Physical attack skills vs spells

Is it just me or do attack skills seem to do way more damage than spells? Not talking about stat sticks.

I started playing a shadow and used viper strike + frost blades through most of act 1. I was easily one shotting packs of mobs and bosses died really quickly.

I got to Merveil, decided to try out essence drain since I had heard good things about it, and tried a contagion+essence drain+void manipulation support setup.

So I cast, and I sit around waiting for 1+ seconds for weak trash mobs to die. Is that it? Merveil took forever to kill. I even took DOT skill nodes and was wearing a 60% damage doedre's tenure.

Clear speed and single target DPS is obviously way worse. And I obviously wasnt using stat sticks with frost blades.

I feel like I just nerfed myself trying to use essence drain...

It's harder to make essence drain really strong with twink uniques early game. It doesn't benefit from added flat damage, which is really easy to get a lot of early on. Also, early game enemies are balanced for pretty lame weapons, if you bring along the princess or something of course you will murder everything. Same issue with Caustic arrow.

Try using essence drain vs viper strike on an SSF character and you'll probably find viper strike sucks too.

Also note you only really have one support gem for essence drain at that level.

In my opinion, if you use 1 skill as your main skill then attack will stronger than spell. But spell builds are more diverse. With attack builds, your main skill is your everything. But with spell, you can combine with trap, totem or trigger gem/skill from unique items. So, try another complex builds if you love spell, with this kind of question, my answer in short will be : attack is hit with your weapon, spell is hit with your whole body

When you hit lvl 18 replace contagion (put somewhere) with Control destruction support and you will see the difference:)

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cuocdoitan wrote:

In my opinion, if you use 1 skill as your main skill then attack will stronger than spell. But spell builds are more diverse. With attack builds, your main skill is your everything. But with spell, you can combine with trap, totem or trigger gem/skill from unique items. So, try another complex builds if you love spell, with this kind of question, my answer in short will be : attack is hit with your weapon, spell is hit with your whole body

Funny, because almost everyone has been telling me that using more than one skill for damage (not counting totems/minions/etc) is a horrible idea.

Even essence drain builds are mostly about essence drain.

I have leveled multipel casters/physical attack characters by this point. Every single one of my physical attack characters has massively outdamaged my casters. My casters are limited by links and gem level. My physicla characters can just get a cheap weapon and they do easily 3x the damage of my casters...or more. And attack gems scale per level as well.

The last character i leveled was a marauder. Even with the redbeak sword + cleav'e hes already outdamaging casters of the same level.

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Rakiii wrote:

When you hit lvl 18 replace contagion (put somewhere) with Control destruction support and you will see the difference:)

Or i can link controlled destruction with frost blades and keep ones shotting mobs...

Im really struggling to see the advantage here. One skill can one shot mobs. One skill forces you to wait. Its not hard to see which is flat out better.

If i were to ask you to choose between a weapon that does 1000 dps and one that does 100 dps, which do you think would be better?

And what´s the point? You can´t really compare lvl 15 characters.

ED is perfectly endgame viable. You can even use blight for singl target as combo with ED.

What´s the advantage? What to say ... maybe fun from different playstyle or do you just compare dps numbers?

It´s up to you...

Do you remember (back when races used to be a thing) when Templar used to get Ice Nova from the Hillock quest? They had to make ice nova a higher level skill because for early game, with a +1 cold wand or sceptre, it was basically unbeatable for pack clearing speed.

For single target, have you tried frostbolt, or another high-dps spell early game?