Fire, Ice, Earth, Wind, & Puppies. Elementally Elemental re-imagining.

[Devalut]

Magical mayhem has always began from one or more themes, but in the end they all differently colored sparkly things that do the big bad numbers on the bad guys with esteemed title of "MAGIC" damage.
But some games strewn away from this path and made them more than just projectileA, projectileB, projectileC; these clever sausages dragged something more out of the ether of thought, these being unique modifiers and effects onto "elements" or "Schools" of every spell under it.

The elder scrolls series rode this pony on this until Todd Howard snorted a line of moon sugar and gave us Destruction magic's three major elements:

And dungeon and dragons has their feast of schools with their own starting perks:

Ex under the Necromancy school you gain:

Grim Harvest​

At 2nd level, you gain the ability to reap life energy from creatures you kill with your spells. Once per turn when you kill one or more creatures with a spell of 1st level or higher, you regain hit points equal to twice the spell's level, or three times its level if the spell belongs to the School of Necromancy. You don't gain this benefit for killing constructs or undead.

And in the Evocation school we have:

Sculpt Spells​

Beginning at 2nd level, you can create pockets of relative safety within the effects of your evocation spells. When you cast an evocation spell that affects other creatures that you can see, you can choose a number of them equal to 1 + the spell’s level. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saving throws against the spell, and they take no damage if they would normally take half damage on a successful save.


Now these key differences don't just apply to one spell, it applies to any spell tagged under it's corresponding element/school.
So I ask you dear reader, what effect or modifier would apply to your chosen element/School to create engaging and thoughtful decisions in games?

 

[cleavinghammer]

You could have elemental aftereffects interact with each other.

For instance: the 4 elemental spells apply 2 debuffs out of 4: cold, dry, wet, hot.

• A water spell leaves the target cold and wet. Hitting a cold and wet target with a wind (hot, wet) spell removes the cold debuff but strengthens the wet debuff, an earth (cold, dry) spell removes the wet debuff but even colder, and a fire spell removes both.
• Conversely, fire causes the dry and hot debuffs, removed/increased by the wind and earth spells respectively.