[In depth discussion] How does increased (weapon) elemental damage actually work?

So my main question is how does the effect "increased (weapon) elemental damage actually work if we are comparing an elemental attack such as static strike and a physical attack such as cyclone?

*Cyclone does 100% physical damage.
*Static strike does 40% physical damage and 60% lightning damage.

With support gems such as added fire damage and weapon elemental damage and potions such as Atziri's promise and taste of hate both these skills will deal substantional elemental damage. Looking at the numbers static strike has substatially more elemental damage than cyclone(?).

Since haku can craft 12% "increased weapon elemental damage" on shield, boots, chest and helmet prefixes of a whopping total of 48% increased weapon elemental damage and this prefix can appear on rings, amulets and belts too, this stat can get stacked pretty high!

And if one were to use say http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Doryani%27s_Catalyst (110% elemental damage).
1. Would this make a 300 pdps doryani's superior to many other similair weapon of same pdps range? (Thinking mainly of soul taker)

2. Would static strike be a better choice with say a doryani's catalyst because it scales better with elemental damage?

3. I've heard that cyclone is a "superior" melee skill that most high end player chooses. But after seeing how much elemental damage you can actually pull of on gears, shouldn't abilities such as static strike pull ahead on these cases?

There are two main ways to scale attack damage in PoE, one is to get a high physical dps weapon and scale physical damage and the other is to use a fast weapon with a lot of flat elemental damage added on weapon itself, auras or other gear.

Using a conversion skill like static strike is actually the former, because converted damage and 'physical added as' are based on physical damage you do so they are scaled by both physical and elemental bonuses. As physical damage bonuses scale all damage you do versus only the elemental part, it's more common to scale damage of conversion builds just with physical bonuses, however you can do both if you use hatred ad added fire so your elemental part is high and using WED gem is justified.

1. Yes, a doryani would be superior to many dps-wise stronger weapons.

2. Sure, a conversion skill would generally be a better choice to use with doryani than a 100% pyhsical one.

3. It's hard to beat moving and dealing damage at the same time, a lot of skills outperform cyclone in pure dps, however there's also the utility factor.

For exemple if you have 100% increased physical damage and 60% increased elemental damage, while using Lightning arrow (50% of physical damage converted to lightning damage) you have to calculate like this :


1) First split your physical damage into 50/50 (one gets converted to lighting, the other not)

2) Apply the 100% increased physical damage to the physical part

3) Apply the 100% increased physical damage + 60% increased elemental damage (160% total increase) to the lighting part.

4) Add up the result for the total combined damages.

If you use auras like hatred or Herald of Ashe it gets more complicated because you need to make separate calcultion without splitting the physical damage (they "add x elemental damage based on your physical damage after adding all the increased and more physical multiplier).

So then Hatred would work like this?

(x-x base physical) *

(Hatred Multiplier) *

(Increased multipliers to physcal + multipliers to elemental damage) *

(more multi n°1 ele or phy) *

(more multi n°2 ele or phy) etc...

Thank you, good to know. I knew there was something wrong but the description of the skill doesn't says it is converted damage. And I looked to find an answer to this, but found nothing. So I just assumed its added based on the physical. I guess it makes sens since the only mechanic in this game to get elemental damage from physical is through converted damage (and so on with cold to fire, etc...).