Elemental Hit

The answer is : elemental hit is not a bow gem.

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zriL wrote:

The answer is : elemental hit is not a bow gem.

that's a stupid answer. those who have easiest access to bows, also have easiest access to the most attack speed boosts. Attack speed boosts give huge benefit to elemental hit. Full frenzy charges give far more DPS from bows with elemental hit than a wander would get.

What is the case, is elemental hit is not a 2 handed melee skill — this is because 2handed melee attacks slow and deal a lot of damage, as opposed to the other way around. Could be viable on some sword or claw/dagger builds though I suppose.

Have not read all replies. Got this gem in latest patch and noticed that when using my bow, the added elemental damage is NOT showing up on the character screen when I check the Elemental Hit tab. Either it's an oversight, or this gem does not work with bows... which it does not state on the gem.

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Unforgiving wrote:

Got this gem in latest patch and noticed that when using my bow, the added elemental damage is NOT showing up on the character screen when I check the Elemental Hit tab. Either it's an oversight, or this gem does not work with bows... which it does not state on the gem.

due to the current reporting system used for the character sheet, it is not possible to include the damage of elemental hit. This is because it is adding a random bit of elemental damage, and I don't think that is supported yet.

The elemental damage IS being applied, and it's very EASY to notice if you use your brain instead of looking at some numbers on a "piece of paper".

Would have been good if you did read the replies, because as far as I know it was mentioned here already.

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I'd say Elemental hit gives a lot more direct damage/weapon damage than poison arrow does, and hence it (or split arrow) is the most efficient skill to be using for any of the mentioned supports
a 150% damage shriek bow deals an average of 280 damage, while a lvl 17 (not even max) elemental hit deals about 500. With elemental hit support that's buffed up to 890 dmg, which is + 318% damage, more than 10 times the added damage poison arrow does.

One sided way to look at it.

Does Poison Arrow add +30% of the base bow damage or the +30% of the final physical bow damage..?

What is a level 17 Poison Arrow's flat damage component?

Etc.

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konfeta wrote:

One sided way to look at it.

Definitely biased, but not one-sided. I was just being lazy to not include added physical damage, because I didn't think that had any effect on the chaos damage (due to it not saying total physical damage)
I also thought that increased physical damage is generally low on rangers because it's not too frequent in the ranger's area (and they don't get the str bonus either, for instance). Also, for a ranger using elemental hit or poison arrow, they wouldn't have much use of higher damage, since most of their damage would come from the cloud or added elemental damage.
Poison arrow also get 1% extra chaos damage per level

Overall if a ranger does spec into damage, they can get a very large amount, not insignificant at all. With a large number of the damage passives taken (use up virtually all skill points to get max frenzy charges and dmg passives), they can do about +200% damage with 8 frenzy charges.

280 damage +200% damage is 840 dmg. 890 dmg is of 840 dmg is 106% (1730 dmg total)

Now assuming Poison arrow's damage boost was multiplicative after other dmg mods, 49% (lvl 20) damage on 840 damage would be 412 (1252 total)

That would still make elemental hit give 2.2x extra damage compared to poison arrow — at least damage which is affected by attack speed (which would be really high).

HOWEVER
Based on my testing, the added poison damage is not multiplicative (at 1% per level it would probably be OP if it was anyway — no skill gains additional increased total damage % per level). This means that the +49% damage really just increases a person's total DPS by 16% when they already have +200% damage on passives.

Hence it's +137 damage vs +over 890 dmg (the elemental hit gem wasn't even max level, but 3 levels away from it), that makes for 6.6x more damage when both sides have 200% increased physical damage from passives and frenzy charges.

This skill is visually bland as hell, fires a plain old arrow. Needs to be amped up.

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unsane wrote:

This skill is visually bland as hell, fires a plain old arrow. Needs to be amped up.

I agree, I want to know I'm using a skill and not just firing a regular arrow.

I'm using it on my witch, on wands as a default left-click attack.

The manacost is reasonable and the damage boost is nice. For rangers I don't think this skill would make a default, as poison and explosive seem nicer, but after seeing the calculations above, I'm not so sure.

The greatest benefit for my build comes from the fire / frost effect though. Fleeing enemies because of the 1 second burn helps, as well as the cold effects.

I use this + multiple projectiles on my bow ranger. The mana cost is very steep, but the added damage output puts it way ahead of split arrow, and as I have enough mana to support the combo it's a net win. What perhaps isn't evident at first is that the gem scaling is terrific.

The crit chance% mod from quality is also very decent, a 20% probably having +60% if it scales linearly.

I'm not AoF, but the synergy of elemental dmg% on this puppy would be through the roof.