Understanding damage output

hey there i'm currently playing through my first character and trying things out, coming from d3 I was wondering how the dps is calculated on your weapons dps? i can see all weapons have a physical damage, but from what i can understand from wiki this is just one type of damage.

Does physical damage on weapons scale on your global dps (like in d3 where that was basically all that counted for a weapon) or do you need say, frost buffs or spell buffs to buff your spells and physical damage to buffS/stats your physical attacks only?

Well, I'm not sure if this answers your question, but each offensive spell skill have its DPS. Just hover your mouse over the skill in your shortcut at the bottom right of the screen, and you can see the DPS. It is affected by critical hit stats and % damage for spells, here's what they are:

Unlike Diablo 3 where weapon DPS affects the damage you can do with your spell skills, in PoE, weapon comes with physical damage which will not affect the spell skills which are considered elemental attack. So what you want is this stat % that increases elemental attack which encompass all elemental attack, or specific attack like frost, or fire, etc. These are the stats that will increase your damage output. Another one would be spell damage, which affects all spell skills.

Physical damage will not affect your spell DPS.

For critical hit, there's 3 type. Spell critical, physical critical, and just critical. Just critical (meaning it doesn't specify spell or physical) is global, it affects both physical and spell attack.

Thank you for your reply! aaah that makes sense. did just get a huge buff from using a high elemental buff wand instead of that giant mace thing i had :D

is there any way to see how much dmg your minions do? i can see their hp but not what percentage of my dps is passed on and what type of dmg it is

That's a good question. I've been using minions myself but as far as I can tell, there's no way to tell what damage they do. The only thing we know is for Spectres and Dominated minion, they will do the same damage as the monster you raise them from.

elemental damage works for witch and spell damage works for witch too. But what is the difference ?

I think elementals is either always a specific or only generally elementals when it is listed in the attached specs to the weapon (ie 26-50 physical and 50-70 elemental) when it is a spec that is adjustable with ie orbs its either spell damage, which counts for all, or a specific elemental.. i don't know for sure though, but this is what i've been able to understand from reading about it (http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Damage_Types)


no the minions in general are a lot of fun but more confused than a gay catholic priest tbh.. sometimes i literally have no clue what is going on with 1 spectre 7 skeletons and five zombies running around in narrow caves.. i think they should consider the idea of a unique looking zombie either a unique model like in d3 or a unique color at least..

Hi, so you thin that +% increase to elemental dmg with wands increases the damage of all my skills, and including physical dmg?

SO basicly, I could run around with any kind of weapon that give me good elemental dmg buffs, or skill buff. And by that logic, I suppose it doesnt make much sense to go for Elder Power buff right? Since we almost never use auto attack with wands..

Also as far as minion goes, I went with Enfeble (ro any other curse), and spam it few times, just so I can see which are frendlies and which are not :)

They should consider adding health bars above heads tho :/

i don't get why they don't just spam a million diffrent skins out for purchase with minions.. it's such a no brainer for money. I'd be happy to pay 5 bucks just to be able to see who the hell is who during a zombie skeleton only cave.


and yes.. played for a few more days now and i think i get it: you want three things for damage:

1. elemental damage (either all kinds or a specific and the specific is of course best if related to your passive buffs, but is still good over no matter what)
2. spell damage increase. this is really important, it basically made me keep an i got in act 2 on the first difficulty for 1½ campaigns just because i lost so much dmg if i changed it
3. cast speed increase. I can never find anything that does more than 10% of this so i think it's pretty rare, but if you do the math it doesn't add up for much unless the two above are high :)