Elemental damage in melee weapons

First and foremost: Elemental damage in melee weapons is completely useless and pointless with how all the skills are shaped right now. Here's why:




Right now every melee skill and the vast majority of passives only scale up physical damage when leveled. This also has a massive impact on what type of items are in any way useful or valuable. If a weapon doesn't have flat physical damage + at least the other increased physical damage% modifier it becomes instantly useless. There is also the fact that after a certain amount of physical damage per single hit the armour of monsters have almost no effect on the damage output unlike elemental damage. Physical damage can also benefit from the passive and item modifiers of mana/life leech.

My curiosity woke me when i found this 2 handed sword:


For it i have leveled up a templar, duelist, ranger and a shadow and tested a huge variety of different approaches into benefitting from the unique modifiers in the item. I tested all of the active skills possible but the only ones that you can utilize to any satisfactory point were infernal blow(with lots of fire/elemental damage passives), flicker strike and spectral throw. To do any reasonable damage at all i HAD to have at least weapon elemental damage and fire penetration. As it is right now, spectral throw seems to be the only skill usable, scaleable with leveling and from passives to be used oro's sacrifice or any other. Because every source of life leech only benefit from physical damage with the exception of the life leech support it was entirely necessary to have that as well to have any amount of survivability.

Yes, you can get the weapon elemental damage modifier on rings and belts. You can also get flat fire on gloves, boots, rings, amulet and fire damage % on rings, amulets, helmet and a chest. Players using high physical damage base items can also benefit from these same items with auras. I tested a multitude of combinations of these modifiers and with the combination of all i had practically zero defenses and slighlty above mediocre damage, at best. Using a two handed sword is the worst possible starting point to build defense by itself.

For some reason elemental hit's damage is not scaled by weapon elemental damage modifier, but elemental damage auras anger, hatred and wrath are. Elemental hit's mana cost is so crazy that using it with the very necessary supports weapon elemental damage, fire penetration and life leech at level 18 you're using a whopping 81,9 mana per hit and doing mediocre damage even with the help of keystone elemental equilibrium, 2 curses; elemental weakness and flammability when using the unique boots Windscream.

Because of the setbacks in the sword you're killing yourself on elemental reflect and especially general gravicus, voidbeares and tittymonsters kill you, every time, unless you're spending a majority of your passives to get eldritch battery, mana regen, maximum mana and using clarity, just so you can offset the increased phys% taken and increased fire% taken with arctic armour.

Don't use oro's sacrifice. By the time you can use it at level 67 it's already useless.

Most of the same problems apply to regular rares with elemental damage rolls, there is just not much you can do to make them useful. As it is right now the value of weapons with elemental rolls is 99% of the time vendor garbage because you cannot utilize the rolls in any decent way, with some incredibly rare exceptions like shockstack crit daggers or such. but even those items require you to have the flat physical and physical % modifier to not be completely crap. I won't go to ranged weapons and skills, because i have very little experience from them, but after inspecting hundreds of different builds it seems that the situation is mostly the same.

Here are some of the items i've tested out in combination with different skills using oro's sacrifice in different builds spanning templar, duelist, ranger and shadow:


Some of the tested items i have already sold.

Yup. Spectral throw is about your only option if you want to do a non-crit based elemental build.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/690708/page/1

Elemental weapons use skills with either high multipliers to Damage Effectivness (Heavy Strike, Double Strike, Double Strike) or favor APS.

Nothing really wrong with that. Elemental Weapon Damage is a little too limited overall perhaps, but elemental weapon builds are more or less niche.

@OP Thanks for creating this informative thread on Oro's Sacrifice (and elemental damage overall).

I still plan to use the sword and I know it pretty much requires an EB+MoM+Clarity+Mana Regen...etc

and if I ever get somewhere with my scion I'm hoping I can turn this build out:


But you're right, elemental damage is pathetic on weapons and really serves as supplementary damage and status application.

Still I'm hoping to make something of this sword...even with the drawbacks...In fact I believe GGG really destroyed this weapon.

it's a similar issue with these two

tsk tsk GGG, taking supporters' money and allowing them to create uniques that are fundamentally flawed. you even nerfed Goddess Scorned at lauch when you nerfed weapon elemental damgae gem, and you didn't buff the sword to compensate

tsk

tsk tsk

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BearCares wrote:

it's a similar issue with these two

tsk tsk GGG, taking supporters' money and allowing them to create uniques that are fundamentally flawed. you even nerfed Goddess Scorned at lauch when you nerfed weapon elemental damgae gem, and you didn't buff the sword to compensate

tsk

tsk tsk

You understand that goddess scorned is a physical damage weapon that just happens to deal fire right? All those +Phys bonuses? They work.+

Also:

Cremating: +25-45
Flaring: +15-26

You might notice that the elemental damage already has that increased damage baked into the damage itself. While you lose nothing in regards to base physical damage (which is another matter entirely). And you can stack FAR MORE elemental damage sources than you can physical, since you can have more than one source in an item slot.

oros is a horrendously bad weapon due to how important ias for elemental aura scaling.
and yes, attack gems and tree nodes are all physical biased.

for a dedicated build, a jeweled foil with nothing but 26 ias will out dps a perfect oros.

whats odd is why the 'increased physical damage' was not changed to 'increased attack damage' so both physical and ele attacks would benefit.

"

Nephalim wrote:

oros is a horrendously bad weapon due to how important ias for elemental aura scaling.
and yes, attack gems and tree nodes are all physical biased.

for a dedicated build, a jeweled foil with nothing but 26 ias will out dps a perfect oros.

whats odd is why the 'increased physical damage' was not changed to 'increased attack damage' so both physical and ele attacks would benefit.

Eh, The jeweled foil will have significantly less damage per hit and therefore scales significantly worse with ignition. there's more than one way to skin a horse.... erm.... play with fire.

And I repeat... The reason "increased phjysical damage" (especially on gems) was not changed to "increased attack damage" was because elemental damage affixes are more numerous and more powerful per affix than their physical counterparts.

"

Autocthon wrote:

"

Nephalim wrote:

oros is a horrendously bad weapon due to how important ias for elemental aura scaling.
and yes, attack gems and tree nodes are all physical biased.

for a dedicated build, a jeweled foil with nothing but 26 ias will out dps a perfect oros.

whats odd is why the 'increased physical damage' was not changed to 'increased attack damage' so both physical and ele attacks would benefit.

Eh, The jeweled foil will have significantly less damage per hit and therefore scales significantly worse with ignition. there's more than one way to skin a horse.... erm.... play with fire.

And I repeat... The reason "increased phjysical damage" (especially on gems) was not changed to "increased attack damage" was because elemental damage affixes are more numerous and more powerful per affix than their physical counterparts.

damage per hit and burning damage when talking about an oros on a high level map are negligible. I would much rather take the mid ranged ele weapon for 50% more dps.

considering top end 1 handed weapons can get 400+ dps while ele equivalent get 240, i dont see how that comment is true. even factoring in ele affixes on rings and amulets youre still fighting against an entire tree node that only supports physical scaling.

the point is, elemental weapon (and spells for that matter) are grossly underpowered compared to physical due to several factors which include attack gems boosting on physical, the ridiculous amount of ele resist mobs, lack of gem support outside of WED, and the inability to benefit from physical leech.

Chris acknowledged this disparity on the last interview but made no mention on to what exactly will be changed in 1.1 to balance ele.

"

Autocthon wrote:

Eh, The jeweled foil will have significantly less damage per hit and therefore scales significantly worse with ignition. there's more than one way to skin a horse.... erm.... play with fire.

And I repeat... The reason "increased phjysical damage" (especially on gems) was not changed to "increased attack damage" was because elemental damage affixes are more numerous and more powerful per affix than their physical counterparts.

Yeah but elemental damage in itself is nothing without penetration. Cue elemental resist and curse immune mobs. Therefore it's only really beneficial to focus on one element on a weapon.

Why are hatred and additional fire gem so good? You can focus totally on physical damage without needing any affixes for ANY elemental damage modifiers (for shits and giggles cold/fire gem for MOAR fire damage and higher ignite DoT). Hell you can even ditch penetration gems if you have enough physical damage.

As it stands the elemental affixes are pretty bad. All we need is a phys => lightning something that's not Lightning Strike.