whats better? bow elemental or bow physical?

I am building my ranger elemental at the moment but I keep coming across bows with huigh physical damage and close to no elemental damage on them. I am starting to wonder if I might had made a mistake (currently lvl 36).

I am curious to hear other peoples opinions on which you think does more dps. Elemental based rangers or physical based rangers (bow).

Ideally you want both. But it depends on what skills you want to use
something like lightning arrow Converts your physical to lightning (50%)
so the more physical the more lightning. But Elemental damage will give you a big boost on top of that

and elemental hit your going to want a fast weapon with element damage also
i guess its just all on your build

Interesting.
I went for physical dmg, I am lvl 27 HC at the moment, and I've been wondering for quite a while if I made a mistake by not choosing elem dmg.
Glad to see I'm not the only one with insecurities ;)

Advantages of physical damage are that you can leech life and mana very nicely

Elemental damage has bigger dps though, but doesn't leech nearly as good as physical, you will have to use a mana leech gem.

so basicaly physical is more sustainable, but less dps, elemental is more damage, but youll need clarity aura and stuff like that, you could go for Edlrich battery keystone too for massive mana boosts from ES.

Ele build gets a lot of dps from equips. Check out petrov eleranger to see how much additional damage he was able to collect via equips.

For hardcore, you likely want a physical build, with LA.

Reason being, ele damage increases so fast, so rapidly, that if you have low ES or use HP, you will kill yourself on ele reflects

Over

and over

andoverandoverandover

again.

Elemental damage/build ALL the way. Don't fall for the physical build. Physical might be good if you reach level 70 and somehow get a free skill reset and you have mad rich gear, otherwise elemental owns from beginning to end. Crit chance also sucks on ranger.

Here's a thought: Can you go with both? As in have one bow focusing on elemental damage, and one bow that focuses on physical?

To the OP: You've had bad luck. It happens :( But as long as your bow is fast, ele dmg on the rest of your gear plus Wrath and Anger should keep you going.

In general, ele does MUCH MUCH higher tooltip DPS than physical. It isn't even close. Ele also scales better with gear, and it has possibly the highest DPS single target attack in the game with Elemental Hit as well as the best AoE in the game with Chain lightning arrow (don't expect that to remain the same into OB though, Chris mentioned changing LA in a recent interview).

Physical has leech, and you don't randomly die to reflect from an monster your lightning arrow hit offscreen. But if you build CI elebow, then once you get pimp ES gear (and decent lightning resist) that can be mitigated as well.

Physical bows badly need a support gem that competes with Weapon Elemental Damage. That alone is enough to assure the supremacy of elemental over physical for bows, because there is no bow support like the Melee Physical Damage support.

EDIT: Oh, and ele can apply shock much better. Phys does have Hatred so chill/freeze is about equal. Ele also can apply burn but usually this is unimportant due to the speed at which things die (unless you don't have an Elemental Hit and are using Burning Arrow for single target, then the burn is pretty good).

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ExileDude wrote:

Here's a thought: Can you go with both? As in have one bow focusing on elemental damage, and one bow that focuses on physical?

For Ele much of your damage is from your armor, not your bow. If you have say 150 average flat elemental damage from gear at higher level, 100+ of that will be from your armor (60 alone from Wakes if you have them). If the phys bow is just there to die slightly less to reflect though, it would definitely help a bit. Ranged Attack Totem is pretty good at dealing with reflect as well.