Vulconus, Bleed, AoF question

I know that typically you can't cause a bleed if you do 0 physical damage, but the wording on Vulconus is a little confusing, is it capable of inflicting a bleed while AoF is active?

No, Vulconus doesn't change the rules of bleed at all. The chance to bleed against ignited enemies still only works if you're dealing physical damage.

Nope.

Bleed requires Physical damage, which you cannot deal while you have Avatar of Fire. You can Ignite with flat fire damage or things like Added Fire Damage while in Physical mode, but Avatar of Fire explicitly eliminates the ability to inflict Bleed.

Vulconus is designed to switch between Physical mode, which can Bleed things with its innate Bleed chance, and Fire mode, where it can Ignite things with its heavily boosted crit chance. Ideally you sustain both debuffs against enemies consistently for maximum DPS with the weapon, which you do by extending Bleed duration via the tree and also by attacking as furiously as possible against anything where it matters.

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1453R wrote:

Nope.

Bleed requires Physical damage, which you cannot deal while you have Avatar of Fire. You can Ignite with flat fire damage or things like Added Fire Damage while in Physical mode, but Avatar of Fire explicitly eliminates the ability to inflict Bleed.

Vulconus is designed to switch between Physical mode, which can Bleed things with its innate Bleed chance, and Fire mode, where it can Ignite things with its heavily boosted crit chance. Ideally you sustain both debuffs against enemies consistently for maximum DPS with the weapon, which you do by extending Bleed duration via the tree and also by attacking as furiously as possible against anything where it matters.

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viperesque wrote:

No, Vulconus doesn't change the rules of bleed at all. The chance to bleed against ignited enemies still only works if you're dealing physical damage.

Alright, thanks guys. Just wanted clarification because the "Attacks with this Weapon deal 88 to 160 added Physical Damage to Ignited Enemies" made me question if that little bit might overwrite AoF. Both happy and sad it doesn't because it'd probably be broken af if it did.

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kyosuke1000 wrote:

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Alright, thanks guys. Just wanted clarification because the "Attacks with this Weapon deal 88 to 160 added Physical Damage to Ignited Enemies" made me question if that little bit might overwrite AoF. Both happy and sad it doesn't because it'd probably be broken af if it did.

Not...really?

These mode-swap uniques Grinding Gear released are interesting but seem to be mostly butt. yeah okay, if your target is both bleeding and ignited (which should be reasonably doable), the dagger deals a pretty substantial amount of extra flat physical and fire damage. That is...literally just about all it has going for it. It's got no extra damage outside those mods, no IAS, no local crit (the AoT mod is conditional, thus global, thus much less impactful than local crit)...no much of anything you'd normally want a dagger for.

It's good for funky weirdbuilds that like the idea of doing the mode-swap thing, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a build Vulconus enables or augments that wouldn't be better with a rare dagger with half again the crit and APS and just a flat fire roll. The extra armor is nice but explicitly not reliable, and the full-fire conversion for Avatar of Fire is handy for skills which are normally hard to full-convert with, but again - you're stuck using a dagger with freaking garbo basic stats to get it.

I have no doubt someone could get good mileage out of the hefty flat damage the dagger can offer, but the build would be carrying the weapon, not the other way around. Even if it could bleed during Avatar of Fire.

As 1453R said, 1.2 base attack speed alone is good enough reason to pass on this dagger. I mean, what is really a point of playing a add-damage build if you're using the slowest weapon possible? :V