Elemental and physical explaination.

Hi fellow players,

I'm a new player, started about 2/3 weeks in the abyss league, trying to understand the game a bit more the game each and every day. I principally followed guides for builds, but I wanted to stop, I feel like by blindly following builds you miss a big part of the game, the theorycrafting.

Anyway, I understood the elemental conversion mechanic and the "added as" but I wanted to ask you guys: what's actually the point in going elemental instead of physical ? The frozen/ignite/shock ?
If it is so, what's the point in going physical ?
Maybe one of thoses have a better early game or a late game scaling ?

Thank you for your answers, cheers

Fresh fish fresh fish :3

"

Bahkuul wrote:

Hi fellow players,

I'm a new player, started about 2/3 weeks in the abyss league, trying to understand the game a bit more the game each and every day. I principally followed guides for builds, but I wanted to stop, I feel like by blindly following builds you miss a big part of the game, the theorycrafting.

Anyway, I understood the elemental conversion mechanic and the "added as" but I wanted to ask you guys: what's actually the point in going elemental instead of physical ? The frozen/ignite/shock ?
If it is so, what's the point in going physical ?
Maybe one of thoses have a better early game or a late game scaling ?

Thank you for your answers, cheers

Spoiler

Excuse my bad english, I'm a mere peon, a French *Yikes*

you will have to read a bit more; on physical damage, what it can do while elemental cant.
i assume you know what the elemental aliments does and can boost.
Take note of the damage-type conversion too.
The rest is from experience. Like gems-link, Key nodes and Ascendent nodes.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki
FYI: not the official GGG site.

Your damage that gets converted from physical to elemental will be modified by both types of "increased". You can get more bonus that way.

There are many ways to get higher damage out of converted damage. For example you can use Elemental overload. You can use certain uniques. You can make a better skilltree. Etc. And many skills come with a base conversion of 50 or 60 % to a certain element. You can scale the entire damage much better, if you get the whole skill to convert to this element. (E.g. with the Elemental damage with attacks support, the Elemental Focus support or the elemental penetration support gems, with your jewels, with opal rings and so on and so forth.) Finally some classes benefit more from elemental damage, especially Inquisitor, Chieftain and Elementalist, and when there is a good reason to use that class you want to go 100% elemental with it.

The advantage of physical damage is, that it doesn't require you to deal with the mob's resistances, but typically the advantages of going elemental outweigh this consideration, and Inquisitor nullifies it almost entirely due to his "sexappeal-node" Inevitable judgement.

To add to what's been said already: consider mitigation. Armour mitigates physical damage, whereas elemental resistances mitigate, as you can guess, elemental damage. Evasion allows complete avoidance of both, as long as it's dealt via hits. Monsters will generally have some blend of the above. Bosses have specially tailored blends of the above.

A lot of players go pure physical because it allows them to completely bypass endgame bosses' considerable resistances. However, pure physical damage can be harder to naturally scale. Elemental damage is often the only kind of damage you get out of spells, so spellcasters will care about scaling elemental damage. There are only a few spells that break this rule and deal physical damage. The rest all do some variety of elemental damage.

To further complicate things, converted physical to elemental damage benefits from both physical damage (calculated pre-conversion) and elemental damage (calculated post-conversion). This has been touched on already this thread.

To add YET ANOTHER wrinkle, chaos damage again bypasses both armour AND elemental resistances (though chaos resistance is a thing, obviously), making it ANOTHER potential choice for builds... although its damage scaling passives, and other sources of chaos damage, are even more limited than those for physical damage, so it's even harder to scale.

tl;dr there are lots of reasons to go either way. None is strictly better than the others, you can only judge physical vs elemental vs chaos damage situationally.

Incidentally, Engineering Eternity has a fantastic video on damage conversion, and why it's your friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfQ7m-PW-FA&index=2&list=PL7GqFLebBU8hhXFHepS76EpnouTc8-Jsh