Confused about Wild Strike Mechanics and Jewel Effects

Wild Strike is a complicated skill, and I still have not been able to find a comprehensive description of the mechanics. All I really know is that it is extremely fun to play, has the potential for great clear speed, and makes for a great tank build when extremely fast and utilizing LGoH ;)

I have a system that I use when shopping for jewels. I make a list of the potential mods that I want (ias, phys%, crit multi, etc). I then roll jewels that contain only one of these mods and stick them into my tree to see what happens to my dps. I plug the values into a spread sheet and calculate the increase in dps that I get for each 1% of each mod. This is handy because I can calculate the total effect that different jewels will have on my dps before I actually purchase them.

In any case, I was doing this for my Wild Striker and came across a bit of an anomaly with respect to crit multi. I noticed that these mods have the exact same effect on my dps (+28.6 dps per 1%):

#% Increased Critical Strike Multiplier with One Handed Melee Weapons
#% Increased Critical Strike Multiplier with Lightning Skills
#% Increased Critical Strike Multiplier with Fire Skills
#% Increased Critical Strike Multiplier with Cold Skills

This was a pleasant surprise because, while the skill description says "Melee, Lightning, Cold, Fire" I wasn't sure if all would apply to the entire skill. This allows doubling up with Wild Strike :)

However, the strange part is that when I test with this mod:

#% Increased Critical Strike Multiplier with Elemental Skills

I would have expected this mod to have the same effect as the others, but it gives +86 dps per 1%, which is nearly 3x better than the others!

Can someone explain the mechanics of Wild Strike and/or Crit Multi that accounts for this difference? Is it most likely a miscalculation in my tooltip dps? A bug?

A possibility that occurred to me is that the "elemental skill" applys the crit multi to my aura damage (Hatred, HoA). However, this wouldn't make sense because any of the crit multi mods above should be applying the multiplier to all damage done by Wild Strike. Besides, the Cold Skill and One Handed Melee mods have the same effect (Hatred is cold skill), so again, it wouldn't make sense.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Crit Mult with Elemental Skill is bugged, and applies multiple times. It'll be fixed with the next patch.

Damn, I already bought and stuffed my skill tree with these jewels haha. Thanks for the info.

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Cherd wrote:

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Vipermagi wrote:

Crit Mult with Elemental Skill is bugged, and applies multiple times. It'll be fixed with the next patch.

Damn, I already bought and stuffed my skill tree with these jewels haha. Thanks for the info.

Oh, it'll still be very good, just not bugged anymore :P

A little off topic, I had a look at your build, and you've taken a bunch of passives, and used one jewel that says "increased melee damage" - this affects your initial hit but not the effects afterwards as the explosion, wave, and arc have the tag attack but not melee

Now what I'm not sure about is whether jewels that say "increased melee crit multi" apply to the attack in general, or just the part of the attack with the melee tag

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themoleium wrote:

A little off topic, I had a look at your build, and you've taken a bunch of passives, and used one jewel that says "increased melee damage"

If you saw Melee Damage on jewels in my tree, then the jewels shown are the ones that I used to level. I've purchased jewels with, and I'm planning to use jewels that focus on crit multi, as this is the biggest dps increase for me (according to tooltip).

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themoleium wrote:

Now what I'm not sure about is whether jewels that say "increased melee crit multi" apply to the attack in general, or just the part of the attack with the melee tag

The assumption that I've been working under is that "Melee Phys" only applies to the initial hit, but the elemental damage scales off of the initial phys hit so the elemental damage is increased accordingly. However, "melee damage" applies to all damage done by Wild Strike. I could be wrong, but then again, it's hard to know these things without a proper description of Wild Strike mechanics available.

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Cherd wrote:

The way that I understand it is that "Melee Phys" only applies to the initial hit, but "melee damage" applies to all damage done by Wild Strike. I could be wrong, but then again, it's hard to know these things without a proper description of Wild Strike mechanics available.

You have its damage properties on wiki

Initial hit - melee, attack
explosion - fire, AoE, attack
ice wave - cold, projectile, attack
arc - lightning, chaining, attack

So, 'melee damage', 'melee crit' and similar will apply on to the initial hit, but 'damage with melee weapon' or 'crit with melee weapon' bonuses will work on everything because there is no damage type requirement, you can deal any kind of damage as long as you do it with a melee weapon.

That said, Wild strike was a cause for much speculation prior to release, as that's the first attack skill available to us that can deal attack damage that is neither melee or projectile, previously it had to be one of the two.

The elemental effects scale off of the initial physical hit, 60% converted to elemental. The aoe cold, light, and fire portions deal the same damage as the initial hit? Right?

Melee Phys% increases the physical damage of the initial hit, so by extension, does it not also increase the elemental damage? Increased Melee Damage% increases the phys, which scales to elemental, and then the elemental is also scaled.

These have been my assumptions thus far. Melee Phys% is not as good as other damage increases (1h weapon%, melee%, damage%), but I assumed that it still scaled the elemental damage indirectly, so I haven't totally avoided it on my tree. Am I wrong?

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Cherd wrote:

The elemental effects scale off of the initial physical hit

This premise is false, their damage is scaled separately, they don't deal the same damage, they just have the same base amount. If you had some item that made you do zero melee damage you would still be able to damage enemies with secondary effects even though initial hit would do nothing except enable secondary effects to happen.

Very few skills have a damage dependency between effects. They usually create a number of damage effects, each having a set of properties and each of them scaled separately by any bonuses with the same properties.