I’m not quite sure that I understand how the damage is calculated. I read the Game Guide and Combat Calculations Wiki entry.
Each skill has some base damage (I think), although most skill tooltips omit this information. Mana Strike states that it has 15 base lightning damage, whereas Shatter Strike does not mention it. According to the Game Guide, “Melee skills typically have 2 base damage total” - so I guess Shatter Strike does add 2 melee cold damage.
Now if my melee weapon does have 10 physical damage (implicit) and additional 10 melee fire damage (prefix), then one attack of Shatter Strike makes 22 damage, but only 2 of those damage points are cold - which means that the increased cold damage and cold penetration that I get from the Shatter Strike skill tree don’t do all that much. So in order to benefit from the increased cold damage, I would have to find a weapon with added cold damage. Am I right? Or I have to have lots of Dexterity and invest points into some passives, as that adds more cold melee damage. But still, having a weapon with cold damage would be beneficial I guess?
Mana Strike with Mana Storm is kind of a different beast, though. The lightning damage is (probably) spell damage and thus does not benefit from added melee damage. In this case, having adaptive spell damage (implicit on staffs and scepters) would probably help? Does it even make sense to invest into Mana Storm without such a weapon (as a Spellblade)?
The wiki is, unfortunately, very outdated & not correct.
For base damage, it very much depends on the skill. Added damage (eg, from weapons, passives & skill nodes) get multiplied by the skill’s added damage effectiveness (100% unless otherwise stated, more expensive & slower skills tend to have higher multipliers, such as Meteor having 600%).
Flame Reave, for example, has 15 base fire damage, Firebrand gets +5 fire damage per stack
The skill needs to explicitly state that it converts any added damage to an element (such as Harvest’s node that converts to Necrotic), so any added phys from your weapon would remain physical.
For Shatter Strike, if you want to maximise the benefit of Cold penetration, then yes, you’d need to get as much dex and cold melee damage as possible.
Correct, Mana Storm is a spell which only benefits from added spell damage, not melee damage.
I have some questions regarding “modifiers on skills are multiplicative with modifiers from gear and passives.” (as confirmed by Reimerh_QArts).
Do “modifiers on skills” include bonuses from attribute points (such as Shatter Strike’s +4% increased Melee Damage per point of Dexterity)? Or is this counted towards “modifiers from gear and passives” (because the attribute points come from gear and passives)?
Is added damage from attributes, e.g. +1 Melee Cold Damage per point of Dexterity, multiplied by the skill’s damage effectiveness?
Are all “modifiers on skills” multiplicative with “modifiers from gear and passives” (not just damage)? So for example, is Chill on Hit or Freeze Rate Multiplier from skill nodes multiplicative with the same stats on passives and gear?
I assume there is one exception: If it explicitly says “Global” (e.g. Shatter Strike’s Lingering Chill node), then it is probably additive with bonuses from passives and gear. Is this assumption correct? (Then this would also mean that it is multiplicative with bonuses from other skill nodes.)
Will this kind of information be available in the (in-)game guide at some point?
Global modifiers from skills are equivalent to the same modifiers from gear/passives, so yes. 160% freeze multi from Lingering Chill should be identical/interchangeable to 160% freeze multi from gear & passives.
Hopefully the skill DPS (phase 4) will give us all of the relevant stats for each skill, including the various proc chances with gear/passives added in.
Depends, if its damage and says ‘more hit damage/multi with other modifiers’ this is a straight multiplier to the damage and the strongest skill points you can invest
Theres 2 Warpath nodes which I forget the name one explicitly states ‘MORE damage while spinning’ this is actually a 75?% multiplier to ALL your damage dealt which scales even harder with increased ie Bleeds even Spell Damage, theres also another node which only does ‘hit’ damage which does nothing for global dmg
Also not all skills seem to be 5% base crit, I have a Transplant Lich with approx 350% inc crit and Marrow Shards with 4%+ base…so 9% and its probably 50% crit on the Shards - Transplant apparently has 5% base crit and crits 100% of the time but I cant see the tooltip
