Don't understand how damage is calculated

Is leveling a hunter and using the Caustic arrow gem, which says that it converts 60% of the physical damage to chaos damage.

However, if I equip a bow with more physical damage, the damage per second stays the same.

Based on my character sheet, having only that single gem equipped.

1. Bow - 44 - 139 physical damage (Using magic to calculate damage) becomes 5169.7 chaos damage per second.

2. Bow - 71 - 211 physical damage also becomes 5169.7 chaos damage per second.

This, as almost all ways damage is calculated in the game doesn't make sense to me :D

What exactly does the 60% convert, if it is unaffected by the physical damage of the weapon?

by "hit part" do you mean that it says that it hits an area dealing chaos damage?

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Fires an arrow which deals chaos damage in an area on impact, and spreads caustic ground. Enemies standing on the caustic ground take chaos damage over time.

Deals (8.8-1927.1) Base Chaos Damage per second
Base duration is 2.00 seconds
60% of Physical Damage Converted to Chaos Damage
Modifiers to Projectile Damage apply to this Skill's Damage Over Time effect
----

Nothing from the description says anything about the 60% only applies to the first impact, if that is what you mean?

The way I understand it is that the more physical damage you do the higher the chaos damage should be, both the impact and the damage over time. Sure, you might lose a bit of physical damage done during the impact, but the damage over time from the caustic ground should increase otherwise it doesn't seem to be converted to anything or even make much of a difference.

So when you fire the arrow, anything immediately hit, is taking the bow Damage, with 60% of it converted to Chaos.

The pool it leaves behind that deals damage over time has a semi-fixed damage over time element that scales with the gems level, but doesn't care at all about your bow.

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Nothing from the description says anything about the 60% only applies to the first impact, if that is what you mean?

The way I understand it is that the more physical damage you do the higher the chaos damage should be, both the impact and the damage over time. Sure, you might lose a bit of physical damage done during the impact, but the damage over time from the caustic ground should increase otherwise it doesn't seem to be converted to anything or even make much of a difference.

The 60% conversion is only refering to the attack element listed at the top of the skill, importantly because the DoT aspect has no physical damage to convert (even if it could, once it's chaos, there's no going back due to the games conversion system). That Pool will gain damage from increases to Damage over Time, and +% Perjectile Damage and that's straight it. Your bow NEVER factors into that part of the skill, only the initial arrow shot.

Ok, think I got it. Respecced a little to test and as you said the chaos damage over time increases its damage, I thought the poison damage did it as well as it also deals chaos damage, not sure why it isn't its own type of damage when its called something else, very confusing.

Also saw that there are some skills that just increase "chaos damage", and honestly, I have no clue whether they will increase the damage or not at this point, because they could be completely different from "chaos over time", but will have to try that out, once I get some more points. :D

But thanks for the help.

Would hope that they would make these things more transparent or clean it up a little. Maybe adding small colored dots indicating which damage types affect a given thing and then adding that to the passive tree as well, or something like that.

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nimos100 wrote:

I thought the poison damage did it as well as it also deals chaos damage, not sure why it isn't its own type of damage when its called something else, very confusing.

Poison is a keyword Aliment (like Burning or Chill) that does very explicity things. While all Poison is a Chaos Damage over Time, not all Chaos over Time is poison. Poison only comes up with effects that call out Poison (or Damaging Aliments). In that same vein, the Damage over Time effect of Caustic Arrow is NOT an 'Aliment', as Aliments are a very narrow catagory (Burn, Chill, Shock, Poison and Bleed are Aliments, maybe stun? I forget if stun is in that umbrella).

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nimos100 wrote:

Also saw that there are some skills that just increase "chaos damage", and honestly, I have no clue whether they will increase the damage or not at this point, because they could be completely different from "chaos over time", but will have to try that out, once I get some more points. :D

So this is a confusing part of Path, any deep dive into its mechanics is, in part by nature, and in part by it being something of a hodgepodge engine that's been built and rebuilt over its lifetime. No, a passive like Atrophy or Heart of Darkness would NOT help the Damage over Time. The "Damage" and "Damage over Time" elements are distinct entities, and don't overlap. Most Damage over Time Skills have a special callout for some form of Flat Damage to help them (in Caustic Arrows case, Projectile Damage).

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nimos100 wrote:

Would hope that they would make these things more transparent or clean it up a little. Maybe adding small colored dots indicating which damage types affect a given thing and then adding that to the passive tree as well, or something like that.

I don't disagree at all that the game is a complicated mess under the hood, but honestly it is a reason I love it, though a lot of veteran players take for granted how complicated it is for new players and forget to help explain things in their build guides (or avoid doing so out of a fear of overwhelming a new player). But that's its own problem that's very hard to solve for in general with a game as complex as PoE. But I wouldn't trade one shred of that complexity if it gives up the wierd builds you can get going.

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Damage over Time effect of Caustic Arrow is NOT an 'Aliment', as Aliments are a very narrow catagory (Burn, Chill, Shock, Poison and Bleed are Aliments, maybe stun? I forget if stun is in that umbrella).

I don't think stun is, but that is just a guess.

I do think I get the aliments. It's just confusing that they haven't added poison damage if that is different from chaos damage.

It's kind of like when you have something that says "20% increased global critical strike chance while wielding a staff" and then you have another passive saying "20% increased critical chance" yet that is not global apparently.

What is the difference between the two, except one of them is when using a staff. So why add the "global" word, it does nothing but add confusion.

"

So this is a confusing part of Path, any deep dive into its mechanics is, in part by nature, and in part by it being something of a hodgepodge engine that's been built and rebuilt over its lifetime. No, a passive like Atrophy or Heart of Darkness would NOT help the Damage over Time. The "Damage" and "Damage over Time" elements are distinct entities, and don't overlap. Most Damage over Time Skills have a special callout for some form of Flat Damage to help them (in Caustic Arrows case, Projectile Damage).

Again, I tested it so I took Entrophy which increases damage over time by 23% and that works with it. I couldn't find Heart of Darkness.

But this is what makes it so confusing because my guess is that a lot of these do the same things yet are written differently as with the critical example above. I also took the Fangs of the viper, which increases both chaos damage and physical damage by 20% and that also increased the DOT, but again, maybe it is only the physical % that works or the chaos one or it might be both. I have no clue, it is not obvious from reading the passives whether they will work or not I think.

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I don't disagree at all that the game is a complicated mess under the hood, but honestly it is a reason I love it, though a lot of veteran players take for granted how complicated it is for new players and forget to help explain things in their build guides (or avoid doing so out of a fear of overwhelming a new player). But that's its own problem that's very hard to solve for in general with a game as complex as PoE. But I wouldn't trade one shred of that complexity if it gives up the wierd builds you can get going.

I do like the game and I like that there is a complexity to it. But there is a fine line between complexity and simply confusing players.
I have played POE on/off for a long time, it is the only ARPG I care to play. But it is also very obvious that it is a game designed for a minority group of players. Most of the "extra" content I have rarely interacted with or progressed very far in, such as the atlas, have no clue how the spy thing works etc. So I guess that it is probably less than 10% of their player base that has completed the atlas or has really experienced what a lot of these mechanics have to offer. I still haven't gotten past using the standard orb crafting and the crafting bench. Yet crafting in the game is far more than this. But casual people like me will never experience it, because these mechanics are poorly explained and there is a long way until you can really benefit from them, given how often crafting goes wrong and to simply gather the materials.

It is a cool game, but it is very much created for less than 10% of players which is a bit sad I think.

The weird build is one of the best things about the game and I wouldn't want them to get rid of it, simply make it user-friendly. I don't ever look up build guides, that would make me feel like I was playing Diablo. I like just doing my own things the way I think they are fun. But the passives should be well enough explained that they don't confuse players more than they help, and to me that simply requires that they clean up the descriptions. Maybe add some easy-to-understand indications like some colored dots or ways to see if a given passive would affect a skill or not.

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

So this is a confusing part of Path, any deep dive into its mechanics is, in part by nature, and in part by it being something of a hodgepodge engine that's been built and rebuilt over its lifetime. No, a passive like Atrophy or Heart of Darkness would NOT help the Damage over Time. The "Damage" and "Damage over Time" elements are distinct entities, and don't overlap. Most Damage over Time Skills have a special callout for some form of Flat Damage to help them (in Caustic Arrows case, Projectile Damage).

You're getting a few things wrong here.


Passives like Atrophy and Heart of Darkness would increase the DoT of the Caustic Ground spread by Caustic Arrow because they apply to Chaos damage in general--which "Chaos damage over time" is a subset of. You can refer to the wiki article on Damage over Time, specificly the section on damage scaling.

What won't apply would be modifiers to attack damage or damage with bows. Even though an attack was used to create the Caustic Ground (or in cases of other skills, to apply the DoT), the DoT is a separate type of damage. For comparison you can see some DoT spells saying that modifiers to spell damage DO affect the DoT, such as with Vortex.


"Projectile Damage" is not Flat Damage. Flat damage refers to base damage, or additional damage that is not a percentile increase/multiplier--but typically refers to damage with hits, since flat damage bonuses don't help Damage over Time unless the DoT is an ailment (they're based on the base damage dealt, which is what flat damage increases).

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nimos100 wrote:

It's kind of like when you have something that says "20% increased global critical strike chance while wielding a staff" and then you have another passive saying "20% increased critical chance" yet that is not global apparently.

What is the difference between the two, except one of them is when using a staff. So why add the "global" word, it does nothing but add confusion.

In cases where it doesn't say "global", check whether it would apply to something specific. A passive just giving increased crit chance is probably still global, while a weapon or support gem with increased crit chance applies just to that weapon or that supported skill respectively.

Global is generally used to denote that it isn't specific. "20% increased global critical strike chance while wielding a staff" won't just increase your crit chance with staff attacks, it will increase your crit chance with spells while wielding as a staff as well.

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In cases where it doesn't say "global", check whether it would apply to something specific. A passive just giving increased crit chance is probably still global, while a weapon or support gem with increased crit chance applies just to that weapon or that supported skill respectively.

Global is generally used to denote that it isn't specific. "20% increased global critical strike chance while wielding a staff" won't just increase your crit chance with staff attacks, it will increase your crit chance with spells while wielding as a staff as well.

That is how I understood it as well. But I think the issue is that it is probably different people who have written the descriptions or new "terms" have been added during the development and then they probably forgot to update the descriptions.

To me simply using:

"+20% critical chance"
"+20% critical chance when wielding staff"
"+20% spell critical chance"

Would be much easier to understand and no reason to add these different descriptions if they mean the same such as "Global".

Same with the "damage" types, just use 3 terms:

"Direct" - Hits
"Indirect" - DOTs
"All" - Both

"+20% to all chaos damage"
"+20% direct chaos damage"

So I think a huge help would be for them to create some standard way of writing these descriptions and make sure they are followed whenever they add or change them. And then update all the talents with more precise descriptions.

And they could even do it, sort of like how they have done the support gems, so as you select a passive it shows all the gems you have equipped on the side and then when you mouse over them you can see the exact bonuses the passive would give to that gem and if they don't give a bonus just don't show them. Because they already have to calculate these things when people get them so the functionality is already in the game, simply not shown to the player before choosing them.