Add some ailment effect for Physical Damage?

Just wondering is it a good idea to add some aliment effect for Physical Damage to compete with Elemental Damage.

When critical damage happens, elemental damage can apply ailment effect on mobs, burning for fire, chill and frozen for ice and shocking for lightning.
But for physical damage, nothing happens when dealing a critical damage.
Althouth there are some methods coverting phys dmg to ele dmg, but I still think that phys dmg should own its unique ailment effect.

Here are some possible effects:
1. Knock Back: Good for range chars, but may be not desired by melee chars.
2. Lock: Similar effect as Bear Trap. Again good ailment for range chars.
3. Bleeding: Dealing DoT on Mobs. Useful for both range and melee to add dmg. But seems a little duplicated with Burning. Can also add some effect like puncture: More physical dmg on bleeding enemies.
4. Longer Duration Stun: Critical phys dmg on enemy can cause stun, which is longer than normal ones. Useful for both range and melee builds.
5. Cripple: Something like enfeeble. Enemy deal less dmg during cripple. A good buff for melee chars, taking less dmg against enemies.

There are still many possible ailment that can be added for phys dmg.
AFAIK, though nerfed in the last patch, ele dmg is still superior than phy dmg. And with the exsiting of Resolution Technique and phys dmg reflection, Critical Builds are no better than RT builds.
Adding some ailment for phys dmg that will be triggered by critical can somehow buff phys dmg.

Hope GGG can consider this suggestion!

Physical just feels worse off. Especially Dual Wield, noncleave.

Take Dual Strike for example. It is two separate attacks for terms of calculations, then added for one piece of damage. (Suffers in terms of armor reduction and therefore leech)

Then you have Whirling Blades. An 80% damage ability, that only hits one target a single time, with a random weapon chosen for each hit. It has an awkward "Cast Time" and a habit of causing desync.

And Cyclone, what could've very well saved a physical melee build. It attacks twice per spin, might as well not dual wield, since that means that it alternates weapons for those two hits per spin. Even more ridiculous interaction with desync, and 40% damage effectiveness. Fast dual wield physical only weapons will be reduced more strictly than a slower weapon. (Armor punishes you for dealing less damage more quickly) And that means your leech falls off as well.

But none of this really matters, as the game is currently so focused on spamming one ability that clears whole waves like it's a joke. Possibly monsters should actually have immunities to certain damage types, or better yet, absorb certain damage types. Yes I understand that would punish a single attack that deals three elements at the same time, but then again, look at discharge. Another possibility I could see, is going as far as eliminating armor effectiveness from melee attacks. Even if something along these lines happened, the massive disparity between simply being ranged versus simply being melee, it probably wont matter.


(Dear GGG, please make it so it's more worth while to use multiple abilities rather than focusing on one. Like a Meteor-Orb sorc / Fireball-Blizzard sorc or something along those lines, at least.)

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wdmshmo wrote:

(Dear GGG, please make it so it's more worth while to use multiple abilities rather than focusing on one. Like a Meteor-Orb sorc / Fireball-Blizzard sorc or something along those lines, at least.)

It is relatively difficult for one char focus on two or more attacting skill. The gem-link mechanism just make it harder.

No one interest in this suggestion?
Or most players are already disappointed with physical damage?

I like the idea of physical crits causing 'concussion' or 'hamstrung' or some such that works like a mini Enfeeble. This would be very helpful to survivability, especially for high-Evasion melee characters who really need some love at the moment. I think a defensive effect would be a lot more useful than an offensive effect, because physical weapon users already have plenty of opportunity to boost their damage by spending passives; it's only their defensive weakness that prevents them from doing this.

Whatever effect it has, it's important that the effect (either in intensity or in duration) scales with physical damage and needs to meet some minimum threshold to trigger. Otherwise it becomes a huge gift to fast-attacking builds that do mostly elemental damage with a tiny bit of physical. Vulnerability should give it an additional chance to trigger (still subject to the threshold and scaling), like the single-element curses do for their respective ailments.

Right now, according to VictorDoom and GGG_Neon, monsters have almost no armour or resists, and instead have a lot of life.

It should be a lot more common for monsters to have substantial armour and resists, but less life. This would cause physical crits dealt by players to have the same bonus as physical crits done by monsters — more armour is penetrated, and the critical does significantly more critical damage than you might suspect. It would also raise the stock of resistance-penetrating curses instead of purely defensive ones (Enfeeble, Temporal Chains).

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Right now, according to VictorDoom and GGG_Neon, monsters have almost no armour or resists, and instead have a lot of life.

I was under the impression that elemental resists on monsters could be quite substantial, it's just that players can destroy them with curses and penetration. You're right about armour though. If physical damage builds have a problem right now offensively in PvM, it's in terms of raw damage (and being less adept at shock stacking than their elemental counterparts), not the effects of armour.

Well after increasing monster armour, you'd want to decrease monster life (and ES). After decreasing monster life, to make it so elemental (and chaos) don't have a field day, you'd want to increase monster resistances. Personally, I'd balance the changes around the less resistant monsters; the more resistant monsters would often get near-immunity, but that's what penetration is for.