Increased physical damage is terrible!

I re-rolled my toon today, got a badass duelist. Saw the passive Water Dancing: 12% increased physical damage with 1 handed, 20 dexterity. Hell yeah, that sounds really strong! Just for fun, I decided to check how much my DPS would go up after getting this passive.

It went from 46.6 to 47.3. What??


Anyone else notice this? Or did I just misread my "before" number?


Did a bit of research, apparently "increased physical damage" gives way less than you'd think.

A possible fix is for all the "cruel blade" +18% modifiers, maybe instead change it to +16% and +4 base physical damage or something.

"Increased" stacks additively with all other "Increased" sources.
That 12% is adding with all your other physical damage passives, your strength's melee damage bonus, and the increased physical damage on your skill gem.

DPS is an estimation of damage, by the way. It aggregates AVERAGE monster stats, I think this includes bosses, and says "on average you will have this much damage per second" it even factors in your chance to hit and other things. Furthermore, a 12% damage increase when you only have 50 dps to begin with, will not be more than 6 dps on a good day.

12% IPD does matter though in the long run, when it interacts with various other modifiers like the "more melee damage" support gem, which basically turns your 12% damage into 15.6% IPD.

I do generally agree that IPD% passive skills (increased spell damage too) are on the weak side and short of straight-up buffing the % they give, should provide some kind of secondary benefit. Getting offensive passive skills is aggravatingly less impactful than defensive ones.

Some of this agony comes from the way +elemental damage was implemented in this game.

Not only are the basic +e.damage mods on gear as strong as the entirety of basic one handed weapons (even moreso, in the case of wands), they get multiplied by lots of things. The +30 to 50% effectiveness on melee attacks, the +30% projectile damage per archery zone to make up for not having bow attacks with increased effectiveness, and of course getting doubled by Dual Strike. And of course getting better with faster attack speed.

It isn't like in Diablo 2 where they were just a nice bonus. In practical terms, half of the entirety of your damage or more can come from these mods.

There are a couple ways to bring them down - the most practical is the Diablo 3 rule that rares can only get one +element on them style. In some ways I'd prefer this; where every attacker doesn't have a rainbow of damage coming out of his fists at all times.

Honestly that's the culprit; Greater Impact would have a much greater impact if most of my damage was actually, you know, physical.

I know I've harped on this a lot before, but I guess I'll repeat it some more: that emotion when you take a 6-6-12 significant node group, and the knowledge you're getting nothing more than a perfectly average 8% per point return on what's a pooper stat to begin with.

Edit: Or there's always the "let +physical damage roll three times on the same ring 'cause the stupid elemental damage gets that privilege" idea.

Edit edit: I looked at my Burning Arrow skill, and it's doing more ice damage than anything else. I find this incredibly silly, and the idea that an Amazon's Immolation arrow would blow significant cool gusts of icy hail on the demons who befell her wrath is amusing.

yeah physical damage is pretty damn weak since 95% of it is your weapon.
and only with weapons with 100% physical and a 20+ added physical mod do melee passives make a dent.


this is why the unique brass maul that has 200% melee physical damage pretty much lasts players into merci.

I also think if iron rings weren't so shitty and if there were more physical gems for things other than melee , physical would have more versatility.

alas for now elemental damage is the best damage by ALOT

Maybe something like Steel and Adamantium rings could come later...? I re-rolled my duelist because I got a bunch of physical damage modifiers. Around level 50 I realized that physical damage just wasn't very strong, and I didn't want to put 20 re-spec points into getting rid of all those passives.