[0.10.4b] Bow Marauder (The Shocker (tm)) [**TO BE UPDATED SOON 1.0.0**]

"

Wow, my bowrauder is so very different from yours! Interesting!

"

Kingrat wrote:

Hey guys, this is probably a really noob question but concerning the passive skill tree, once I do the initial skills, do I proceed north first or south first? I'm still trying to wrap my head around this skill tree lol it's VERY confusing

"

FabledGumbo wrote:

Is it reasonable to expect to get 100 or more dex from equipment to be able to equip an endgame bow or should that be a factor of consideration towards endgame? Also, is it really worth going 7 points out of the way just to pick up one elemental damage circle? And if you're going that far anyway, is it worth the 4 or so extra points to pick up iron grip?

"

Jakabov wrote:

I had assumed that Iron Grip's influence on Lightning Arrow's damage should be subject to the converted damage calculations, meaning that it essentially becomes total damage gain regardless of type. If you have 100 strength, which gives +20% physical melee damage, taking Iron Grip should increase LA's final damage by 20%.

I have a melee marauder with, incidentally, almost the same build -- Lightning Strike is fundamentally very similar to Lightning Arrow. I equipped a bow with LA and took a look at the damage with and without Iron Grip. At 350 strength, these are the results (the damage is low because the bow is shit, just multiply by 10 or 100 or whatever if you want to see bigger numbers - the proportions would be the same):


WITHOUT IRON GRIP (screenshot)
DPS: 26.4
Total damage: 10-30
Physical damage: 4-12
Lightning damage: 6-18

(The lightning damage is exactly 50% higher than physical thanks to the 50% weapon elemental damage passives in the templar area.)

WITH IRON GRIP (screenshot)
DPS: 40.3
Total damage: 15-46
Physical damage: 7-20
Lightning damage: 8-26

NOTES
- at 350 strength, I should get +70% physical damage to projectiles
- this should give either +70% or +35% total damage to lightning arrow, depending on calc
- if wearing a lot of flat damage from gear, the on-sheet dmg difference will look smaller

RESULTS
Total DPS increase after Iron Grip: +52.65%
Physical damage increase: +66.66% (subject to rounding at such small numbers, assume +70%)
Lightning damage increase: +44.44%

CONCLUSION
- calculation checks out for physical damage
- calculation does not match for lightning damage, but is high enough that it must simply be affected by some third party calculation
- third party calculation is probably the +50% weapon elemental damage from Catalyse passive

It would cost me another 7 respec points to respec out of Catalyse, so I'm not doing that just for the sake of testing this. It seems conclusive that Iron Grip increases Lightning Arrow's DPS significantly, but that the 'Elemental Damage with Weapons' stat is calculated independently and not increased by Iron Grip's bonus. I'm a writer and not super keen on math, so if anyone will take a crack at solving that, I'd like to see the results.

My verdict is that IG does increase LA's damage by potentially upwards of 100%, but that LA's damage is actually a fairly small amount of your DPS after all the various sources of flat damage are applied. If you get a bow with very high base damage, LA's damage becomes a larger proportion of final DPS, and so too does Iron Grip. If you're using a low-damage bow, Iron Grip probably does almost nothing.