molten strike and lightning strike indirectly nerfed?

please correct me if im wrong here----

the new melee damage with shield node's do not apply too the projectile portions of these attack's. to compensate for that damage ONE HAND damage node's were largely removed. so if i wanted to play a 1h axe/shield build these two ability's would suffer a large dps loss compared to other melee abilitys such as cleave and static strike. is this correct or am i wrong here??

Why don't you just test it? Get spectral throw and check the dps prior and after taking one of those node, based on the wording they probably don't work with projectile attacks.

The reason, as I assume, are wands. If they gave you a 'physical attack damage while holding a shield' bonus, it would affect wands too.

Not all is lost, however, if you use axes you can always specialize and take axe nodes, those work as they always did.

so "physical attack damage with one handed melee weapons while holding a shield" couldnt be a thing? the point here is that there are less supporting nodes for those ability's than previously, they didnt add an increase to axe nodes as you suggest to compensate.

i'll admit testing w/ spectral throw didnt cross my mind, the other two you couldnt see the actual dps of the projectiles to test. the problem im trying to point out is the loss of nodes like water dancing which previously affected the two but was not compensated for. this also applies im noticing too the melee crit nodes. disembowling being the only remaining crit node for general melee(i have to clarify here to rule out staffs and maces which have specific critical nodes)does not apply to molten or lightning strike. so yea there are definitely some perhaps unintentional nerf's here.

They might have thought the description too long and confusing, unless it's intentionally done to promote projectile attacks as a 2H weapon thing that compensates somewhat for their survivability problems. I'm probably just reading too much into it, they were most likely just too short on time to cover all bases.

'Melee crit' nodes actually seem to be 'crit with melee weapons', as they work with projectiles too, so it's a description problem.

When patches like these go live you gain some and lose some. Facebreaker builds, for one, gained a significant damage boost, as those one handed nodes were converted to melee with shield and now affect unarmed too.