Monster Mitigation: Physical vs Elemental

Right now most attack builds except for marauder starts do more tooltip DPS building elemental than physical. It looks like a glaring imbalance, but that would be ignoring factors beyond mere tooltip DPS.

So I was wondering if we could figure out even some approximate numbers on the effectiveness of monster armor mitigation vs. their elemental mitigation.

Do monsters have greatly varying armor like they do resists? Or is there a certain armor # that is 'standard' for a certain lvl of monster?

For elemental, every monster has one 'main' resist (75%?). Are their other resists 0 or some medium amount? If we guess that every monster has one 75% resist and the other two at 25%, then that's around 42% avg resist. Factor in the few enemies that have resist all and you could put that average at 45-50%.

If a player is doing large enough hits to almost negate monster armor, then the physical vs elemental comparison starts to look a lot better.

(Penetration gems swing things back toward elemental, but it is difficult for an ele build to assemble only 1 damage type on their gear, and it takes a support slot. Elemental Weakness also makes for a far superior pure DPS curse than Vulnerability, but it's hard to compare it to commonly used curses that give utility/defense.)

I'm going to guess the silence means nobody has any idea :p (and I don't expect any GGG people to tell me).

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aimlessgun wrote:

I'm going to guess the silence means nobody has any idea :p (and I don't expect any GGG people to tell me).

The issue with pinning this down, is exactly how armor interacts while mitigating damage.


Once you exceed a mobs "Armor" point, you begin to do basically, irresisted damage (We're talking less then 5% mitigation, from around 50%, within 100 or so damage) So basically, all phys users need to do is hit a certain damage number, and they see a huge increase in damage. Where as elemental damage increases linearly, against mobs.

Its also fair to point out, that most mobs (2/3rds) have lower armor numbers, while (1/3rd) have higher armor numbers, due to their natural stat alignments.

Well im currently running an ethereal knives build. It can mow down large packs faster than any skill in the game. So physical damage skills are definitely alive and well.

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bilbobeastlybaggins wrote:

Well im currently running an ethereal knives build. It can mow down large packs faster than any skill in the game. So physical damage skills are definitely alive and well.

The issue is theres literally a wall there. Below a certain damage number vs the mobs, you do little to no damage, compared to ele, hit a certain number, and you get to exceeding said ele damage. Its like a T-Totter, very little middle ground.

With elemental status effects, the only reason you'd build around physical damage is for leech.

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BRavich wrote:

With elemental status effects, the only reason you'd build around physical damage is for leech.

Or any other myriad of reasons you didn't list, including that:

Phys builds get freeze from hatred, burn from AFD, both of which scale off of your physical damage.

Ele damage boosts being much harder to come by then physical for 3/6 of the classes.

As stated above, physical snowballs heavily, where as ele serves steadily, but does not have near the snow-ball factor.

Among a few others.

(PS Leech is a big, big big big big thing btw.)

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EpsiIon wrote:

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aimlessgun wrote:

I'm going to guess the silence means nobody has any idea :p (and I don't expect any GGG people to tell me).

The issue with pinning this down, is exactly how armor interacts while mitigating damage.

Yeah, I wish we had some idea of the enemy armor numbers so we could find out if most decently geared characters are hitting this point, or only 2hers are, or what.

And this is exactly why this game is so interesting because there are so many factors to take in consideration when trying to calculate something.

As pointed out physical damage is really good, and with the buffed phys damage nodes you can easily get 100%+ phys damage and then add the bonus from strength, the melee support does MORE DAMAGE not increased damage and same for melee damage on full life and you have added fire damage and hatred.