defensive changes or by nerfing their damage a little bit, and I for one like the former idea more.

We are currently very used to the idea of absolutely outward cases of mages where they're hardly even mage dedicated, when's the last time you've seen a hard evoker not having a close match cause of their setup? Instead they rely heavily on defensive structure or high mobility to make themselves work and not die to the nearest duelist.

I believe buffing basic attackers also has an impact on the mage meta quite a bit, as they've always functionally been effective into mages, while autohitter tanks kinda just get out damaged. Like a triangle these three archetypes all had advantages against eachother.

[Perdition]

As someone that for the most part mains a mage, I also want them to feel less frustrating to play against because it makes it easier to play them without dealing with (justified) complaining. Your idea of silence immunity sounds interesting, maybe if it lasted 2 rounds rather than the current 1 round for KD immunity since silencing every other round is still more than enough to put a mage out of commission imo.

At first I was against silence targeting invocations specifically, but the more I think about it the more the idea grows on me. It should probably shut down custom tome spells too as another means of balancing those perhaps. The only reason for the idea in my OP is, while an RNG chance of your spell fizzling might feel kind of cheesy, I think it's a better alternative than being locked out completely, and there's current precedence set for it in the form of hesitation, even if that only applies to basic attacks. But then again, hesitation itself could probably use a rework into some other functionality so maybe I was wrong to draw inspiration from there.

Lastly on the topic of basic attackers, they do tend to deal with mages handily yeah. I find with that match up as a mage there's too much pressure from the basic attacker's damage and usual momentum efficiency that it's hard to really get rolling with your mage shenanigans. But buffs for basic attackers are another topic entirely, even if needed.