Why would anyone make a Physical build for bow?

I'm relatively new to rangers but...wouldn't you concentrate on physical damage so that your lightning arrow does more damage, since it does a % of your physical?

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Emil_kof wrote:

I'm relatively new to rangers but...wouldn't you concentrate on physical damage so that your lightning arrow does more damage, since it does a % of your physical?

Nitpick: archers, not rangers.

I didn't mean to start another physical vs elemental thread. I was just saying how bow builds don't get any advantage from physical.

I think physical is only better than elemental if you are melee. Just look at how melee gains advantage from physical. There are two '' more physical damage '' gems for melee, there are tons of notable passives ( 15+ physical damage, 1 hand or 2 hand passives etc. ) You can increase your damage even with strength.

Yes, LA or another ''converted'' bow skill's elemental portion of damage gains advantage from physical damage increase. I did my calculations, even with all of the physical bow passives, your LA's dps wont' even get close to your elemental dps with just the elemental passives at Templar area, Inner force, weapon elemental damage gem and some elemental damage from quiver, belt and jewelery. Anyone thinks otherwise, please just do some math and show it to me.

Obviously we can't know everybody's physical or elemental build. I mean you could get the physical passives and physical bow but support it with hatred and added fire damage and use weapon elemental damage gem. ( even so I still think pure elemental is better than hybrid builds ) I am just comparing a pure physical build against a pure elemental build.

I wouldn't mind going for physical build if it's dps were just a little bit worse then elemental, however the dps difference is simply too huge. Whether your main skill is LA or any other bow skill, a regular elemental build's dps will almost double any physical build's dps.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying physical bow build is not viable at all. I am just saying that, given the facts, physical is not best for your bow build in terms of dps.

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zekerferc wrote:

I didn't mean to start another physical vs elemental thread. I was just saying how bow builds don't get any advantage from physical.

I think physical is only better than elemental if you are melee. Just look at how melee gains advantage from physical. There are two '' more physical damage '' gems for melee, there are tons of notable passives ( 15+ physical damage, 1 hand or 2 hand passives etc. ) You can increase your damage even with strength.

Yes, LA or another ''converted'' bow skill's elemental portion of damage gains advantage from physical damage increase. I did my calculations, even with all of the physical bow passives, your LA's dps wont' even get close to your elemental dps with just the elemental passives at Templar area, Inner force, weapon elemental damage gem and some elemental damage from quiver, belt and jewelery. Anyone thinks otherwise, please just do some math and show it to me.

Obviously we can't know everybody's physical or elemental build. I mean you could get the physical passives and physical bow but support it with hatred and added fire damage and use weapon elemental damage gem. ( even so I still think pure elemental is better than hybrid builds ) I am just comparing a pure physical build against a pure elemental build.

I wouldn't mind going for physical build if it's dps were just a little bit worse then elemental, however the dps difference is simply too huge. Whether your main skill is LA or any other bow skill, a regular elemental build's dps will almost double any physical build's dps.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying physical bow build is not viable at all. I am just saying that, given the facts, physical is not best for your bow build in terms of dps.

All of this is true. On top of that, "Weapon Elemental Dmg" and "Inc Ele Dmg w/ Weapons" put the dps multiplier through the roof for LA. Phys is inferior when talking just dps. You didn't even mention survival, where ele Rangers can take advantage of 2x Diamond Skin and all of the Mara Life/Regen Nodes. Phys is stuck eating up a bunch of damage nodes, which ends up being less dps anyway. There really is no debate.

using a physical damage bow will increase the amount of lightning damage compared to other elemental damage which gives a higher chance of shockstacking.

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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.

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.

quoted from a post from invalesco, hes talking about a dagger crit shadow in this example, but the same rules aply to physical bow users.
(his crit dagger shadow does 30k dps, bypassing armor mitigation)

Wel they aply to all physical damage in general.
Shit early game, better then elemental endgame.

And for the dude going on about "what about LA hitting 9 times"

Take a rain of arrow and u wil have the same AOE dps, only difference u wil do more damage PER hit compared to a LA chaining 9x with each of those 9 hits flat reduced by resis
(not to mention the dps reduction from the suport gems themselves, where as ROA has 0 reduced damage suport gems linked to it to be usable, only buffs)

Roa/concentrated effect/faster projectiles/faster attack/bloodmagic/life leech + iron grip passive + point blank passive and some aditional projectile/bowdps boosters = enjoy pure physical rampage. (obviuesly other combinations are possible, but the number 1 ranger on HC used something like this if im not mistaken, and i wonder WHY he went physical damage trully i wonder why....) and obviuesly u stack wrath + anger + hatred they just buff ure dps.

Rain of Arrows hit ONE time. LA dodge between mobs, and EACH jump has an AoE that can hit the previous mob again. What part of this dont you understand? LA, with this mechanic+chain, has an effective dps that is around 5-9 times higher than what the tooltip says.

But I see now, you are a guy who trust tooltips and is clearly not a person who should discuss this topic...

bye bye and bai

Chain reduction + lmp reduction if u use it + elemental resis from mobs reduction, now go calculate *burb*

Believe what u want, but the tooltips dont acount for resis redution ore armor reduction.
They just state dps vs 0 resis/0armor mobs

There.. +%physical damage belts..

As for the "LA hits with an AoE" argument:

It won't hit every monster 9 times... I haven't tested it but you're assuming when a single LA shot hits a mob and produces the 2 extra shots, that both of those shots can chain to the same target and that all monsters receive overlapping damage. Even if that is true, you only get 6 overlaps in the perfect ideal situation. End result, the effective damage is still only around 50k-60k which puts it at the equivalent to the physical damage output (you need to factor in the fact that chain has 50% damage reduction.. and then factor in lmp damage reduction). Prior to the chain nerf, ele damage builds were far better in terms of damage output and survivability. As stated by others, the physical damage builds are more for fun and the one I'm running is typically only viable for softcore. HC builds I find are boring since 90% of your build is focused on spamming life nodes which truly limits the creative aspect of build crafting.


In any case, if you have more than 3 monsters (say 7) and they are NOT all standing super close to each other (what happens 90% of the time), the splash damage on LA will NOT overlap anywhere close to 9 times. It's too complicated to get any real data since the chain algorithm is fairly random I believe and I'd have to sit down for several hours shooting shit with LA and tracking trajectories.. There's also the fact that the front targets will be hit more than the back targets due to overlap so finding an effective dps would be.. hard and time consuming.


As a comparison though, I could easily put chain + lmp on split arrow which would give me 9 arrows which hit 9 targets then chain twice each giving me a total of 27 hits.

Ideally GGG should implement an "effective DPS" indicator somewhere that tallies the total amount of damage done per second. Would be a lot easier to compare builds that way. Could probably do it client side too.

For endgame.