Iron grip question

I am running a molten strike juggernaut in standard, primarily running maps and such. I was perusing through the passive skill tree and had a question regarding the iron grip passive.

According to the wiki, strength adds 0.2% increased physical damage to melee attacks per point. My strength is currently 533, so if I am interpreting this correctly, I should be receiving an additional 533 x 0.2 points of physical damage to my attacks, or an extra 106.6 damage. Iron grip supposedly adds this damage to projectile attacks; molten strike releases projectiles, so I should also get this base damage added to it as well, right? When I add the iron grip passive in my tree, the dps of molten strike remains unchanged. Am I understanding this skill correctly?

I play self-found only and I have a decent weapon, but my damage is stagnating around 23,000 or so. On some of the higher level maps, this simply isn't enough. Will the iron grip passive make a difference in that number?

Current gem setup is molten strike-faster attacks-added fire damage-increased physical damage. I am also running a lightning golem and herald of ash.

Thank you for any input you may be able to give.

No, you are very fundamentally misunderstanding molten strike. It simultaneously has two different attacks going on: the initial (melee) hit, and the secondary (projectile) hits. The projectiles' damage is also based on your weapon, but it is not based on the hit damage of your initial melee hit.

Your projectiles are currently not benefitting from your strength bonus at all; the tooltip DPS is simply not a good representative of your projectile damage with molten strike. When you add iron grip, your projectiles do gain that bonus, but your initial melee hit gains no additional bonus, so your tooltip correctly remains unchanged.

Edit: damn, ninja'd by viper

Iron grip bonus works as usual on molten strike projectiles but it's hard to tell how much exactly is it helping you without knowing how much increased damage you already had on projectiles. There is a calculator on wiki that can estimate how much dps are the projectiles doing but you need to know the structure of your damage bonuses in detail and enter it properly in the calculator.

Wow, I appreciate the hasty replies!

So I should really take the iron grip passive to up my damage? I haven't really invested much into any projectile damage nodes because I was focusing more on increased armor and staff damage. I have a couple of refund points...should I reallocate into projectile damage?

If you don't spend more than 5-6 points - sure, it's a fairly big bonus though generally not as good as point blank. I would suggest taking weapon passives with molten/lightning/wild strike instead of projectile or melee damage, weapon bonuses will affect both melee and projectile portion and in case of wild strike even damage that is neither melee or projectile.

Such skills are also a bit tricky to support as we don't really have many generic supports for melee skills. A full elemental build can use WED and recently Ele focus, a crit build can go for crit supports but a physical build feels a bit left out if you don't convert all your damage to elemental with physical to lightning, but that makes leeching harder and resistant enemies become a real problem. Multistrike is also a good generic support for all types of molten builds and it also helps smooth out some of the randomness in projectile spread.

weapon (staff) damage will affect both parts (as well as general "damage" or "phys damage")
melee stuff only initial hit
projectile, Area mods will affect only projectile part

Point Blank and Iron Grip are both good. You won't see it on the tool tip, but the increased kill speed will be noticeable. Keep in mind that MS shotguns, so for large single targets the increased projectile damage helps a LOT.

If you use Point Blank, you might want to stay away from increased area radius and increased projectile speed.

WED vs Melee Physical: If you support MS with added elemental, Heralds, Hatred, etc, then WED will come out ahead for the initial hit. For projectile damage the key words are WEAPON Elemental Damage vs MELEE Physical damage. So for the projectiles WED comes out even more ahead.

For pure projectile damage passives, it depends on how close you are. Like if you already have Art of the Gladiator, it wouldn't hurt to take Fury Bolts.

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harddaysnight wrote:

If you use Point Blank, you might want to stay away from increased area radius and increased projectile speed.

They reduced the damage dropoff on point blank in ascendancy so taking a bit of AoE will help your clear speed a lot without messing up the point blank bonus much. Projectile speed has absolutely no effect on the skill.

For molten strike builds that focus on projectiles GMP is also a great support.

I didn't know that projectile speed didn't affect it. As for changing the dropoff for Point Blank, I guess I vaguely remember that. I'm not very good at keeping up with all the changes - which is why I always miss out on the OP skills before they get nerfed.

I haven't played with GMP yet. If I use it I'll have to remove another support. For temporary experiments I could swap it with Faster Attacks since that's my only green.