Combat Updates - Passives & Type/Class Matching

Real Time Combat - with a selected Team of 4 (One including the protagonist)

Sub Classes:
Rogue (Speed), Warrior (Strength), Wizard/Mage (Magic)
Speed beats Magic, Magic beats Strength, Strength Beats Speed (may change)

Elemental Affinity:
Water, Fire, Earth, Electricity
Water beats Fire, Fire beats Earth, Earth Beats Electricity, Electricity beats Water

Characters will have 1 subclass, and 1 elemental affinity associated. Your Protagonist will have an option to remain neutral or without giving too much away by having "naughty interactions" with a character, can temporarily inherit the affinity.

Sub-Class & Elemental Affinity Matching:
When engaging enemies it will be important to ensure both the sub-class and the elemental affinity used are taken into consideration. There will also be some enemies that you may need to approach with one sub-classes at the start, but swap to another in order to finish them off. This encourages building the appropriate team.

This however is something I intend to integrate as a difficulty scaling, a higher difficulty will mean a greater penalty when not appropriately type matching, where as a lower setting will be a lower penalty to allow for freedom to play your way.

Passives:
Whilst sub-classes will impact move sets, elemental affinities, and have a play into passives for your teams. So if you have certain affinities in your team, you will get certain buffs, so if you have multiple of the same affinity in your team, it would stack, but with lowering return as you add the same affinity. My first thought/breakdown is as followed

Water (regeneration), Electricity (Ability Cooldown), Fire (Attack), Earth (Defense)

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. As we are early nothing is off the table yet, but this is where I am at with combat, and I want to make sure I can make it enjoyable, challenging, but also somewhat simplistic.