Sorc ideas:
Sio's Mana shield buff idea. Takes testing to figure out what a reasonable cost and mitigation total is. Remove/change Arcane Fury and rework so that Mana only gets access to it for at least the damage benefit (or maybe keep it as is at the cost of locking out other main trees.) And change Arcane Sustenance to an always on passive that locks you to melee. Mana cost to .25 per damage prevented at max investment and .125 for melee. 60% max shield strength? Would make sustaining shield for casters at 60% tough but doable with serious investment in mana regen and max mana/energy. Cold with Bane of the Horadrim feels tough at low levels (but you tend to have mana issues at that level range anyway/before all charms) and my more geared but missing UMOs lightning sorc worries a lot about mana in labs with the current shield (25 % damage reduction and .6 mana per damage ie the flipside of the max strength shield above.) Will take testing and lots of people with access to good gear to figure out if this is too much or not. The non-meleesorc builds are so rippy at the moment. They need the help and making Mana shield more of a mechanic to build around would set the class apart further from others.
Lightning
Thunderstone heal change (see my last post). Base the heal on max mana. Elemental full energy build like Fire.
Covens
The first tier is all mostly fine. Some of the numbers on them are just strictly worse than other classes versions of the same things (exs, druid gets 100 life per point vs living flame's 40something, classes with hard point avoid get 1 per point vs .5 from Warp Armor). Besides Snow Queen they all have a pretty solid benefit for 1 point or oskill from Vaetia's Wall. The Coven abilities that need work are the second tier. Fire Dance is solid and the others range quite a bit.
Hive is just bad. Bad at spreading poison in trivial farming zones when it's your main damage type. Bad damage that gets overwritten by your real poison skills. Damage is negligible if you aren't poison with the necessary pierce. Give this skill a purpose or change it for something else (leaving the few items with it intact for the memes and memories). A buff that's useful for all specs and something to make it especially attractive to poison. If Hive can be coded to help you passively spread haunt that would be worth considering (would need to be locked to hard point investment or remove the o skill sources of it.) But just doing something different with this spot on the tree that makes picking the coven more appealing would be nice. If we want to keep the ability in Sorc identity, It needs to do more poison DPS than Lorenado to have any impact on that front. (Vengeful Power is fine - the crush attacker is rather obsolete/not worth hardpoints but the phys res is a staple option)
NC Need to remove Dex->Energy? Remove hard point range "buff" or rework targeting. Current targeting makes investing in it really poor for damage on lone targets. Novas happen ever secondish, pick a spawn position and then do not fire if nothing is in range. Increasing the radius makes not firing more likely. You can get some damage out of it in really dense areas with a bigger radius or by keeping it at 1 point and getting in mobs faces. I think the targeting behavior should change to picking a mob and dropping a bolt that turns into a nova of the same size. Should lower the damage a bit. It does good damage when it shotguns and current behavior means it shotguns something you want it to once in a blue moon. Would probably be too good if it always direct hit lone targets like bosses.
Living Flame fine even if life per point is kinda low. Dance also fine. Good offense buff
Snow Queen could use some flat physical damage reduction instead of defense. Make it the free value from 1 point/Vaetia's wall. Scaling should be similar to blessed life (designed in concert with cold and mana shield changes) with a hard point synergy. Ice Elems are great early on all specs that don't click devotion and a pain (to not reliable enough) to manage for the buff late. Would be nice for cold if you could get the aura without the summon someway. Switch the Minion damage to CSD to elemental spell damage so it has more late game appeal to non cold.
Trees
Poison
Blight is a joke. 40 MS and 50 PSD at 2k energy is not interesting or even that good. Change MS to %life per second based on Energy and change spell damage to poison skill duration based on Vit (figure out appropriate numbers) and rework Elucidation so that its bonus lorenados increase max projectiles and skill duration improves Arachnomancy damage at multiplier that makes Shael in armor less damage than good jewels but Shaen more damage. Ideally this synergizes with the last buff with arachno duration based on energy over 1500. Because of how poison works, Arachno needs to be much higher dps in its current form. There are interesting strengths to having a big dps long (for an ARPG) duration poison on a boss (almost full focus on dodging/kiting). Shotgunning current Lorenado results in about its dps in frame 1 damage per cast, but the max dps "rotation" is just too inferior to Fire/lightning. Just comparing half geared fresh 105 fire and lightning to almost full TUs 105 poison. No MOs on anyone. Less spell damage and SF Thunderstone is about 100K dps with a 5 frame staff. Flamestrike is about 120k. Shotgun Flamefront is 70k. Poison is 20k Arachno and 20k melee range shotgunning Lorenado... That was the first sorc I leveled that struggled with the Butcher and Infernal Machine... The tree needs a big single target damage buff. Lorenado feels okayish for clearing (mostly keeps up with posioning a pack and then running gameplay). Bosses are a long slog from Hell onward. Arachno on its own should be at least half the dps of fire and lightning premier single target nukes. Then balance the other frame 1 poison damage spam ability so it makes up about the other half while putting yourself at risk.
Cold
-Old identity crisis. Are we clicking Melee Devo or not (Churel? Haunt? Ice Elems). Are we some sort of melee summoner hybrid? All the Ice Elem items and the TU Lamellar/other items built off the aura to give you marginally more damage than other options (8 minion damage targeted mod on crafted jewels and some free bits on charms/alternative key are the only reliable and significant sources that aren't just worse than what you'd be using instead). Set with a bunch of minion life and Dex stats and pathetic +skills, spell damage, SF, Energy etc compared to poison, lightning, and fire. I think we should just pick the melee caster approach. Redo the set and give the Ice Elem aura to the tree somehow as long as you have a hard point in the coven skill. Also make Churel castable under melee devotion.
-Needs help mid-lategame with survivability but may be fixed with Mana Shield changes because of how melee devo (assumed) and energy shield work with flat damage reduction. It'd be nice to remove the cap on Crystalline Barrier (and possibly adjust the formula because of the increasing returns.) This will take math and some review of the content to figure out what reasonable numbers are at different gear levels and settled mana shield maximum strength I'd suggest a higher cap that's closer to expected endgame spell damage totals with the numbers balanced so that you're significantly tougher than other specs while mana shield holds but can't just face tank the big endgame multiple damage instance "don't stay in the fire mechanics." Might need some adjusting on the ones that are all physical with lower numbers because assumed 50% vs 90% mitigation after flat damage reduction. I don't know what what the numbers on those abilities are but I think getting like 50-60% effective damage reduction (with some gear help) against those abilities would not break things. Just need to keep in mind the other potential sources of stacking flat damage reduction available (mostly angelics and suggested snow queen change). If it takes 600 flat damage reduction to get to those numbers there shouldn't be much to worry about with random extra sources.
-Double AR bonus on capstone. There are some decent options for a bit of LOMA/MOMA to help sustain while dealing with bosses and only fair to give similar free AR bonus as other melee caster specs.
Some QoL suggestions after fixing the tankiness issues.
-CBF in tree (theme).
-Holy Freeze effect with similar slow strength to Haunt. (Chasing down runners with the specs nukes is a pain and targets that run over your Novas takea lot less damage) The freeze effect from wintertide and upgrades are neglible impact on an 8 or 7 second cooldown ability. Adding Holy Freeze with like a 2/3 screen radius would take the freeze's purpose. Partial uptime regen is kind of a feels bad especially on a significant CD repositioning tool. Either adjust numbers on regen (half uptime so half effect) and build it into the spec, or, if we want to keep this as a tankiness button with partial uptime, a flat elemental damage reduction buff would be a great defense steroid with the other changes. Heck give it the same formula aa the aura so you double the mitigation from it for part time.
Fire
The spec has been pretty stable besides Havoc stuff. From leveling it, Havoc is in a very strange place. 15 seconds baseline is kind of ridiculous for an ARPG. 12-13 seconds is also ridiculous and that;s with energy you could typically expect in early late game. 6 second Fire Dance is too long to drop every screen. I know it's a nice meme (420 Blaze it!), but does this ability still need to have 1 sec CD gated behind ~6k energy? I see the damage is still getting nerfed, so I assume so (little experience with it lategame). Can we at least change the scaling to something like the Superposition formula? 5-6 seconds at low levels, 3-4 around 100-120, then 2 seconds at 2400 energy would make it a button you press regularly from the point you unlock it rather than it being an ability you only skill later in the game when you can bring it's CD down to something reasonable.
) to watch mob in Bremmtown to jump to their own death, but that uber is easy anyway.