I refute this assumption here.
I am sorry to break it to you, but Joint Penalty is not exponential, neither is Quickcast, Cloak, Meteor or any physical skill backed by 100% crit. What they are not, is additive; they are multiplicative.
You obviously haven’t seen overpowered if Joint Penalty is where you’re hung up. Joint Penalty is more convenient than overpowered.
Firstly, Joint Penalty does not scale damage, it scales DPS. Secondly, Joint Penalty merely changes the rules of how damage is applied thereby making all single target instances of damage AOE, and all AOE instances of damage two instances of AOE damage if, and only if, multiple targets affected by Joint Penalty are in the AOE. If perhaps the attributes were not only for electrical, earth and poison damage, I’d say that Joint Penalty is broken with attributes. Lastly, there are dozens of multipliers in this game which you label as random instances of exponential growth. Here are just a few…
Scout’s Cloak +50% physical damage on next skill.
Scout’s Split Arrow +100% damage on bouncing arrows.
Elementalist’s Meteor +300% damage.
Elementalist’s Electrocute +100% magic attack on frozen targets.
Wizards + 20% to 100% strike damage against lethargy targets.
Archer’s 2hbow attribute +100% damage to flying monsters.
Archer’s 1hbow attribute -25% physical defense to all targets.
Sadhu’s Astral Body Explosion +150% damage.
Viability of skills will remain if what I am told is true, that +100% Attribute is a two times multiplier of damage dealt (excluding some buffs) by a skill. Also, everything scales at about the same rate excluding physical classes who gain a rather generous boon of 1.5 times damage once they reach 100% critical chance, not including their critical attack.
I think Sorcerers are still good despite losing some of their pet control until C2. It may have been done to prevent the Sorcerer + Necromancer combo,or just to make Sorcerer C2 look better. If I were to play a Sorcerer now, I’d go W1P1L1P2S2.