Why do spells have fixed damage?

What I hate with spell gems vs non spell gems is that non spell one are front loaded.

Most of them give a solid %X at lvl 1 and raise that by +1% with each level. So when you get a new non spell skill and start to level it, it is more or less useful right away.

New spell gems are useless until you get them to top current level (which is another problem as gems don't level fast enough; if you lead in level far enough your lvl 1 skill gems can never catch up). Damage of spells jumps a lot between levels of skill gems which also adds to this problem.

I am totally with you guys here.
Spell damage is a big problem right now.

The problem is not only does it only depend on the gem, but the bigger problem is the skill tree right now.

The last few days i wanted to play a fire/firestorm witch.
Now while it was very strong in the beginning, it started to lack power later on in Merciless.
The problem here is not the base damage on firestorm, which is quite high, but the improvement you can get from your passives.

Lets look at this basic build:
Basic spell damage build

It has all normal spelldamage nodes skilled.
The paths may not be optimal but it takes a total of 32 points to get them starting at the Witch.
But wait, that is only a total of 59% spell damage we get from passives.

For comparison a basic marauder build:
Marauder single hand build
It has 56% Melee Physical for Onehanded weapons.
With 7 points!!


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But back to my firestorm witch.
I pretty much skilled all spell and fire elemental damage skills i could find, and still had only a very slow kill speed.
I also have 140% Spell damage total on my wand and focus.
Still the only way i could clear the waterfall cave was using Concentrated Area on my firestorm. This effectively limits the spell on very small groups if not single non-movng targets.

The obvious move is to take spell crit chance and up the damage further, but with firestorm at 5%(or less, i don't know) that is no easy task.

I then started reskilling to Icespear. From level 6 on icespear was surpassing Firestorm by far with me having all these fire passives and no crit passives.
IceSpear also has this LARGE crit bonus if you are far enough away from the enemy.
Crit chance is here the way to go.


Long story short: I still have about 8 fire specific nodes, which i will reskill to crit chance and damage because if you want a Spell-witch you have to play a IceSpear witch...

Sadly.

Perhaps Int needs a New Modifier , that will
be benificial to all skills.

Every so many Int adds 1% Spell damage.

or every int adds X spell damage.

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Now if every Int adds 0.1 Damage.
every 10 is 1.

every 100 Int adds 10 Damage.

say they have +150% spell damage.

every 100 int is adding 25 Damage.

--

If every 10 int is adding 1% spell damage

100 Int adds 10% Spell damage.

Say they have a 1000 Point damaging spell.
with their +150% , so thats a base of i guess
425 , 100 int makes it +160% is about 1105 damage.

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So a percentage addage from Int makes a larger contribution at a higher level.

but makes an insignificant change at low level.

so perhaps even both.

1 Int adds 0.1 Damage
10 Int adds +1% spell damage.

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But to turn around and do this , it would
mean that Dex and Str will require some sort of additive.

Perhaps for Strength , every 10 Strength adds
0.05 % Max HP Regen.

and Dex every 10 adds projectile speed , or attack speed

The way i see it, Spell damage on wands has to be "more damage" like on weapons instead of increased damage.

I know the mod on weapons is "increased physical damage", but the way it is premultiplied on the base damage makes it essentially more damage.

We need that for spells too, except for icespear, that is strong enough already