Job Trait Elements

[kargath]

Hi, I'm just wondering why job traits have little colored icons next to them indicating an elemental affinity.

I was farming tigers last night for fangs and my eyes were falling out of my skull with boredom, so I started smashing all the menu buttons while I was resting...and noticed that all my thf ABILITIES were green (wind) .. flee, hide, steal, etc...ok makes sense...wind = zippiness fine.

...but my latent abilities (job traits) were kinda odd...treasure hunter/gilfinder were light, eva bonus was wind (makes sense I suppose) and then I started wondering...but I'll stop right there knowing how poorly speculation is received on these forums, so ..

can anyone just simply point me to an article explaining why treasure hunter is a light based job trait, and/or, more importanly, why there are elemental affinities attached to latent abilities in the first place, since you can't "interact" with them? This is kinda esoteric, and info of this type of question can be hard to find.

Thanks

[Bagel]

White doesn't necessarily mean light based, it can also be no element.

[Ganzar]

colors look pretty

[Loren]

For the same reason Provoke is ice?

If there's any effect whatsoever, it's slight enough to have gone unnoticed for 4+ years so I wouldn't sweat it.

Honestly I think the devs are far less interested in elemental affinities than the players are considering how seldom they matter outside avatars and sky gods.
e.g. Dia is "continuous light damage" but the amount is fixed on every mob in the game
e.g. Thunder kills an air elemental faster than Blizzard
e.g. Elemental resist on gear has zero effect in 90% of cases

[Suiram]

I think the SE devs have a sense of humor, and they gave JAs elemental affiliations in order to spawn posts like this one in the AV thread for our collective amusement.

[kargath]

For the same reason Provoke is ice?

If there's any effect whatsoever, it's slight enough to have gone unnoticed for 4+ years so I wouldn't sweat it.

Honestly I think the devs are far less interested in elemental affinities than the players are considering how seldom they matter outside avatars and sky gods.
e.g. Dia is "continuous light damage" but the amount is fixed on every mob in the game
e.g. Thunder kills an air elemental faster than Blizzard
e.g. Elemental resist on gear has zero effect in 90% of cases

I can buy a lot of this...even the sense of humor...what I can't buy is that SE is in the business to make money. Paying developers top coin to code in supurfluous features doesn't make money, bloats the code and can introduce unnecessary bugs, and increases development time.

I simply can't see a corp subscribing to these practices - no matter HOW sick and twisted they are...

Dia may be locked in it's damage no matter what, but maybe it's duration/success is affected somehow by it being light based? But Dia's still a "thing you can do", whereas, job traits are just there...with an element attached to it. Same with provoke.

Speaking of which, If provoke is ice, then it makes no sense whatsoever, and if it makes no sense, what businessman is gonna pay devs to put it there? If anything, provoke should be light...

[Loren]

Paying developers top coin to code in supurfluous features doesn't make money, bloats the code and can introduce unnecessary bugs, and increases development time

That's an American way of thinking. :]

Remember SE is the company that brought us fish ranking, expeditionary force, Demon's harness, the frozen Bearclaw Pinnacle waterfall, Lightning armor, the 15k Assault point weapons, and heaps of other quasi-failed content.

I remember hearing somewhere that the dev torch has been passed from one team to the next on each expansion so maybe the original release people had some plans for trait effects that never got realized?

[HadesBothari]

I can buy a lot of this...even the sense of humor...what I can't buy is that SE is in the business to make money. Paying developers top coin to code in supurfluous features doesn't make money, bloats the code and can introduce unnecessary bugs, and increases development time.

Every Job ability/Spell is coded using a template/class/w/e which includes an element? and the programmer was allowed to decide what it was when it didn't make a difference (but only as an incentive for a job well done ..mind)?

maybe

[Callisto]

I used to work for S-E, they used something along these lines to decide which trait got which element.

http://theaward.org/images/involved/game%20simon.jpg