Are the +Damage passive nodes bad?

I often see someone saying that the elemental damage nodes on the Passive tree (both the generic "x% increased elemental damage" ones and the "x% increased y damage" ones) are bad and should be avoided.

Is that true? Why?

I often get the feeling that people claim it's more adviseable to focus on life nodes instead of damage nodes in general, is that it?

Or is it a matter of critical strike chance nodes being better than damage nodes?

Part of it is that life is very important. Also, it's pretty inefficient to stack too much increased damage. If you already have 300% total increased damage (from tree, gear, gems, etc), another 10% increased won't do much - bringing you from 400% total damage to 410% is only 2.5% more damage than you were doing before. At some point, it's a lot more efficient to get something else, like survivability, attack/cast speed, crit, etc.

Generally, you only want to get the most efficient increased damage nodes and put the rest of your points in something else.

Those dmg nodes you are speaking about do just increase a bit your paper dps and do nothing else. There are much better ways to spend passive points: ie. getting to important notable passives or keystone passives. This results in a better performance.

But, to say it in short words: Paper DPS is in PoE most widely pointless.

Damage passives are very good but only efficient ones, it depends 100% on the build.

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_poz_ wrote:

Also, it's pretty inefficient to stack too much increased damage. If you already have 300% total increased damage (from tree, gear, gems, etc), another 10% increased won't do much - bringing you from 400% total damage to 410% is only 2.5% more damage than you were doing before.

Still, damage is scaling linearly (is this even a word in english?).
Going from +150% increased damage to 160% or from 400% to 410%, you still get the same absolute number added to your DpS.

Imho it's totally worth it to stack damage in the tree, but only after you got enough life, defenses, etc.

im with peter and chunda, balanced build, take defenses where the point spend is efficient, take damage where the point spend is efficient, a well rounded character usually has a decent amount of both.

There are exactly zero endgame viable builds allowing to perform well and made of just some good items and tons of pure dmg/life/es nodes on the tree.

Absolutely EVERY good build relies on something special and is built around it. And to buff this special, I'll name it "build enabling" feature, you need to take long ways on skill tree to get to areas containing needed notables/keystones.

Sure, sometimes you have some "spare" passive points to invest in something temporary "nice", because you dont have enough points to get where you wanna come later. But is it smart, to have not enough points to make your build work, because you spent them into pointless dmg passives?

Again: It is imo not helpful, to answer a question coming from somebody new to the game with such an answer "depends on your build". He wanna understand it deeper, I think.

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bersi23 wrote:

There are exactly zero endgame viable builds allowing to perform well and made of just some good items and tons of pure dmg/life/es nodes on the tree.

Absolutely EVERY good build relies on something special and is built around it.

This is one of my current melee builds




it obliterates 78 maps wth virtually any mods. Whats the special thing it relies on that isnt just standard damage, life and defense nodes?

Although you have many pure dmg passives in direct access, you didnt take them and instead took long ways, "wasting" passives, to other areas containing needed notable passives and special passives like +block, +evasion, +attack speed etc.

So what exactly did you want to say with your well geared and smart planned build? Your posted build is everything else but not a dead collection of pure dmg nodes - you have a low dmg but high survivability tank - thats the "special feature" of your build, thats what you built around.

But I think, we all discuss about something different as thread opener wanted to know - he was asking about elemental dmg passives.

I think you're missing what the OP is asking. Even attack speed nodes and damage notables count as dps passives. Nobody takes pure damage passives because they simply aren't efficient. Instead they take damage passives that end in notables. A single notable is worth about 2-3 dps passives. In the end it all comes down to efficiency.


Ele damage passives are bad, because they just suck, point for point. Also, a lot of builds also utilize chaos damage as well(spell builds with added chaos gem) or are mainly phys based with scaling ele damage, in these cases it is inefficient. ALso, nodes of a specific element are bad because it is rare to be using only a single element at a time.

Getting damage nodes is very much important, you just have to do it efficiently, as you can see with snorkle's build. Crit is just another way of scaling dps. If your base damage is low, all the crit chance and multi will do nothing to help you.