I don't know if this was the intended design or not, but Inscriptions are currently a huge part of character power. The description I like to use is that each inscription slot is closer to a prodigy than it is a talent. In particular they often make up the core defenses of a build, especially in the area of expanding HP pool (Heroism, Shield) and debuff removal.
These changes attempt to modernize the inscription system. Specific goals include:
Adjust the overall power level of inscriptions to be closer to infusions, most notably runes
Increase the overall ability of inscriptions to deal with mass debuff spam, especially physical, to keep up with randbosses and weapon "minor debuff" procs
Keep the inscription pool fairly specialized with each having a primary niche it fills even if it has other effects tacked on
Encourage more decision making in what inscriptions to use by having drop quality matter more. Ie, I always prefer Healing to Shield/Regen, but a really big Regen can change my mind. More of this.
Stop gimping NPCs by giving them things like Sun Infusion that just make them mess with each other
Many inscription types have been removed, merged, or redesigned off the same base concept with a new name. They are often the ones that are "minor utility" effects. Inscription slots are far too powerful to waste on minor utility, they need to stay in the realm of strong combat options to be meaningful choices. Charms are a better area to put those effects. The removed inscriptions are Sun, Telepathy, Frozen Spear, Heat Beam, Vision, Phase Door, Controlled Phase Door, Lightning.
I'm adding new inscriptions as I finish them, many of which are sketchy concepts that probably won't be worth keeping. Listed roughly in order of how much merit I think they have:
Rune of Shatter Afflictions: Retheme of the previous Taint of Consume Affliction, still the counter to multitype debuff spam. Currently cleanses 1 debuff of each type and generates a small shield for each one removed. Concept still needs some work, but I do want a 3 type cleanse of some form in rune.
Mirror Image: Creates copies that inherit snapshotted life, resist, defense, armor, and armor hardiness. Each image is spawned adjacent to a different enemy and taunts on summon and each turn for the duration.
Ethereal Rune: This is just Invisibility updated to have resist all and a small amount of movement speed. Offensive damage reduction is kept. Wall walking was interesting but as roughly 75,000 people pointed out is a balance nightmare, and it can't be given to NPCs because it would be very annoying.
Blink Rune: Phase Door and Controlled Phase Door merged and their base level dropped to be available early. Controlled Phase Door currently is acting like its something special with its high MT requirement when its actually just worse than Movement. Unlike CPD this can't go through walls but it does have shorter CD than the other mobility inscriptions. Out of phase buff from normal Phase Door is kept.
Taint of Purging: When activated and each turn cleanses 1 physical debuff and increases its duration by 1 each time this occurs. This is the specialized anti-physical debuff spam solution, as long as it keeps hitting a phys debuff its cooldown won't decrease allowing you to keep poison/bleed/slows/etcetc in check. The downside is that the cooldown on this is very high so it won't be up fast if you aren't consistently getting debuffed, it isn't instant, and it has no tacked on bonus effect like Wild's resist all or Healing's heal.
This will likely replace Telepathy as the Alchemist Quest reward because it doesn't play very nice with stat scaling (and so doesn't fit well on drop tables) and because its mostly aimed at late game problems.
Rune of Stormshield: Updated Rune of Lightning. This rune has a fixed 3 turn duration and blocks all instances of damage over its rolled threshold up to its maximum number of blocks. The threshold value can vary quite a bit. The idea here is that this is an alternative to Shield for straight damage mitigation but more situational. It can scale incredibly well against huge hits, but fail to do anything at all if you take too many multihits total or just take hits that are under its threshold. Maybe too messy for an inscription design, I dunno.
Rune of Dissipation: Removes all magical effects/sustains on the target or all magical debuffs on you, replacing Gloves of Dispersal as the guaranteed magic counter which is currently considered a necessary tool to have. Having to use an Inscription slot instead of a simple ego is a big cost and the effect niche, so the numbers are quite aggressive. This is a quest reward for finishing Urkis via Angolwen.
Prismatic Shield Rune: Picks 3-6 random damage types from all possible damage types then resolves a number of wards for each one. Activating the rune gives you the entire set of wards at once. This is dropped as a basic inscription design and will probably be a fixedart drop.
(Existing inscription changes/considerations)
Biting Gale/Acid Wave Runes: The cleanses on these are a hack from when runes desperately needed help. It makes the design bloated and takes away from what should be the focus: Dealing some damage and defending yourself via debuffs. The cleanses have been removed, save checks on the debuffs removed, and numbers revamped mostly in favorable ways. Notably, Biting Gale now has a duration of 5.
Wild: Now cleanses 2 types at once, but only at fairly high item level (earliest shops can't have it at all). To compensate for this, the duration of the resist all debuff is now 2-4. Old values ranged from 3-8 and were tied to item level. Resist all value has been refactored to weight stats more heavily and random value less.
It isn't talked about much, but the damage reduction on high level Wild infusions is enormous, in the 30-40% range. With the duration scaling up to 5-6 pretty easily Wild starts to become a damage reduction tool more and more as the game progresses, without much tactical tension in when to use it like that. We have other inscription types for that. These changes reinforce Wild's role as a cleanse mechanic even late game while keeping the high resist all values so you can still use it as a damage reduction tool but not with insane uptime.
Primal Infusion: Redesigned. This still gives affinity all but instead of cleansing on activation it reduces a random debuff duration by 1-3 each turn based on willpower.
Teleport: This is hard to balance. Its generally accepted that the randomness of this makes it always suboptimal, but the effect is pretty powerful. Simply leaving is suboptimal is one option. Other possibilities are making the cooldown generous, or allowing you to reactivate it within a turn to return to the position you teleported from. Would love to hear if anyone has other ideas.
Movement: No longer keeps the immunities when the movement speed is broken. If post nerf stun is still a problem it should be fixed a better way than leaving this as a crutch to immune it.
Heroism: For experienced players a huge portion of effective HP comes from this, which is really silly. Additionally since many sustains don't recalculate their stat values very often this is abused to "snapshot" stats. For now, I'm just removing the bonus stats to reduce the overall power. Once the sources of healmod are toned down in other changes the downside this has (no sustain, just anti-burst) should be more significant.
