Why elemental damage with weapons is in a bad spot

This post is NOT about spells, it's purely about attacks.

It's funny that I'm creating this thread, actually. Few months ago, I did exactly the same, except it was basically the opposite - I complained about physical damage being underpowered. A lot has changed, the 50-60% buff to all nodes being the most significant change of course. And then there is the general phys weapon buff and the possibility of avoiding physical reflect with Immortal Call+CWDT as long as you don't 1 shot yourself.

The huge buff to all nodes wasn't really the best solution, but it made physical work, so it worked out well and nobody really complained. Somehow, not even ele dmg users. (maybe cause ele cleave was still around) The amount of disadvantages elemental has compared to physical is not even funny anymore. Actually, let me just talk about all of them.

1) Terrible Nodes
Elemental has, if I'm not mistaken, 8 8% nodes, a 24% node, and some 30% element-specific nodes (fire and cold are on paths in the skill tree most people won't even go through). There's also 2 10% cold damage with weapon nodes nobody is ever going to take. Then there are some pure elemental damage nodes at the Templar starting area, but they're complete shit compared to physical nodes.

-What I propose:
a) Buff the regular nodes to 10-11%
b) Give us 15% notables for every weapon ele cluster (could also be 10% + 5% resist penetration)
c) Make catalysm 30% and give it an interesting mod (Resist Penetration)
e) Give the 30% element-specific nodes 10%fire/lightning/cold pen
f) More clusters!

2) Anger and Wrath
After the Aura patch, Anger and Wrath are the best way to get damage on elemental builds. You're forced to take these two, and you're severely gimping yourself if you don't use both of them. There's simply NO way to replace the huge amount of base damage you get from them. It's the biggest source of ele dmg in the game and you have to sacrifice your "aura slots" for it. If you want defensive auras, well, you'll have to go around the tree and pick up tons of reduced mana reservation.

-What I propose:
a) Give us another way to get high amounts of flat damage and nerf the 2 auras slightly

3) Elemental Resistance
Almost every single monster has this. There's monsters with insane overcap res, there's purity monsters, there's the EE map mod, there's 75% res map mods. It's just stupid, ele builds can't even reach the tooltip of phys builds anymore, and then they get reduced by an extra 50%? What does phys get? A mod that can only appear on rare monsters and a weak map mod. Yup, that's it. Nothing else really reduces physical damage the players deal, because the ~1000 armour most monsters have does nothing.

-What I propose:
a) Give most monsters a weakness to a certain element
b) Make purity a less common mod
c) Reduce the amount of resist monsters have
d) GIVE US WAYS TO PENETRATE RESISTS

4) Reflect
With the introduction of CWDT, phys reflect became nothing to fear and ele reflect still remains fairly dangerous, especially for crit builds. Reflect actually used to be an advantage that ele builds had over physical builds - not getting killed to reflect as easily. But right now, elemental builds are the only ones dying to it.

-What I propose:
a) Just nerf ele reflect number-wise OR ↓
b) Give us a similar way to evade it

5) Leech
Elemental users have to use the gems, physical users can get their leech from the tree/gear/skill (br). This is never ever getting changed, so I'm not even going to suggest anything, since there's no real point. But it's still a drawback that forces ele users to either use 2 gem slots OR use 1 gem slot+EB OR use 1 gem slot and try to leech mana with their phys damage. Considering that the damage of ele builds is already lower, making them waste gem slots/skill points just makes them even weaker.

edit: There was a pretty good suggestion, so I'm going to add it:

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moosifer wrote:

I've always felt that the leech passives should be all damage. There's only 2 on the tree and both for 2%. Making them all damage wouldn't be game breaking but would be enough for some builds to find a way out of being forced to use mana leech gem or EB. Mana regen alone might suck but with a supplemental 2% leech it would work.

There's actually also a 1% node, but I've never seen anybody take that one

6) Skill Gem Scaling
Since ele cleave got nerfed, there are 2 skills you can go pure ele with and be effective: Power Siphon and Spectral Throw. That's because they increase the projectile damage as they get leveled, not just physical. This way, these two gems give some scaling to elemental builds that got almost none from the tree because of the bad nodes. I'd love to make an elemental reaver, an elemental ground slammer, an elemental anything, but I'd just feel like I'm doing the most inefficient thing ever when I'm using skills that only have physical scaling for my elemental build. And, in fact, I'd indeed be doing the most inefficient thing ever.

-What I propose
a) Make skills scale with all damage, not just physical

7) Forced to Stack AS
Attack speed is the best way to scale elemental damage, and it outclasses all the other ways to scale it. So, so far, you have stacked some flat damage, especially from your mandatory auras. Then, since the nodes suck, you have to scale it by attacking really fast. This brings up some problems:

-The first one is the mana cost - If you're throwing out 6 spectral throws per second, you're forced to sacrifice skill points to be able to use the only good scaling method. As if you already didn't have to make some sacrifices to be able to spam your skill.
-The second one is how much of an advantage this gives to Shav's users - The blood rage bonus on low life is pretty insane, and is, by itself, a reason to go low life. To use that, you're going to need a Shav, which happens to cost a shitload of currency that most people will never get. What this causes is that the difference between the super rich guys and the normal guys is just WAY too big in the case of elemental dmg with weapons.
-Makes it impossible to go pure ele 2h because you need high AS.


-What I propose:
a) Just buff the WED nodes and nerf the attack speed bonus on blood rage
b) Reduce the mana multiplier of the life leech gem and WED
c) Add a bit of attack speed to WED nodes.


Now, the advantage of elemental builds:

Status Ailments
They're nice, sure. But they just can't make up for all the weaknesses. First off, you have to get crit if you want to spread status ailments, or at least take static blows. To freeze for longer durations with attacks, you'll also need to use hatred. And guess what?! If you're using a build where hatred gives you a good amount of damage, you're using a physical based build. So, with a good physical weapon, you're actually better at freezing than ele builds. For ignite, no usual attacking builds will use burning as an important source of damage, sure, there are some of them, but they are something completely different than typical ele attack builds.


I'm not denying that there are good elemental builds, but if you took the amount of currency they cost and made a physical build with it, it would do a lot better in the current state of the game. Weapon elemental is currently getting outclassed hard and if it doesn't get some changes, it'll stay that low damage way of building a character that's also vulnerable to reflect. And people will not use it. Well, they're right not to, why would they if they could just pick up a physical build and faceroll?

tl;dr - Elemental damage with weapons has 7 big disadvantages and 1 small advantage - it needs a buff.

I'll be adding good suggestions by players to this post.

More suggestions:
1) Give all weapons an implicit mod that makes attacks with them penetrate a certain amount of all res. The amount each base would penetrate would depend on its speed, so if you got a 1,1 base, you get 35%, if you got a 1,7 base, you get 15%. The numbers aren't set in stone.

2) I personally think that gems should just scale ele dmg like they scale phys dmg, but it is still a good idea:

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sidtherat wrote:

i think that simply adding 1% per level to attack gems to 'all resist penetration' would make huge but not OP difference (while ofc making gems scale with all dmg not only phys)

I would start with leech changes to apply to all damage types in general but heavily nerfed and buffing up of skill gems.

Starting off with good changes for the game overall and go from there.

Attack speed problem needs a longer-term solution.
Elemental damage effectiveness on weapon base could be a solution - slower weapons = higher ele dmg effectiveness.

freeze and burn are mostly irrelevant so the only advantage ele has physical is shock proccing.

its worth mentioning the nerf to purity max resists and ele adapt have made reflect mitigation all the more difficult and the single elemental resist auras are really not optimal for the vast majority of builds.

"

Make catalysm 30% and give it an interesting mod

Innate 10% elemental penetration imo.

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Yesu wrote:

"

Make catalysm 30% and give it an interesting mod

Innate 10% elemental penetration imo.

Yes, that's a pretty good idea, I was also thinking about 2% mana leech from elemental attacks.

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kolton wrote:

Attack speed problem needs a longer-term solution.
Elemental damage effectiveness on weapon base could be a solution - slower weapons = higher ele dmg effectiveness.

That could definetly work as a fix, although I'd say we'd still have to give fast weapons a slight edge.

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Nephalim wrote:

freeze and burn are mostly irrelevant so the only advantage ele has physical is shock proccing.

its worth mentioning the nerf to purity max resists and ele adapt have made reflect mitigation all the more difficult and the single elemental resist auras are really not optimal for the vast majority of builds.

Also true, but when max res got nerfed, physical builds were dying to reflect way more easily. How much of an disadvantage it gives ele builds only started to show since release.

Why the fuck did they nerf the WED gem again? Like bad enough EVERYTHING has resist lol

It's important to remember the reasoning behind the elemental damage node nerf, and to see if it's still relevant should you undo the nerf.

At the time, ele-cleave was the most powerful starter build in the game, with very few viable alternatives. With Cleave being nerfed, and physical damage nodes being buffed (the 50% buff for increased phys nodes patch) and buffed again (phys damage nodes affecting non-weapon phys damage), I think it'd be fine to revert the 20% nerf to elemental damage nodes.

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Novalisk wrote:

It's important to remember the reasoning behind the elemental damage node nerf, and to see if it's still relevant should you undo the nerf.

At the time, ele-cleave was the most powerful starter build in the game, with very few viable alternatives. With Cleave being nerfed, and physical damage nodes being buffed (the 50% buff for increased phys nodes patch) and buffed again (phys damage nodes affecting non-weapon phys damage), I think it'd be fine to revert the 20% nerf to elemental damage nodes.

Yes, that'd definetly be fine, but it would not be enough. There are still the resists, there is still the reflect, there is still the leech, and reverting a 20% nerf to nodes won't make up for that.

We really need all skills to scale with ele dmg, a good way to penetrate resistances (a notable behind every WED cluster that would give 5, and catalysm would give 10, maybe add 1 or 2 WED clusters) AND better numbers on nodes and the WED skill gem. A small buff won't change much.

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Freeslana wrote:

1) Terrible Nodes

When physical damage on gear didn't scale with IPD, the balance made sense. I wouldn't be against increasing WED on the tree. Making the 30% ones like more like catalyse probably is a good idea.

Although, I'm sick of the back and forth on WED gem. It was OP before, it's good now, please let's not rebalance this every time elemental or physical is OP.

"

2) Anger and Wrath

I was very surprised they buffed these so much. I mean I was able to get 30k dps using 2 ungils. With the aura increases these really need to be nerfed. Maybe higher ele damage on jewelry would work. Or rather, changing the suffix %ele damage ones to ele pen instead.

"

3) Elemental Resistance
a) Give most monsters a weakness to a certain element

This is something that I've always wondered why it wasn't around. Seemed to make sense to me that mobs would be strong against one and weak against another. The idea of all res just doesn't make sense at all either.

"

4) Reflect
b) Give us a similar way to evade it

The evasion changes should be that solution. But as you'll always end up getting hit people are scared of evasion as you don't get more life than builds that have DR all the time. I'll keep screaming this, give evasion more life and people will find it very attractive.

"

5) Leech

I've always felt that the leech passives should be all damage. There's only 2 on the tree and both for 2%. Making them all damage wouldn't be game breaking but would be enough for some builds to find a way out of being forced to use mana leech gem or EB. Mana regen alone might suck but with a supplemental 2% leech it would work.

"

6) Skill Gem Scaling

Ya, I've always wondered why the scaling isn't just "damage" instead of "physical damage." Probably has to do with added light, cold and chaos.