suggestion for a boost to the ToE (in General)

Bring back the GA and DD damage reductions, also make it reduce decay.

Better yet, have it reduce RoBF flame damage the same amount as physical.

Then, the ToE has a nice boost, and the RoBF has a counter that everyone wants. Obviously, using a ToE still leaves you open to mage damage, thus preventing it from being OP.

Mian's suggestion sounds awesome to me.

The ToE does indeed need some love.

If we changed GA back to returning either Physical or Magical damage, depending on attack, the ToE would get passively buffed. ;)

Oh yes, make the ToE block RBF damage as well as physical. That would suit me down to the ground!

I'd be ok with that...

On the wearing Minion, or as part of the Aura?

I dislike Aura's anyway, and would hesitate before making them more powerful.

I would have reservations about that.

Here is my reasoning.

CB has become, for good or bad, a tattoo centric game. That can be debated, but at the upper mid to top levels, the tattoo is your characters main focus.

All the tattoos except the ToE have an offensive ability. Which most characters use as their main one. Even the RoS has offensive ability due to the AS/GA axis.

There are 4 types of damage in CB now:

1) Physical
2) DD/magical
3) GA
4) Flame/RBF

The ToE is woefully underpowered now due to the fact it only works vs 1 type of damage.

Unless it works vs at least 3 types, I cannot personally see people switching to ToE or using high level tattoos as such..

The ToE works great as a low to mid level tattoo on a high level character due to its effectiveness rate.

Adding a patch to the ToE to help vs the RBF is patching a bad item and not fixing the underlying problem.

For the ToE itself there is a fine line between it being nearly useless and becoming overpowered like it used to be.

The ToE only seems useless because it doesn't do more than one thing.

But that one thing that it does it does really well.

It happens to work really well as a facet of a strategy rather than the heart of a strategy that the others work as. I like it that way, it's more like a mage shield, or an adam or a pair of EBs. And that also means that I can do without it for the most part, or in other words I'm not reliant on it to do what I do.

It's quite liberating actually.