What's this "damage effectiveness" I keep reading about?

I can't seem to find any updated information about this, so I need to ask here cause it's kinda worrying me.

I keep reading about Arc having 50% "damage effectiveness", and how the tooltip doesn't show the right damage and whatnot. I understand that some physical skills say stuff like "deals 80% base damage" so I suppose that would be a "damage effectiveness" of 80%, but I've never seen a spell gem have that. Do spell gems have hidden damage modifiers or something? Is my cool new Arc spell not what it seems? :(

Damage effectiveness on spells just means that any extra flat damage is multiplied by that amount. For example, if you support Arc with Added Chaos Damage, each cast will only deal 50% of the chaos damage listed on the gem. This is to prevent flat damage support gems from being furiously OP with fast-casting spells.

The base damage %s on attacks are similar, but the difference is that with spells the base listed damage on the spell itself is not affected, whereas attacks have to base their damage on something external (your weapon damage) and thus multiply all the damage.

Tooltip damage on spells is a whole other thing. As a general rule, I'd say that for most spells, tooltip damage is only a useful metric when comparing between the same spell one different characters/with different gear, etc. It's generally not a good indication of clear speed.

Hm would like to know that aswell.

First of all Arc still does 100% damage.

Damage effectiveness only means every support gem damage buff or general buff you apply to the skill will get halved.

Wiki still reads 50% damage effectivness on ARC, no idea if thats up to date tho.

Arc is only a suboptimal example.

Take Incinerate as an example:

At lvl20 it does 85 avg DMG on hit. Added Chaos is doing 200 avg on hit.

It means, if you add the gem to incinerate, you would get 3.5 times more damage out of the skill, while the highest DMG multiplier for support gem is only 1.7 (Conc Eff). To cut this, they introduced damage effectiveness. For Incinerate 0.3, which means the 200 are cutted to 60.

So it's still in effect, and it's basically a damage multiplier for added damage on a spell. Now my question is, why is it nowhere to be found in-game? I saw an old screenshot that actually stated the damage effectiveness in a gem. I can't find that anywhere now.

Also, does the tooltip DPS take that into account? My Arc seems to get a hefty amount of DPS from Added Lightning Damage, even though it's supposedly only 50%.

The tooltip damage is correct.(although keep in mind the dps listed is PER TARGET, so for arc if you hit 6 targets you'd multiply that dps by 6)

Spell damage effectiveness does not effect the base damage of the spell, it only applies to any additional flat damage (added cold/chaos/lightning support gems being the best example). The 50% damage effectiveness but high base damage is why Arc scales so well with added levels (from gear/empower) and not well with things like added lightning/cold/chaos.

Attacks and spells use 2 slightly different systems.

Spells work as stated above.

Attacks scale ALL damage, base(weapon damage) and flat damage added by supports/items. So if an attack says 'deals 150% base damage' this will effect base damage coming from the weapon as well as added flat chaos/cold/lighting/phys damage.

The wiki still refers to this as damage effectiveness on the skill pages but it's technically not the same stat as damage effectiveness on spells.


Damage effectiveness for spells is basically just a way to make them scale in different ways.

Hopefully that all made sense.

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Dranzyl wrote:

So it's still in effect, and it's basically a damage multiplier for added damage on a spell. Now my question is, why is it nowhere to be found in-game? I saw an old screenshot that actually stated the damage effectiveness in a gem. I can't find that anywhere now.

Also, does the tooltip DPS take that into account? My Arc seems to get a hefty amount of DPS from Added Lightning Damage, even though it's supposedly only 50%.

The damage from added lightning is still being scaled by your spell damage, the damage that is being scaled is just 50% of what it would be on something like fireball.

If the spell doesn't list damage effectiveness any added damage is 100% effective. Fireball would be any example of this.

Damage effectiveness is still shown on spells if they have a value of something other than 100%, but when the change was made to the way base damage on the spell is effected, they moved and renamed it so that it would appear differently than it does on attacks.

Oh holy balls I'm blind, I never noticed that on my gems, lol. Well, guess it's just a balance thing then, and now that I know I can see it I'm fine with it.

I gotta wonder though, I get that something like Flame Blast with its 1100% potential scaling needs it reduced, but why does Arc have such reduced effectiveness, being ever so slightly faster than Fireball, with 100%, or Glacial Cascade with 80%, or even Storm Call which is much faster than all of those and still has 100%?

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Dranzyl wrote:

Oh holy balls I'm blind, I never noticed that on my gems, lol. Well, guess it's just a balance thing then, and now that I know I can see it I'm fine with it.

I gotta wonder though, I get that something like Flame Blast with its 1100% potential scaling needs it reduced, but why does Arc have such reduced effectiveness, being ever so slightly faster than Fireball, with 100%, or Glacial Cascade with 80%, or even Storm Call which is much faster than all of those and still has 100%?

Probably to help balance the innate shock chance?

because by default it hits multiple targets fully