Want to fix phys dam VS ele dam GAP?! Here is how.

As many of us who have had literally hundreds of combined levels between our various characters are well aware of... ELEMENTAL damage is thee clear cut superior choice in almost every single category/build/weapon choice.

Many of us love our ELE weapons and their is nothing wrong with them. The problem is that gearing towards ELEMENTAL damage is practically forced upon people because if they choose to go for a pure physical build they are just hurting their damage output.

Elemental damage is perfectly balanced in my opinion. What we need is a new keystone passive that does something along the lines of "Removes all elemental damage, in favor of an XX multiplier to all physical damage."

What this would do is actually make people who want to play pure physical damage characters actually viable.



The problem, or should I say the huge performance gap, between the elemental and physical damage is that one scales very well while the other one only gets weaker in time. And this problem is compounded because elemental damage only increases when you increase your physical damage but not vice versa.



Take GLACIAL HAMMER for example: Besides the freezing aspect of it... The skill takes your physical damage, and converts half of it to elemental. Now this elemental portion of it, can be further multiplied by several factors. Where as if a player wanted to play a pure physical character using something like SPLIT ARROW they could never augment their skill for further damage increase.

Now it feels to me as if the devs realize this effect this late in the game and have begun balancing the game around it; creating a scenario where they make elemental damage and it's modifiers an "end game" addition to your character.

But what choice is that really? That's more of a funnel. I'm willing to bet that if the developers had access to hidden data, such as what percentage of players are using what skills with what support skills... They would see a very large demographic of players using the red support gem "Increased elemental damage"

Now the scenario we have now is that the support gem has become a defacto choice for everyone. You might as well remove it from the game and give everyone that built in elemental damage.


As I said, in my opinion their is nothing wrong with the elemental damage and it's clear cut superiority. It's just an observation I noticed which is alarming. This game pride's itself on it's limitless player choice yet I see a scenario in the future where everyone is funneled into clear cut right and wrong choices.

I feel that if the developers were to introduce the keystone passive I suggested or one similar to it... It would do a great deal to create an atmosphere of more choice.

And this says nothing about doing ELEMENTAL damage versus Physical damage to actual targets...

We all know how armor works in this game. Monsters will always take far more elemental damage to them as the game currently is because of their relatively "low" resistance levels in comparison to their armor levels.



The only hope a pure physical player has is to use the slowest possible physical weapon to mitigate the damage lost to the enemy armor. Not to mention invest an in proportional amount of their moneys into the equipment they where.

Only to have an elemental character invest a fraction of the cost into their fresh character and outperform.

While I like your keystone, the problem is there aren't many options to boost physical damage through gems. Physical bow builds have been begging for something for month. When added fire damage is as popular as added melee on physical builds there's a problem. We need more physical damage gems, badly, also not limited to melee as well.

Also it doesn't help that shit like cleave doesn't have an elemental reduction but does get a physical one. LS + MS only reduces melee damage but doesn't reduce the projectiles.

It all warps people into going to elemental damage because even physical based builds spend most of their time converting the damage over anyways.

I, like you, think elemental damage is fine, if physical damage could compare. It's another situation for me where they aren't consistent. Either one is too powerful and needs a nerf, or one is too weak and needs a buff. Leaving it as the status quo for so long doesn't make sense.

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flab wrote:

Armour penetration support would help out low-mid physical damage users a lot.

The big separating factor then is the combined effect of attack speed and criticals, status ailments. Physical is purely defensive in that sense, although it has the implicit piercing effect due to armour. I'd still say shock and freeze wins though.

My problem with this is it does little to help heavy hit builds and just further boosts high APS builds which are among the most viable melee builds. Hard hitters blow through most armor anyways but it's hard to get enough to really one shot things at higher levels without incredible gear.

I really think physical needs higher base damage at this point. If a weapon doesn't have 150% IPD and a flat roll it's basically useless because you need such high damage to keep progressing.

God I miss my sweep build being good. While I like high speed shit, I miss one hit KOs!

Ya I see where you are coming from. I've just wanted to make high physical builds work and they just haven't been functioning as well as my elemental builds have. Then again, melee in general is so aggravating I can't believe I still bother to try and make it work.

Heavy strikes damage effectiveness is 150% on top of %physical per level and quality adds in attack speed.

I would think Heavy strike+melee spash+ multistrike+ melee physical damage would give you enough damage alone.

You would use a 2h weapon because even though high aps weapons show more damage we all know it doesn't penetrate the armor as well.

Your gear would be crit and attack speed based along with any +physical you can get.

get yourself a high pd ezomyte staff and you have yourself some block chance as well + a decent base crit.

then you have vulnerability and temporal chains to help.

You can even use the increased critical chance gem.

since you are going to have so much physical damage you may as well use vaal pact in order to take advantage of all that leech.