Why pure caster is unplayable on late game comparing to physical damage

I think pure spell casters like ice spear or fireball etc. are unplayable on late game, and reason is health. Casters can only life leech by linked gem... also spells cast much more slower then melee or ranged attacks... In my opinion is a little bit unfair.

Spells are seriously gimped and the reason is:

1. Totems
2. Cast on Crit
3. Traps/Mines

Seriously I wish they unmade the above mechanics so we can actually have spells that do some damage. The only one that does any damage is EK.. Boring!

You can build a melee char that does 30K+ dps for 20-30ex, but if you want a spell to break 15K dps you'll need to invest hundreds of exalt.

Bad game design imo.

Give a reason to self-cast. Channel Spell Support gem. Make it so Totems don't cast when they die.

You can manipulate most of the spells to do a lot more damage than you actually need.

What 90% of people don't realize is that your tooltip dps is only accurate in terms of hitting a mob with 0 resist of any kind.

Multi strike on a physical damage skill for example will LIST more damage but likely makes you do less damage in the process to an actual mob; Sure you attack faster but what do you gain from it?

Spells need links like Penetration which for some reason people overlook because it doesnt list dps in your tooltip.

I do more damage than anyone I have ever grouped with in maps by a far margin as a self caster.

Multipliers like Melee Damage are available for almost every spell in the game.

I guess i'm missing something.

elemental damage in general could use some loving too and its no coincidence most spells are elemental based.

I remember the old days when my cold crit witch was THE way to deal damage... I got it over 34k tooltip DPS around the time Cold Penetration came out, and that was with LMP tripling it! Of course, that went down when I put in Cold Penetration, but it was still pretty goddamn ridiculous. That was before the nerfs to CI and the double nerfs to ES, though, when they decided that Ghost Reaver made ES a more powerful form of life, essentially... Enforcing that.

As far as the balance between spells and attacks, elemental damage and physical, it depends on the nerfs at the time. Looking back, I can't really recall many powerful buffs. It's mostly just been nerfs to the damage of one type or another. Back in Closed Beta and the beginning of Open, Physical builds were laughable outside of some basic melee and Groundslam. Hell, Victordoom and Epsilon were some of the first major rangers to go with physical bows, just as Lioneye's was about to come out. It generally boiled down to Blood Magic or Chaos Innoculation with a few exceptions, and now we have Life Steal builds and CI only showing up with extreme levels of gear.

While anecdotal, the lesson I take from this trip back in my memory is that if things get too binary, there are going to be nerfs... And then the meta will shift to another form of binary builds. I never understood why they nerfed the hell out of casters anyway (we all agreed CI needed it, however... Most specifically the stupidity of free Blood Rage, but I'm fine with making it a few more nodes, the ES and ES% nerfs were painful), the builds spent almost every passive for offense in order to actually keep ahead of the tanks who never had a risk anyway and who dominated the ladder over witches and the like.

ghost reaver really broke the uniqueness of going ES over life.

probably backlash from the 99% blizz/chain lit sorc and hammerdin days, I bet

Man, Blizz Orb Sorc was just the best at nice farming runs... And fun to boot. Hammerdin was just the foreverleveler in Baal/Chaos runs that abused the stupidest advent of the game: Everyone gets to teleport now! Then again, I'd rather fight a Hammerdin in pvp than a farcast Javazon or a chargelockadin.