yes, i know that’s a bit of an impossibly broad topic, but let me focus on a particular example.
if you are using Lightning Blast (LB) which is tagged with spell AND lightning and with ALL other things being equal (especially adaptive & flat damage on the weapon) should spell damage and elemental damage on a weapon apply equally ?
i.e. if i have a 100% spell damage wand vs a 100% lightning damag wand, would i still get the same DPS ?
Yes, 100% increased spell damage is identical to 100 % increased elemental/lightning damage. You just want the most of it.
The in-game game guide is your friend (as is the more detailed community game guide).
well, that’s what i thought, but you know what i’m going to say next.
i had two weapons with such stats and the tooltip for one of them (and now i can’t remember which - but i think it was spell) gave me a much higher tooltip.
yes, i checked that the flat/adaptive damage was the same (or at least substantially similar).
time to run another experiment, for science ! 
my guess is that the “close enough” on the flat/adaptive was not actually close enough and that’s where the difference was. i was pretty sure i checked that carefully though…
My best guess would be an ailment like shock, ignite, bleed or poison or cast speed would caused that behaviour.
But yeah flat spell dmg can have a massive impact as well.
the damage calculations should be straightforward, arithmetic is easy.
the problem is making sure you are collecting all the correct terms together…
i often find weapons and think, this is awesome, should increase dps, only to find that the tooltip drops.
i think i’m just going to have to make sure and upload to planner next time that happens and dig into the numbers carefully.
with so many different things impacting different things, it can get very “not obvious” sometimes, what does more damage.
Ailments are incredibly strong super early on, even if you don’t focus on their damage type.
And things like armour shred or shock on hit can cause massively more dmg against enemies that last long enough.
But armour shred and shock for exampels are not very usefull against small to medium mob, that just need a few hits.
tooltip dps is a useful metric, but not everything and should always be looked at with caution.
definitely. i just used it with the same skill and a weapon swap to see if it’s better or worse. but i’m just somewhat suspicious that some sort of side effect isn’t being included
All “increased damage” mods have the same effect for skills that have only one damage type(such as lightning blast) - HOWEVER, the rolls for affixes on items tend to be higher for more specific affixes.
For example on a Staff the T5 affix roles are: lightning damage (128%-192%) spell damage (128%-192%) and elemental (106%-144%)
The best combo of affixes for your build will usually be whatever has the highest affix rolls, the only exceptions being when you are doing hybrid damage builds.
yes, i do know that, but it’s a good thing to point out for future readers of this thread. it comes up a lot in chat, i.e., it’s pretty much an FAQ, why is there spell damage, elemental damage, lightning damage etc… affixes ?
that would be why there is a HUGE difference, flat damage usually is the hardest thing to get and the biggest increase
exactly. so now i’m wondering if there was a “small” difference in flat damage that was not actually that small when it comes to the total damage calculation.
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