You should gutt +skills on items for 0.4 to see how it works out

Part of me hopes that +lvls has been implemented to be a primary method of scaling just to simplify things across the board while they work on adding new skills/weapons/content into the game in the first place, with a side effect of making gearing a bit obtuse for us in the interim.

A bit like keeping simple base stock in the soup while you work on peeling and adding the carrots, onions, potatoes, meat, etc. to optimize the flavour-impact of each individual ingredient. It also really only makes it appropriate to shake things up with spices, adjustments, or enhancements once you've finished putting everything into the pot and have given it a little time to stew a little.

I am suddenly very hungry.

Just removing them wouldn't work out well... They would need to than rebalance all the skills/nodes as if they didn't you're just effectively nerfing the damage ceiling 10%-30% across the entire game. More power coming from build/skills vs items would shrink the gap between the high-end and low-end of players for sure though, and help out the people who struggle getting to end-game stuff.

Agree, in this league I had minion build and to achieve decent damage all EQ was + minion skills and reservation because i just cant skip them. In the end, I had no choice to go with different paths or to create something new and fun, because it would not have decent damage.

It would be cool to have only runes for + level, it is shame that there is rune for spell skills, but not for minion skills.

Also, it would be great to have skill gems beyond 20 lv. in this way u do not have to sacrifice EQ for + level.

I find the modifier pretty boring despite all of my builds heavily relying on it. There isn't anything transformative to it unlike critical hit, skill speed, added damage types, etc. +1 to skills is "+1 everything more better"

Not against the mod entirely but it feels too available and too neccessary. Removing it outright would be a balancing nightmare at this point I imagine, but i kinda hope it's phased out over time.

Been trying to craft a lot this league and it's so sad that most items if they don't hit + skills are just garbage. Would be more fun without them for sure.

+ 1

From the interview yesterday, the devs view +skills on caster weapons similarly to phys damage on attacker weapons.

They've nerfed it a little bit. However seems like they want a mod on weapons to be somewhat required. Similar to how attack weapons are bad without phys damage unless you are going full elemental (few ever do).