Bow damage is meant to be elemental?

Started a ranger couple of days ago, leveled a bit, had fun and decided to look at some builds. And what I see is that everyone is going for elemental damage and skipping right over physical bow damage nodes. Why is that?

I understand that it works, but I don't see it (yet) why does it work better than increasing physical bow damage? For example, "8% increased physical damage with bows" should be better than "10% increased elemental damage" with burning/lightning arrow that only affects the converted half of bow physical damage.

Educate me please :)

I went elemental by design, starting at Templar. When I chose to do so, it was easy to get elemental damage on rings, amulets and gloves, it's not so easy now. That's probably the biggest reason elemental was popular among bow users.

For a fresh build with no legacy gear, going physical is an excellent idea, it's just too hard to get decent elemental damage bonuses on gear and they nerfed it harder by spreading out the elemental nodes and making them weaker.

it's a mana related tradeoff.

The highest possible DPS readout comes from a thicket bow with max cold/lit/fire mods and a +%IAS suffix. But that's EXTREMELY mana inefficient. I haven't done the math to see how the "retuning" affected bows, but I suspect the thicket bow still dominates.

The issue is, if you can make your attacks more mana efficient, sometimes you can fit in another DPS link in favor of one of your mana links. Or you can trade out resource passives for DPS passives. If you can do that, a slow bow with %IPD/physi/IAS might play better against your build, or even give you higher overall DPS.

Hard to make a direct comparison.

Example: raw damage per affix.
------------------------------

Thicket bow with max "Blasting": 24 - 42 fire damage.
33 damage for one affix
1.55*33 = 51 dps for one affix

Spine bow (23 - 69 dmg) with:
Quality (27.6 - 82.8 dmg, 110.4 avg, 1.35 APS)
Max "tempered": 23 - 40 physi (31.5 avg)
Max "cruel": 149% IPD
New average damage is: 2.49*(27.6 + 82.8 + 23 + 40)/2 215.9
105.5 dmg for two affixes (215.9-110.4)
53 damage per affix.

So you see the physi affixes on a slower bow are more resource efficient.

71 DPS per affix (53*1.35)
So you see the stacked physi mods are worth more DPS per affix on a slow weapon, than the elemental mods are worth per affix on a fast weapon.

But because its APS is so much higher the thicket bow will wind up giving you a higher DPS reading. Can you even it out? If you're able to take skills out of mana and put them in some other DPS stat, yeah.

Thank you for a very thorough reply, Zakaluka. In my gameplay I prefer less clicking, so going for a slower and harder-hitting bow seems like a good fit with my interest in physical bow damage.

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Winenose wrote:

Thank you for a very thorough reply, Zakaluka. In my gameplay I prefer less clicking, so going for a slower and harder-hitting bow seems like a good fit with my interest in physical bow damage.

You can leech more that way too, since most leech mods only trigger for physical damage.