Small changes to Illusionist belt, Igniters belt and Belt of the whispered secrets + Arcane belt of shielding

[Heikki Gross]

Now we have many belts to craft, but only a few of them are usable. I hereby suggest small changes to 4 of the belts. It would make them a lot better options and help balancing some aspects of the mage sets.

Illusionist belt - have the blinks put the fire dot on all visible and aggroed monsters when they first appear, instead only to the one targeted. This would make the belt usable for faming builds where keeping aggro on a lot of mobs is problematic. I think that some cool farming builds would emerge from this change.

Igniters belt - Increase the weapon damage % to 1000% instead 500%, it would be a small step towards making fire build closer to frostbeam build

Belt of the whispered secrets + Arcane belt of shielding - join those 2 belts, separately they do not make much sense. Only usable either on SCR or Arcanist while both sets are in desperate need of buffi and everyone whould like to use both of them at the same time, then why not have that option?

For SCR it would really hit 2 flies in one hit, deflect gives it the much needed defensive buff and having lightning struck up more, a damage buff. In addition you should make the lighting struck stack up to 2 stacks, no matter the source. I strongly think that those 2 changes would help to bring SCR on par with ELR. Also it will make the deflect a stat to desire, not just something for wet crafting.

For Arcanist, it would help, but not to make it completely viable, having 2 stacks of lightning struck from belt would be a huge bump since you do get hit a lot while in SOFT, but it would be a start.

PS! We are planning to give a more detailed suggestions regards arcanist. To same extent, nothing what requires deep coding, just a modification of existing stuff.

[CarnivorousDeathParrot.2]

There were several threads and posts on how to improve Arcanist, SCR and even Igniters Belt builds, by several players. Instead, we got the Arena, nerfed drops, no gems from ads and weird nerfs like MagTrap or Paradox. . .

The OP suggestions are great, in particular combining the last two belts (most likely also without the armor penalty).

To stop having such a narrow scope of viable builds I think boosts must be both mutually exclusive and broad.

Mutually exclusive: right now there is a problem where every ice or fire spell is and will be about dealing damage with thermal shock. An exception and application of the idea is Blizzard and SCR. The Frostfire belt adding fire damage (instead of bleed, for example) was a mistake. An idea for a fire build is a mono-fire weapon set, or even just a book/shield; that way we have flexibility again on how to combine spells.

Broad: We don't only have unbalanced classes and unbalanced sets but also unbalanced skills. So, even with only one viable build per class, these builds run around gasping for AR to cast that one spell that does everything (ELR Frostbeam, SCR Blizzard) where everything else is a build up to that and usually sucks by itself. So one thing is that gameplay gets old fast. Second thing is that it's easy to get it wrong and create yet another overpowered build. . . that is bound to become useless when that one skill gets nerfed.

This would have to be the approach in buffing Arcanist; as agreed, one single buff won't fix it. Also, Arcanist failed as a competitive build because it relied exclusively in perma-SoFT status.
I used to suggest a stacking buff on deflect, as deflect is also common in Paradox and Void Crib status.
Now, the Paradox nerf was illogical as no one was using it anyway due to low power. But since we are at it and also since AR has been nerfed, a charges bonus like the Fury set becomes obvious (1+ Paradox, Singularity).
Another parallel bonus would be to make the Illusionist's belt deal Arcane dmg. Another would be an Arcane-specific headgear enchantment (everyone else needs to use Osmosis).

Any of these additional buffs could be added to the set as "gloves" or "headgear" specific bonuses like it was done for Havoc.