Elemental attack builds are still way too far behind compared to physical builds

Mostly because the impale mechanics. Even after all the impale nerfs, an impale champion still dishes out ridiculous damage while being extremely tanky. Previously, impale was over the top and your damage would overkill anything. Now, it just kills anything just right.

Elemental builds? Need a ton of investment, still lack in the damage department and are extremely fragile. It's another league where I have been baited to make a deadeye when I could have gone impale bow champion, be twice as tanky and melt absolutely everything. Even with the deadeye rework, it's still horribly bad and the defenses are still unreliable. You can technically become tanky with various investments, such as acrobatics, wind dancer, wind ward etc. but that only works if you have a ton of evasion AND health to begin with.

Do people at ggg care anymore about balance? It's been like this since impale was introduced and monsters overbuffed. They nerfed everything bow related, while buffing/not touching physical builds in the process while quadrupling the life of the monsters. Abyss jewels aren't what they used to be anymore, a lot of elemental nodes on the tree were nerfed for some fkin reason, life nodes still grant 4% life instead of 5% in a game where you get hit anyway, so being a ranger and hitting things from distance isn't an advantage anymore.

I can go on, but I'll just go and create an impale champion that can kill uber elder with a budget of 2 exalts. Great game ggg.

I'm not asking for more impale nerfs, but can elemental bow builds receive some love for god sake? Everything related to them is watered down / overnerfed / not good enough.

To be honest Bow builds got a gigantic buff with Deadeye this patch.

Single target and AoE clear for my guild mates that all play elemental bow mf builds doubled. +2 Arrows as well yeah..

Farshot providing 60% more damage from distance plus barrage no spread is insane. All you need to do is stack as much elemental abyss jewels as you can the damage will ramp up quite significantly with bows. Even the current Abyss jewel implementation is very big.

Elemental bow builds are more than fine. If anything GGG needs to pay attention so that the scaling of flat elemental damage from abyss jewels and other sources with high attack speed bows doesnt get out of hand.

Elemental attack still scales off phys with added phys as X element all over the tree. It's still got the most tactically useful ailments. It can abuse EE to crank out silly amounts of boost (and add in Trinity for even more shenanigans).

It's by no means down for the count.

Phys got a huge buff going into 3.7, with a lot of melee skills getting a facelift and weapon attack damage getting buffs on several uniques.

At the same time, some elemental skills *coughstrikeskills* got some of the most dire in a series of nerfs: Molten Strike and Frost blades lost contact with the ground, Shrapnel Shot died to become the equally unimpressive Galvanic Arrow, new attack animations and animation cancelling glitches made big bonks like Smite and Glacial Hammer feel like dogshit, and subsequent updates stripped Tornado Shot of a useful internal glitch and half of its secondary projectile damage.

The last nail in the coffin was the scrapping of the Wildfire threshold jewel and scaling freeze and chill effect to % of boss health (which is substantially higher than it was when landing crits and raw damage largely determined freezes).

In addition, a lot of tree nodes that used to enable double-dipping and selective conversion now only allow conversion to the element you're already doing the most damage in, or conversion to a random element. Combat focus is still around to help you with wild strike/elehit, but it's no means the strongest use of a jewel socket.

(Compared to phys attack damage, which clearly benefits from clusters far above any marginal benefit from threshold jewels - this makes pure phys rather costly to spec)

Eventually the pendulum will swing the other way. Alt quality bow skills with extra projectiles or extra forking/chaining are redefining the go-to skills for deadeye, and Lightning Strike got an unequivocal buff as well as a conditional one in its alt-quality versions. Even wanders have gotten some extra mileage out of alt-quality scattershot skills with extra proj and chains.

Sustain: i totally feel you when you say the tankiness isn't there for element skills. It's real common to roll a natural "phys attack damage leeched as life/mana" on weps and jewels. Literally the only way you can get element damage leech is with temple, delve, or some other boutique mod on a dropped item.

This has people picking up vaal pact to leech adequately while using element attacks, and anytime they can't leech they are basically hosed.

It could be in a better place, honestly, a lot of elemental attack skills got scuffed badly over the last year or so and need some love again.

Its a straight point efficiency problem, Phys is superior because it doesn't require a full stat (penetration).

Those points are why phys builds tend to be tankier because they have the points available, warcries and strength being superior to dex exacerbate this imbalance.

The damage is there though and if your willing to jump through enough hoops its even superior. For SC the balance is fine, for HC ele builds usually end up on the squishy side of acceptable.

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crunkatog wrote:

It could be in a better place, honestly, a lot of elemental attack skills got scuffed badly over the last year or so and need some love again.

If we ignore bows and look at elemental attacks then elemental Strike Skills really got gutted beyond believe i think melee Strike skills need some love in general.

Not 100% sure on this but i think Lightningstrike can shotgun now with AC. I am doing more single target damage with ancestral call setup then with a damage support. I think if you stand a bit away from the enemy you can hit him with your projectiles and the melee hits from the AC at the same time, can't explain it otherwise.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Not 100% sure on this but i think Lightningstrike can shotgun now with AC. I am doing more single target damage with ancestral call setup then with a damage support. I think if you stand a bit away from the enemy you can hit him with your projectiles and the melee hits from the AC at the same time, can't explain it otherwise.

Impale? It adds damage to every hit... even little ones from AC.

It's a HoWa build with pretty much only lightning damage, so no, impale can't be the reason.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Its a straight point efficiency problem, Phys is superior because it doesn't require a full stat (penetration).

Those points are why phys builds tend to be tankier because they have the points available, warcries and strength being superior to dex exacerbate this imbalance.

The damage is there though and if your willing to jump through enough hoops its even superior. For SC the balance is fine, for HC ele builds usually end up on the squishy side of acceptable.

GGG did add 'overwhelm physical damage reduction' as a stat some patches ago, so this isn't entirely true. I don't know where the arms race is at exactly but it doesn't seem too bad to me.

@OP a bit of a strange criticism to say that Deadeye can only be tanky by stacking defensive layers...everyone has to do that :P

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demonstorm wrote:

Mostly because the impale mechanics. Even after all the impale nerfs, an impale champion still dishes out ridiculous damage while being extremely tanky. Previously, impale was over the top and your damage would overkill anything. Now, it just kills anything just right.


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Could you maybe please eloberate how impale is so powerful , asking as someone who hasn't played poe much since introduction of impale . Also i do agree that elemental attack builds dont get love . Maybe the issue is because of dmg convertion works in poe . Say phys can go to 800 to 1000 on high ends and pure single element can only go upto 600 on average . This will severely limit its potential if its not converted or how we call it double dip. Because if it goes to 1000 dps on fire alone it will create massive balance problem.

For example a pure phys will never double dip like a spell converted from phys to light to cold to fire . Although the converting process needs investment if the gap in brackets is large it will out dps a phys by many magnitude.

Atleast thats how i think ele hit builds will never shine.