Coma wrote:
And how would you calculate the damage return with AoE? do you take all the AoE damage on yourself (=instakill... even half the damage will likely kill yourself on a single proc)? the highest value (it will still be less than what you would take from an explosion from a non crit single target attack)?
And with channeling? Dot? do you take the full damage at the start (what if interrupted/cleased?) or you take it tick by tick? what if you drop your combustion midway (with how DoT work their damage is calculated tick by tick so you could set them up at low combustion and have them tick at high combustion without problem or you may end up clearing your combstion midway)?
Sorry but damage return is much more complicated than what it look at first sight... especialy with a class that have a considerable focus on AoE and DoT/channel (or even worse combination fo the 2 like several BW/Sorc skill).

Combustion being a FIXED value is the best way to get "self inflicted damage by casting". And since it look like there is no way to find a value that will make it sensible in organized WB and not turn into a "kill yourself" for solo/pug we should probably drop the idea of damage and go for a different kind of drawback imho
As for the several debuff type proposed;
Wouds debuff is probably excessive with the current gear... it would end up forcing BW/Sorc to soket wound to survive any form of aoe spike (if you drop to 3k hp... that is quite resonable once you stack opponent hp debuff with self inflicted hp debuff... you could die even without a spike... just sustained damage could be enough to kill you in a single timestamp).
Cost increase is probably the best to limit BW/Sorc to only spike damage at full comb/DM rather than keepeing themself at 100 full time it obviously have to be a steep increase in order to take into account personal and group AP regen (you can't just add 20 AP to the cost or runeprist will just cover it with a greater rune or you could circunvent it with devour energy).
Increased dmg recived or increased chance to be critically hit are probably the best if the aim is to conserve the current feel of "dealing more damage but risking your life in doing so". But is also quite hard to fine tune an increased crit damage should also be avoided in order to prevent "one shot" scenario (think about a critted festering arrow or snipe that got an additional 50% or 100% crit damage on top of it's normal crit damage).
PS: sory if it seemed a bit harsh (realized only after writing it all and didn't have the patience to rewrite it from scratch

) my aim was only to point out critical problems with impementing the damage return (as you can see there are actualy several of them) not to trash your proposal ^^
Hey it wasnt MY suggestion, you can see above what my proposal was... Combustion doesnt give any benefit until you use meltdown which then gives you the crit and crit damage buff for X seconds depending on how high your combustion was.
and I agree. Wounds debuff too harsh.
Cost increase of AP could work but frankly might be too limiting. I mean even when fully supported its not like BW/Sorcs are "OP" IMO. So the goal was not a "nerf" but really just a way to not ignore the mechanic.
Anyways, I think there are many ways to look at this, but I think the GOAL should be to make it more fun, more dynamic, and fix the 3 problems I see with the mechanic that I listed. Most suggestions I have seen fall short of this.