I'm personally not a fan of damage and resist being counterparts, this is going to result in some funky balancing issues involving health and pierce inflation as higher level gear and jewels are released. I believe the best method of balancing player power is making health and damage counterparts and removing the damage intersection. Health and damage should be the two primary stats a wizard focuses on, and they should be limitless in value. Resist and pierce should be side stats, something extra just like critical and block. Make resist and pierce counterparts, add more pierce to gear and add a pierce intersection. This will help make balancing future gear a little easier as you can better determine the value of stats with a priority towards higher health and damage.
They will probably remove all of these things after the gear audit. Tbh, the game was very balanced gear wise until aquila then the darkmoor + jewels were added where everyone got 40+ pierce, max accuracy, critical, 100+ damage, 50+ resist, max pips, and shadow pip chance. Old crafted gear meant you had to mix and match gear to ensure a balance between power pips and accuracy (I used to have the hades robe + crafted helmet and boots at level 100) while all these additions maxed out over half the stats and meant you could only increase damage, resist and health and pierce.
Perhaps they can raise health broadly across lower level gear since its bizarre how we go from like 8k health at level 120 ice to 11k at level 130 and shift stats around to bring back the era where you had to mix and match to get certain stats compared to today where certain things like pips and accuracy are always 100% and block and critical stats aren't really needed in large amounts.
Back in waterworks era is also where we saw the beginning of the end for certain schools stats wise since they had to add stats to certain schools to give them something so that they weren't stuck at certain levels of stats since obviously you can't keep increasing resist on an ice from 40+ at level 60 since by level 100 it was going to be like 80-90% which would be ridiculous. The problem is they remedied this with adding stats to ice they shouldn't have like damage. Ice at level 60 used to be 20-30 damage but level 100 they were 100 damage and even now they are at 100+ with even more stats. Storm on the flip side was at 80+ damage waterworks era but then they only went to like 120 darkmoor era. They also added some resist to storm to make up for it but the resist was basically standardized for all schools at waterworks levels + like 3 since resist once it reaches 100 is basically done mean't that schools that shouldn't have certain stats got a lot more benefit.
The reason I say zeus gear was the problem was it gave offensive numbers that storm should have had based on level progressions but meant that storm was an absolute cannon that destroyed everyone. To fix this they probably thought darkmoor was the answer, but that just flipped the problem around since they pulled up a bunch of stats and added amazing spells that nerfed storm and boosted stats on other schools that shouldn't have changed. This just compounded to where we are now where schools like fire reached 200 damage to make up for ice hitting 100 at level 100 when it shouldn't have even been there, and storm keeps getting left behind since the developers don't like a school just spamming and one shotting things with minimal effort.
They said in the next update they will look at gear audits, which probably means removing the op gear sets that are giving fire 20 extra damage for no reason and bringing those down, lowering the stats on darkmoor gear, and making health more linear compared to the just stratospheric rise they used to get people to get out of darkmoor gear which has caused other problems.
