Ice Bite - pretty useless

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Actually one of them is not much worse because of mechanics. It is much worse because of your elemental damage source.

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Lava Lash is bad if you use the Added Fire Damage gem or use incomplete conversion from Infernal Blow. But you haven't noticed that, and assume that Lava Lash doesn't have a similar use case "issue".

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Ice Bite is indeed poopy. We all have consensus on that.

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But then the next thing on the list for you to say "this sucks" will be catalyze...

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The simplest solution is to just remove them.

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hscorpio a écrit :

Idk how you'd get a 100k DPS Infernal Blow. The explosion damage is not even affected by weapon elemental damage, iirc.

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But then the next thing on the list for you to say "this sucks" will be catalyze...

Bah, if you don't want to discuss skills with an open mind, then why even bother?
If you think I'm not allowed to state "Skill X is subpar compared to similar skills because of reason Z", then you should maybe get out of your police state metality.
After all this topic is called "Passive skill tree/keystone feedback", not "Passive skill tree/keystone cheering".

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The simplest solution is to just remove them.

Let's just say I disagree. The idea to give incentive towards single-elemental builds is generally very good. Making the nodes symmetrical is also good - alas, they are not really symmetrical in actual viability, for reasons stated above.
Fixing that should be simple enough.

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I mean, really, if only 27% of your damage is cold, how in the world could a 30% additive or multiplicative cold damage talent give you more than an 8% increase in dps?

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hscorpio a écrit :

I was playing my duelist, who currently uses Hatred to buff his Heavy Strike and decided to spec into Ice Bite for some DPS-boost.
I wrote down the DPS values for a level 16 Heavy Strike, a lvl 10 Heavy Strike and a lvl 10 Glacial Hammer for comparison before I specced. All were linked to the same support gems, Faster Attack, Melee Splash and Melee Physical Damage.

As my Hatred is 42% more effective due to aura-supporting passive nodes, about 1/3 of my damage is cold damage, and as I had no other %-elemental damage buffs up to that point I expected an increase of about 300-400 DPS (4000 DPS * 1/3 * 30%).
Glacial Hammer makes it so 2/3 of my damage is cold, so I expected even more from that.

I was in for quite the surprise:

Level 16 Heavy Strike: 4049 -> 4157 (increases 108 points)
Level 10 Heavy Strike: 3715 -> 3823 (increases 108 points)
Level 10 Glacial Hammer: 3011 -> 3195 (increases 184 points)

So, seeing how the difference was the same for a level 10 and a level 16 gem, it was quite obvious that the %-damage increase on the Heavy Strike gem is not even considered.
As I was a bit baffled, i pulled out my calculator and ran some numbers through it.

As it turn out, it seems like the 30% increase from Ice Bite takes the damage from the "Default Attack", then calculates all converted and added cold damage from skills and such, and adds that much flat cold damage to your total damage.
No %-phys damage buffs that usually apply to your converted or added cold damage from Hatred/Glacial Hammer apply here, so you only get a ridiculously small flat buff and that's it.
Support gems, gem level, none of those matter.

Let me repeat: If I'm correct, Ice Bite always scales of the Default Attack.

Seeing how the three main sources of weapon cold damage (Hatred, Glacial Hammer and Ice Shot) all scale with physical damage, that makes Ice Bite quite the joke. It's just as effective to grab a small 12% phys node, which even gives you a little bit more leech.

I guess other 'weapon elemental damage' incresing nodes work the same way, which would mostly matter for the combination of the 'Added Fire Damage' gem and the 'Lava Lash' node.

I could be wrong, I don't know.
What I know is, Ice Bite sucks and I'm speccing out of it.

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TreeOfDead a écrit :

Well, Ice Bite is indeed poopy, as Lava Lash etc.
That's called balance in PoE. Deal with it.