Kinetic blast projectile VS area damage

Kinetic blast has 2 components:
-an initial projectile
-4 resultant aoe explosions at 75% the damage of the initial projectile.


If I have a jewel with 12% increased area damage. Does this mean only the resultant 4 explosions per projectile launched will benefit from the damage but the initial projectile does not? Is this why area damage does not change tooltip damage?

If I have a jewel with 12% increased projectile damage does this only affect the initial projectile and not the resultant explosions or does it affect both?

If I had to choose between one for damage output, not tooltip should I really be using area damage instead since most of the damage is in fact coming from GMP+chain explosions?

Projectile damage will affect everything so it's usually the best choice for projectile skill users.

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Nephalim wrote:

If I have a jewel with 12% increased area damage. Does this mean only the resultant 4 explosions per projectile launched will benefit from the damage but the initial projectile does not? Is this why area damage does not change tooltip damage?

of course. initial projectile is not AoE, right?

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If I have a jewel with 12% increased projectile damage does this only affect the initial projectile and not the resultant explosions or does it affect both?

both

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If I had to choose between one for damage output, not tooltip should I really be using area damage instead since most of the damage is in fact coming from GMP+chain explosions?

Id prefer the one that scales both. Unless the AoE one is much stronger

Well, the issue is that I am trying to find optimal jewels for the build and area damage + projectile can spawn on the same jewel as affixes so I would need to understand how much of my total damage output is area damage and If I could potentially use it in place of projectile damage at not much true damage output loss.

Can I say for example 9% projectile damage is about equal to 12% area damage in terms of final damage output or is it really just too complicated to compare the 2 side by side?

Reason being is that I can potential get attack speed + life + area damage instead of attack speed + life + projectile which tends to be very rare.

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Nephalim wrote:

Reason being is that I can potential get attack speed + life + area damage instead of attack speed + life + projectile which tends to be very rare.

I wouldn't get too picky and pay three times more for a projectile damage jewel, the difference is small anyway as most of your damage is AoE.