This starboard post is a quick summary as to why elemental damage is a bad idea, but one even more important topic not mentioned there is the fact that it could potentially kill build variety instead of promoting it. Imagine this:
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In the current system, 3 weapons are viable for a sorcerer. They use builds revolving around those 3 weapons everywhere, so you come across 3 different sorcerer builds.
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With elemental damage, each map generally has a couple specific elements to it (Lets say Dark and Fire for Badlands.) Now 4 weapons are viable in total for sorcerers thanks to elements, but going into Badlands, all of them are going to use the best option there, leading to everyone running the same build.
TLDR of this is that when elemental damage comes around even though data may show more variety in the meta, in practice, going into a map you will see far fewer builds due to everyone chasing the best performance (a consequence of the contribution system but not 100% tied to it.)
What I recommend instead is opting for more 4th books. Vampire is the only current 4th book, and its abilities reward players for gaining and losing health, adding depth to an existing game mechanic instead of adding a new one.
Following this trend, we could add more 4th books that cover different niches; debuffing enemies, dealing AoE and DoT damage, healing allies, trading AoE capabilities for single target damage etc.
This way, every player could spec into the 4th book they want that complements their playstyle; while one warlock could want single target DPS, another could aim for sustain and self heals and a third warlock could go for debuffs instead. We’d encounter 3 very different builds for the same class coexisting which is well, build variety.
(another point about why elemental damage is a bad idea i didn’t mention is that it adds yet another shallow new feature to worry about instead of building synergies with your class. 4th books introduce more depth to game mechanics, adding interactions between specific stats, actions and abilities while elemental damage changes nothing with gameplay but makes you deal more or less damage against random targets. Even if elemental damage were changed to trigger effects instead of influencing damage, this would just make it even more of an afterthought of an addition people would just not want to engage with.)
