Why does weapon quality only affects physical damage?

E.g. Crackling Quarterstaff exists that only has lightning damage at base. And unless you roll to add physical damage it doesn't benefit from weapon quality at all.

Just makes no sense tbh.

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Sandcubicle#5745 wrote:

E.g. Crackling Quarterstaff exists that only has lightning damage at base. And unless you roll to add physical damage it doesn't benefit from weapon quality at all.

Just makes no sense tbh.

It should affect the implicit aspect of the item, for most melee that would mean phys. Might be a bug, have you reported it?

They need to fix those type of weapons having the %phys damage mod as well. It should work like it does with armor... you don't get an ES buff on pure Evade gear, and quality boosts the appropriate defense of the item. But instead, we get Cultist's bows (all chaos damage) with phys damage % as a bonus.

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Axterix13#5693 wrote:

They need to fix those type of weapons having the %phys damage mod as well. It should work like it does with armor... you don't get an ES buff on pure Evade gear, and quality boosts the appropriate defense of the item. But instead, we get Cultist's bows (all chaos damage) with phys damage % as a bonus.

Yeah that is also super annoying. Once rolled a +120% physical damage on crackling quarterstaff. Straight to the trash bin.

They always "sort of" made up for quality not increasing elemental damage by having those elemental damage numbers be higher. You can get 3x+ as much elemental damage on a weapon than you can physical damage (base value pre-quality).

I'm not entirely sure how they can fix that. There is always going to be the problem that you can stack 3 flat elemental modifiers, while you can only stack one flat physical modifier. They can nerf the individual elemental damage mods, but then that screws over anyone attempting to focus on one element.


Crackling Quarterstaff is not really anything new. There are many items in PoE 1 that have modifiers that completely erase or discount all physical damage and mods. Sure, they aren't generally implicits, but they exist. And then you get into items and skills that simply ignore those lines on weapons to begin with. For example: getting a weapon with implicit Resolute Technique, while it having crit chance and crit multi modifiers. I'll also add: wands and staves have ALWAYS had this problem until the invention of battlemage and similar effects. They rolled local elemental damage and local physical damage when there were no (or like only 1 or 2) skills which utilized wands that could use those stats.

Eventually, something like the Crackling Quarterstaff with a large elemental implicit will end up being BiS for pure lightning damage. It will just be hard to craft.