Elemental damage completely dominates this game, physical remains useless

Iam totally agree with you Jakabov, you describe all the problem.
nodes/gem,

Im remember in April, they say, they can't modify/change the Armor méchanic.
Maybe they can't remove it but i don't understand why nothing is do to réduce this disparity

And don't say im wrong, ggg work well, they add two gem for you

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Chris a écrit :

The best current builds use heavily supported ranged attacks because they can do a lot of damage from the safety of distance. The recent Multistrike and Melee Splash gems may have improved options for melee characters but we don't have data on that yet.

when i was reading this, im asked if he was really sérious..

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Faerindel a écrit :

EK maybe?

Also, the way armor works makes sure that elemental damage pales in comparison to high phys damage.

Ek is a spell... this change all.


My main char is a pure physical sword/shield ranger lvl 79 (0dmg converted) and his effective dammage against monsters are really ridiculous compared to my EK friend char (same lvl, and he have a badest stuff than me).

Play a pure physical mélé with double/dual-strike against a stone golem in old field and the same with pure elemental version, you will see the difference.

I leave my main char one week ago, and now i play my last char, a new mélée ranger char with only elemental nodes/gear with cyclone. And i deal more dmg and clear more fast than before..


Ps: Im really sorry for my wrong english...And i hope you will feel the meaning of this expression.

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Moosifer a écrit :

I completely agree and there's alot of work that can be done. There are three things that I desperately want and think will do wonders for physical damage.

With regards to cleave, either nerf the elemental damage while DWing or buff the physical damage. It makes absolutely no sense that physical gets a pain cut in damage, when it's not very good in low amount. While elemental gets no additional reduction and depends more on high attack speed due to high mob res.

I have a hard time believing GGG will do anything about the elemental dmg part of ele cleave. To address this, they'll probably nerf the physical dmg part even more, not realizing that even if cleave had "0% physical dmg" it won't matter. You have to have "x% reduced elemental dmg" or else cleave will remain the same, elemental elemental elemental.

You don't even have to lvl cleave up at all when going ele cleave so you don't increase it's mana cost. That's how sad it is, and how good ele cleave is mana wise. A lvl 1 cleave gem is all you need.

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The other thing, which I'm getting so sick of waiting for is have it so physical damage rolls on off pieces (ring, ammy, gloves, quivers) is affected by IPD. If they did this physical bow builds would be opened up, sword and board would become much more interesting and these low damage uniques with interesting mechanics (darkscorn is the one that always comes to my mind) will be much better as a result.

I've been waiting for this too. They also need to increase physical dmg mods. 6-12 dmg is nothing in comparison to 30% increased elemental dmg. Especially iron rings. Their pitiful 1-4 dmg might as well be non-existent.

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Lastly, physical damage weapons are an all or nothing thing. Sticking to my last point, elemental builds can get big DPS boosts from off gear, they can use something like quill rain and put up good numbers. Who is using brightbeak on a physical build? With physical weapons you need 2 high IPD% rolls along with the flat damage roll or it's just garbage. This can easily be fixed by either raising the base values of the weapons while lowering the amount of IPD% you can get. Or just making the change I suggested above, allowing gear to make up for what your weapon lacks.

THIS THIS THIS. This is one of the things I hate about physical. If you don't have 2 high physical dmg rolls, the weapon is complete garbage. Not only does your weapon have to be godlike, YOU STILL NEED TO INVEST HEAVILY IN THE PASSIVE TREE. .

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But when I think about "what exactly is wrong with melee" I think that there's no such thing as a pure physical build, it's either elemental or a conversion build, also their survivability.

Survivability is what plagues pure physical the most. You have such low life, and in the game where kaoms + 10k health is a necessity to be in close proximity, pure physical is practically told to convert to elemental and put the remaining points into life. There is absolutely no advantage to go pure physical. Infact its a detriment. It's terrible in the current state. You can go elemental and have a ton of points left for health. Not even close for physical.

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Islidox a écrit :

I definitely see why. It's also the fact that going melee and crit in general will reduce the amount of passives you can spend on life/defense. Building up crit AND accuracy will seriously cut into your defense, and that can be killer. Otherwise, you'd grab RT, grab all the life nodes along the way and then some, call it a day, have a cold one.

Correct.

If you don't grab resolute that means that you have to focus so much on the increased physical dmg nodes. Countless of them. Forget attack speed. Toss that out the window. Increased physical dmg only. And you'll still end up with little survivability.

Phys damage is fine for mana leech and life leech on gear but nothing more

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Faerindel a écrit :

EK maybe?

EK builds deal more than half of their damage as cold+fire. That's my point: even the iconic "physical" builds are more elemental than physical, the physical damage is just a vector for elemental damage. Everything is about elemental damage in this game. There literally doesn't exist a competitively viable build that's more physical than elemental. You can play it as a gimmick, but it's so much worse that it's not worth acknowledging the possibility.

Literally every single powerful build in Path of Exile is elemental-based. Every single one, no exception. Every build. Even the most physically oriented builds get about 60%-75% of their damage from Hatred and Added Fire Dmg. These pseudo-physical builds are made viable specifically by the fact that you can turn it into elemental damage. It's really some of the most lopsided game design I've seen in my life. It's just hilariously bad.

Yup, I agree OP. I feel like I'm becoming a negative nancy in these forums. It's too bad this great game is being directly hindered by some poor design choices. I would prefer either the damage types be mutually exclusive or you can only have one added element at a time. Then after that you have to redo armour calculations. The logic with the big hit = big damage is arbitrary and should be included elemental damage taken as well, you can't tell me a huge ass fireball shouldn't work in the same way as the big hit relative to a smaller flame. They just need to accept that was a novel but ultimately bad idea. In armour's current form it limits the damage effectiveness to large physical damage destroying low to mid physical dmg builds outright, again poor design that just ends up serving no other purpose than to inadvertently limit player choice.

This game can achieve greatness. The developers are going to have to be willing to make some pretty fundamental changes though.

tripple EK totem 2667x3 dps unbuffed. 3343x3 selfbuffed.


Kills packs in maps in seconds so for me this physical EK dmg just works fine.


Have to admit that about 750 dps comes from added fire dmg and 500 dps from Hatred, so you're right when it comes to pure skillbase dmg.

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Jakabov a écrit :

Elemental damage utterly dominates this game. There literally isn't a viable physical damage build in the game, the closest you get are things like physcleave where more than half the damage is still elemental from Hatred, Added Fire, and various sources of WED. Ele cleave is the best melee build, LA is the best ranged attack build, and the fundamental game mechanics fiercely discourage relying on physical damage.

True, but physical damage is the power generator that drives most elemental damage conversion mechanisms. LA, for example, is useless without a strong source of physical damage from your bow. There are only a few supports that add pure elemental damage rather than converting or adding a percentage of your physical damage to your attack.

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StarlightGamer a écrit :

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Moosifer a écrit :

If you have 10,000% IPD from tree, gear, and a shit load of hacking, a 5-10 physical damage roll on a ring will give you 5-10 physical damage on your stat sheet. Feel free to test it.

Hmm, my physical bow character gets 10-15 physical damage from a 7-11 physical damage ring. It would be 11.55-18.15 (11-18) if it was increased by my bow physical damage passives, so it's obviously not being affected by passives like you said. Actually, I'm not sure where the extra damage is coming from. It's being increased by between 43% (7 x 1.43 = 10.01) and 45% (11 x 1.45 = 15.95). My bow has 146% increased physical damage, which is close, but should give 10-16 damage because 11 x 1.46 = 16.06.

Edit: If I take off my quiver, the ring suddenly gives 10-16. If I switch to my other weapon set, it gives 10-16 there too, but the bow only has 85% IPD%. If I remove everything but the ring, it gives 7-13 damage. If I put my quiver on, which gives 1-4 damage from the intrinsic mod, it increases damage by 2-4? Ugh, I don't know how this figures. I guess there are truncated decimal places and a bunch of rounding going on behind the scenes.

IIRC 'Projectile damage' stuff increases it. Why that works and bow physical doesn't work is an issue that will be fixed at some point (being worked on but might take a while due to being part of larger balancing).

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RogueMage a écrit :

True, but physical damage is the power generator that drives most elemental damage conversion mechanisms. LA, for example, is useless without a strong source of physical damage from your bow. There are only a few supports that add pure elemental damage rather than converting or adding a percentage of your physical damage to your attack.

That's not true. While a LA build using a physical bow is good, I'm pretty sure the most popular version still involves a high ele damage + high APS thicket.

My 7 Frenzy charge Physical Ranger is a sad panada.

Did not end up with enough DPS even though the idea sounded cool at the time.

I get only get 2.3k dps with this bow using frenzy, lmp, afd, ml, this is my bow.

I do 4 attacks per second :x