Elemental type strengths and secondary effects. Any reason to ever choose lightning?

As I understand it:

Fire has the best damage and ignite is a damage DOT as its special effect.
Frost has lowest of the 3 elemental damages with its special effect being Chill/freeze, which justifies its lower damage by bringing powerful crowd control.

What I dont get is lightning. I understand it has a huge low to high damage at random meaning lightning can do very low or very high damage - so, a gamblers choice.

The question is SHOCK as an elemental ailment - is it just a damage DOT like fire? Or does lightning bring something else to the table?

As it stands imo - COLD is the winner with FIRE a close second. But lightning either gets the short end, that or Im missing something.

Could someone elaborate on shock and give arguments for justifying shock over fire/frost?

Lighting gets Shock, a debuff that increases damage recieved, which can stack with itself up to three times. Its quite good also.

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vondalv wrote:

Lighting gets Shock, a debuff that increases damage recieved, which can stack with itself up to three times. Its quite good also.

wow! Didnt know that. So lightning sure as hell is viable? Does it increase lightning damage sources or damage from all sources? And is the damage stack flat like X/X/X or percentage based %/%/%?

Shock can stack 3 times, leading to 120% more damage. Huge. My list goes lightning ice fire.

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Ouroboros226 wrote:

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vondalv wrote:

Lighting gets Shock, a debuff that increases damage recieved, which can stack with itself up to three times. Its quite good also.

wow! Didnt know that. So lightning sure as hell is viable? Does it increase lightning damage sources or damage from all sources? And is the damage stack flat like X/X/X or percentage based %/%/%?

Damage from all sources, percentage based.

One thing I forgot to ask. Does elemental damage from all abilities have an inherent chance to proc freeze/shock/ignote - or do you HAVE to take the chance to ignite/shock/freeze talents at the shadow-side of the passive tree?

Im running infernal blow/anger and i rarely ever see enemies getting ignited!

Any time you crit, you apply your elemental status alignment. Let's say your bow is:

25-45 phys damage
10-15 cold damage

You crit so your cold damage will crit also, freezing them.

Edit: any time you crit you will apply your ignite to them.

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vondalv wrote:

Any time you crit, you apply your elemental status alignment. Let's say your bow is:

25-45 phys damage
10-15 cold damage

You crit so your cold damage will crit also, freezing them.

Edit: any time you crit you will apply your ignite to them.

Oh my.

My entire elemental hit marauder build is built on getting resolute technique and lots of elemental damage nodes sacrificing accuarcy and crit. Horrible decision then?

^ Pretty much. No crit = no status effects, at least not from your attacks.

Edit: To add, there are some workarounds though. For example, my Fire Staff Templar has Chance to Ignite on his Sweep. I also use flammability. So, burning still occurs, despite my Resolute Technique.

Shock is potentially brutal in combination with burning or Puncture. The shock multiplies the amount of damage done by the initial hit, which is used as the base for the burn/bleed. Then as the target burns/bleeds, the damage taken is multiplied again by shock. Three shock stacks would increase the DOT almost fivefold.