Increased physical melee damage (working as intended?)

So I was making a badass unarmed character, made a crazy spreadsheet and everything for it and planned the build for quite a while.

Everything started out nicely until a while later I noticed that my skill dps values weren't matching with the spreadsheet. Of course I first thought I had made a mistake in calculations, but after some number crunching I realized what the problem was.

I had thought that +% increased physical melee damage (from strength and passive mods) would increase all physical damage, even the physical damage provided by +# physical damage modifiers on items such as Meginord's Girdle's 10-20 Physical damage.

To put it in form of a formula, I thought damage would be calculated as:

(Weapon/Unarmed base damage + Integer modifiers from gear) * (1 + Strength mod + Passive mods) * "+% More damage" modifiers

Turns out that in reality the strength and passive modifiers are calculated ONLY for the weapon/unarmed base damage and the integer values are just added on top of that value without being scaled:

(Weapon/Unarmed base damage * (1 + Strength mod + Passive mods) + Integer modifiers from gear) * "+% More damage" modifiers

With weapons this obviously doesn't create such a noticeable difference as their base damage quickly increases with higher level base items. However, the unarmed base damage stays the same and basically gets very little benefit from both strength and melee physical damage passives.

Elemental damage seems to work as in the first example and +% increased weapon elemental damage modifiers seem to also increase elemental damage provided by equipment other than the weapon itself.

So my question is: Is physical damage modifier currently working as intended?


EDIT:
Interestingly enough, the %increased physical damage from skill gem levels/quality is actually applied to both base damage and integer mods as in first formula.

I'm fairly certain any facebreaker build could confirm that this is compeletely and utterly false.

"

Umbraal wrote:

I'm fairly certain any facebreaker build could confirm that this is compeletely and utterly false.

It's not outside the realm of possibility that my calculations and observations are horribly wrong somehow.

However, my current (low end, bad) gear has 21 - 43 added damage, so average of 32 added damage. Adding a 10% physical melee damage node should be equal to adding average of 3.2 damage.

With a ~900% Facebreaker, that should be a clearly noticeable amount on the damage values.

However, in reality, adding the 10% node only increases my dps by less than 15. (which is quite underwhelming considering that the current dps of my Infernal Blow is ~1500)

For reference, Iron Ring adds average of 2.5 damage, which is a noticeable ~90 dps boost.
(Again, low level, crap gear, etc!)

"

Vipermagi wrote:

"

Umbraal wrote:

I'm fairly certain any facebreaker build could confirm that this is compeletely and utterly false.

Er, actually, this is a fairly well-known occurence in the game? Physical damage from gear kinda sucks because it doesn't benefit from a bunch of bonuses. Unlike Elemental, naturally.

------
(edit: wait nope FB is mult. There was a quote here, but nobody saw anything)

FB multiplier works like a charm. It's applied on top of all of the damage just as you'd expect.

After I changed my spreadsheet to work with the formula that doesn't use strength and passive mod bonuses on # physical damage from gear, the spreadsheet is accurate once again.

Shame about the massive dps hit though :D

However, the question still remains: Is this intended or something they just overlooked and will fix eventually?
To be honest, it'd be a bit strange if it was intended, considering that every other mechanic seems to work on the first formula.

Thank you for the answer Mark!
That was exactly what I wanted to know and hear :)

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

This has been known on the forums for quite a while, and is working as intended.
It is, however, also slated to be changed in the upcoming refactor of all damage stats (roughly half done, between my other tasks), as I've successfully argued that it no longer fits the current stat of the game for it to work this way, and gained the go-ahead for it to be changed as part of that overhaul.

Nice to know Mark! Is there an ETA on this overhaul? My next build kind of hinges on it.

This has been a very discouraging discovery for me after 6 socketing my Pillar of the Caged God and getting high physical gear. I was excited to see higher and higher scaling as I leveled and pushed my strength to the maximum. I hope this mechanic is changed in the near future. I'll be leveling with elemental until then, it would seem.