Why would anyone make a Physical build for bow?

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Invalesco wrote:

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It's a good vid, but I must disagree with some points as I feel like not the whole picture has been provided.

1. This video is talking about how multistrike relates to certain skills and did not cover the whole spectrum of physical vs elemental, hence the title is rather misleading.
2. Elemental Resistance on mobs are more common, that wasn't touched on
3. Multistrike provides %increased melee physical damage as it scales
4. Very few players do only 1k physical damage at end game. Most players can do alot more than that.

My view: Elemental damage has always scaled well early game as compared to physical damage. The superiority of elemental mods on gear is one such example, and %phys and +phys scales poorly because of the poor base damage on early weapons. However, come end-game, physical damage always scales better.
Take a look at this screenshot:

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This was a CI character at level 73. Granted, this was in closed beta, but damage mods on gear have not been nerfed in any way, so that amount of phys damage is still very much achievable. Because he was able to use 2 melee phys support gems on that skill. However, that's countered by the fact that he is a dagger user, and daggers do not actually have that high a base physical damage compared to other weapons.

With regards to the usage of multistrike, This char has an average base physical damage of 1887. Without multistrike, 1887 damage on an enemy with 8k armour will yield 1394.493 damage.

With multistrike, the new DR equates to 8000/(8000+12x1132.2)= 37% New damage dealt within the same duration with the 100% more attack speed = 0.63 x 1887 x 2 = 2377, which is higher than 1394.493. This calculation hasn't yet taken into account the %increased melee physical damage bonus granted from multistrike yet.
Multistrike will always provide a DPS bonus for ele builds because monster reduction does not scale depending on damage. It is flat. For physical damage, the bonus it may/may not provides is based on your phys damage output.

In end-game, with high physical damage, monster damage reduction scales lower. With ele resist mobs, which are also more commonplace, damage reduction will always be a flat percentage. Hence phys damage builds will actually have higher damage output as compared to ele builds in end-game and will deal more damage.

Another point is survivability and sustainability. Both physical and ele will have issues with reflect, that much is true. However, physical builds will have more leech options. Ele builds can only rely on the life leech and mana leech support gem. Phys builds have the option of relying on %life/mana leech on gear, and shadows for instance have the mind drinker node nearby. Blood Rage also provides %life leech.
Also, crit-based physical melee builds will also always outdps their ele counterparts at end-game, simply because the sheer amount of damage you dish out when you crit will reduce the opponent's DR to nearly 0, whereas ele resist mobs will always still reduce it by a flat percentage.

For some other builds such as crit dagger builds, crit-based physical will always be the best option and ele dagger will never be able to compete, simply because dagger crit nodes all provide increased physical damage bonuses.

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VoxelSquid wrote:

Keep in mind that although elemental bow builds tend to have higher tooltip dps ratings, their actual damage dealt is much less, because by end-game, pretty much all mobs have fairly high elemental resists. With physical damage, if you focus on dealing lots of damage in one hit you can lower mob's armour mitigation and end up dealing more effective dps than ele bows. Invalesco made a comparison with actual numbers a while back to show that physical builds do actually do more damage at end game. (However I can't find the post right now, I'll probably edit it in when I find it)

I think bows in particular are actually very good for physical damage because by using Iron Grip, Frenzy, and Point Blank, you can greatly increase amount of physical damage dealt in one hit.