A comprehensive list of all the reasons physical damage sucks compared to ele

1. Passive support. Weapon Elemental Damage has two clusters, giving, respectively, 50% increased WED over 3 nodes and 30% WED over 3 nodes. The former is also very close to Static Blows, a must-have passive for many elemental builds that offers an incredibly potent effect physical has no analogue to, while the latter is straight on the path almost all Rangers will end up taking, and reasonably close to the duelist area most Marauders go for, along with it being near the awesome thick skin node. Meanwhile, the melee physical damage nodes are all either weapon-specific or few and far between, usually near the starting areas of various characters - limited utility.

2. Status ailments. Each element has its own potent status-inflicting element - even burn can be massively effective with the correct support. I don't have to tell you how amazing shock and freeze are, you've all seen Kripp. What does physical have? Stun? Sometimes? Against weaker enemies? This would make sense if elemental damage needed the help, but...

3. IAS Support. Physical damage mods on weapons are highly dependent on the base physical of a weapon - as a result, faster weapons with lower base damage just get less from physical mods. However, elemental mods are all flat in nature - therefore the higher the IAS, the better a good ele roll gets. This also leads to high-elemental weapons minmaxing better than high-physical weapons, with a few unique exceptions.

4. Curse support. I don't think I need to explain this one, but there is simply no physical curse with anywhere near the same effect as Conductivity, Flammability, or Frostbite. Warlord's Mark and Vulnerability aren't bad.

5. Gear support. Physical mods on gear are nowhere near as good as elemental mods, regardless of where. This is compounded by the fact that elemental weapons get far more from high-APS, low-base-damage weapons.

...Did I miss anything? Am I wrong on anything? Let me know, let's help convince people that physical damage is bad.

You're missing one of the most important ones, the way armour damage reduction is calculated. Using something like melee splash will reduce the physical damage dealt more than it will reduced elemental damage dealt. Each hit will do less physical damage, so the mob's armour will be much more effective, whereas elemental damage is just reduced by a flat percentage, regardless of how big the hit is.

Also when in parties someone will probably be cursing with elemental weakness

Except phys dmg isn't that bad at all. You just need to get your phys up enough to negate enemy armour, and you're good to go.

Elemental has to deal with resists, some so high, even curses can't bring them down all the way.

No effect on crit doesn't bother me, although they are planning on changing this it would appear.

You want to hit HARD, and not necessarily fast with phys dmg. It helps, but hitting hard should be first priority.

just a question, whats the averange dps a 85 lvl ele cleave does? and other abilities too.

Hard to tell. Since their tooltip does not include enemy resists.

tooltip is fine, it doesnt include armor either, its estimated anyway.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

Except phys dmg isn't that bad at all. You just need to get your phys up enough to negate enemy armour, and you're good to go.

Elemental has to deal with resists, some so high, even curses can't bring them down all the way.

But is there really any question that elemental just has a higher total damage output? Even if they have to deal with resists, the most they'll ever have to reckon with is 75-80%, that's two shock stacks with static blow, and at 2+ APS, that's no problem.

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No effect on crit doesn't bother me, although they are planning on changing this it would appear.

You want to hit HARD, and not necessarily fast with phys dmg. It helps, but hitting hard should be first priority.

Hitting hard is nice and all, but again, how much damage do you do compared to elemental? It's not as much by any metric, unless you're running something like Marohi Erqi, Lioneye's Glare, or Facebreaker with perfect gear.

Yall should listen to invalesco on this, not random community clamorings.

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Zakaluka wrote:

Yall should listen to invalesco on this, not random community clamorings.

QFT. He gives actual numbers, not vacuous claims.

If you're heavy in one element, resists can actually be a huge problem.

I run burn-based explosive arrow, and pretty much the only enemies that aren't instantly vaporized are fire resistant enemies. The only enemies that I have trouble killing are highly resistant enemies (curse-immune, ele resist aura, with a base monster type that is fire-resistant takes longer to kill than act bosses).

So yeah, damage potential is insane with elemental damage. But then you find yourself in a map where 60% of the monsters are resistant to your dominant element, and you find yourself spending 20 minutes slogging through a map that normally takes 5.