Do implicits affect spells differently than affixes?

I’ve uploaded images to explain why I’m asking. I have two weapons, one of which I expect to clearly be better than the other. I am a lich with passives allocated to necrotic damage. The exalted weapon has 10% more necrotic bonus, and 3% more DoT bonus, but the tooltip absolutely tanks when I use it. My other skills, drain life and hungering souls, both go up quite a bit, as expected. Can anyone explain why this may be the case?

Aside from the implicit not working the same as an affix, I wonder if it’s the spell itself. Maybe it has no innate spell damage, so the adaptive damage does nothing, while the lightning damage is always added?

Welcome to the LE forum!

Adaptive spell damage does add flat spell damage based on the dmg type of the ability, in this case pure necrotic.
If a spell has multiple damage types, adaptive spell damage equally distributes flat spell dmg for each damage type.

My best guess would be, that shock somehow gets calculated for Spirit Plagues DPS, even though it does not hit itself.

And because the Coral Wand has no adpative spell dmg, but spell lightning damage, shock would increase the damage you do greatly.

Do you have any other elemental or lightning damage increases on other gear pieces?
This could explain the disparity as well.

Implicits and affixes are equivalent for dmg calculation.

No other lightning bonuses on my items/passives/skill specs. I don’t think shock is affecting the tooltip. If I go to the dummy and hit it with both wands the damage is actually drastically different in a consistent way.

I don’t have a good explanation after a quick look but I will say that the largest difference between implicits and affixes is how they are displayed on the tooltip. Functionality they are identical. In fact, even things that don’t look like affixes at all like attack speed are just affixes in disguise.

It’s probably the ignite on the rare wand being used in the Spirit Plague tooltip even though it shouldn’t.

Maybe I’m missing it, but you never seem to state what tooltip you are referring to. After this you say drain life and hungering souls both show higher damage, so what is the initial skill you are comparing? If that one skill is the only one affected then it’s probably that skill that matters here.

It’s the tooltip in the other two screenshots I uploaded (Spirit Plague).

I don’t think this is it. As I said, it’s not just a tooltip anomaly. The actual damage between the two is drastically different, and consistently so (so it’s not a proc causing it).

I want to add:

After reading about how damage is calculated this just seems like a bug to me, probably with the added flat damage in regards to this skill in particular. I’ve since had two other wands with higher % mods (necrotic and DoT) but with necrotic/adaptive damage instead of lightning, and they all have the same result of significantly lower damage/tooltip. One wand even had 15 more necrotic damage than lightning on the current wand, plus a 65% curse mod (absent from lightning wand), plus 105% more necrotic/DoT (each being higher than the individual mods on the lightning wand, too). Because I have no other curse mod, that alone should be a huge relative boost, but I still lose 5k~ tooltip. Factor in the higher DoT and necrotic mods, and the higher, but necrotic type, flat damage, and something isn’t being used correctly.

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I don’t have a good explanation after a long look. Pretty sure it’s a bug.

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For anyone interested, I did some testing and opened a bug report here: Spirit Plague scaling issue with scourge, rotten to the core, and concentrated rot specializations

Don’t know if this affects the build tools out there or not, but something to keep in mind if you’re taking these specialization points.

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