[0.10.4b] Bow Marauder (The Shocker (tm)) [**TO BE UPDATED SOON 1.0.0**]
" That's not how it works. In a direct comparison, percentile physical damage nodes are twice as good point for point as elemental damage nodes. Lightning Arrow takes your physical damage and converts half of it into lightning damage, so higher physical damage also grants higher lightning damage. Elemental damage passives only affect the lightning part of Lightning Arrow, which is half of the damage. Ele dmg nodes become worth somewhat more than half after considering the elemental damage on items, but it's still less unless you have an absolutely ridiculous amount of it on your gear. If you stack absurd amounts of flat elemental damage and run Wrath+Anger together with your Grace aura (which will cost you hundreds of life), you can reach a higher on-sheet damage with the elemental setup, but you still can't crit. Conversely, physical damage nodes increase the flat physical damage you can get on gear, in addition to making life leech much more effective and making you less prone to killing yourself on elemental reflect mobs since only half or slightly more than half of the damage is elemental whereas the marauder build's damage is almost all elemental due to having literally zero increased physical damage. In fact, the pure elemental build requires a good deal of flat elemental damage on gear in order to be worthwhile. If you don't have that, you're just inefficiently increasing half of Lightning Arrow's damage. Since those elemental damage % nodes add only to the lightning half of LA's damage, they're very inefficient until you have so much flat elemental damage from gear that it adds up to the equivalent of the other 50% of Lightning Arrow's damage. There's only about +100% elemental damage realistically available, some of which comes from extremely under-budgeted passives like the 5% and 8% by templar. There's far more physical damage available, and placed better on the tree. If your base physical damage is 100, Lightning Arrow converts it into 50 physical and 50 lightning (minus 30% due to the inherent skill penalty, but ignore that for this example). Taking the Catalyse cluster increases weapon elemental damage by 50%, which raises LA's damage to 50 physical and 75 lightning. If you had instead raised physical damage by 50%, it would have been 150 which LA would convert into 75 physical and 75 lightning damage. You'd need enough loose elemental damage on your gear to make up for this difference before the elemental build is actually efficient, and even then, it still takes like eleven useless filler points just to get the ability to apply the shock effect, and it rules out the use of life leech gear. You can add more elemental multipliers via support gems, but the same goes for physical damage. One isn't significantly better than the other, but contrary to popular belief, pure elemental is not the only way to play Lightning Arrow, and it has drawbacks such as no crits and a long skillgrimage just to get a 20% shock chance that never increases. The only serious advantages of going marauder are the tankier starting passives, the slightly better resists, and access to more life nodes if you want to go all out on life stacking (this is what makes it a bit safer for HC play -- you would never need more than about +170% for softcore). The disadvantages are that basically all your damage is elemental, you can't crit or really life leech except from the support gem, you will be jumping through hoops in order to equip a thicket bow before level 70 or something, and you can never have more than 20% chance to shock. Last edited by Jakabov#1183 on Feb 2, 2013, 12:13:13 AM
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Jakabov,
in the Ranger forum, people are saying they get much more dps with a LA bow ranger (with elemental dmg nodes) than a physical bow ranger with critical hit nodes? Last edited by Pi314#5955 on Feb 1, 2013, 11:53:01 PM
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sooooooo this marauder bow build is shit against elemental reflect? what do we do against that then?
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" It's pointless to compare entirely different builds. LA is the best bow build whether you go elemental or physical. |
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" Why is LA the best? |
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" Because LA lets you take the damage from physical damage nodes and basically add it 1.5 times to the total damage you're doing instead of the just the amount you're getting from the node (aka +8% is actually +12%, +15% is actually +23.5%, etc). It does that because it's taking 50% of the physical damage you do with your bow and adding that to your attack as lightning damage. +physical damage nodes is most definitely the way to go because they add the most bang for your points with a build that's based around LA. |
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I think I am missing something, I deff see the advantages of a Physical build, but I am not seeing how phys damage is adding 1.5x the amount...
If I do 100 phys dam, with LA it does 50 Pdam and 50 Light damage. If I apply a +8% bonus, I would do 108 Phys dam, and with LA I would do 54 Pdam and 54 Light dam, how are you getting the phys damage to half double count? |
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" If your resists are maxed then you won't have many problems, and Resolute Technique prevents burst damage against you from crits (which would 1-2 shot you depending on your dps). Last edited by Hojirozame#7390 on Feb 2, 2013, 2:45:45 AM
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" RT isnt about preventing crits against you. It is that u cant deal any crits in exchange for 100% accruacy, isnt it? |
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" Actually it serves both of the purposes. You WANT to avoid crits, and you WANT 100% accuracy without worrying about accuracy nodes or stats on items. Physical Bow builds. When you compare the amount of elemental damage and the amount of physical damage (flat values) that you can reach on your character (we are talking about using bows exclusively!), the amount of elemental Far surpasses the amount of physical; the amount of physical is so much smaller that it makes it much less worth investing in. I tried to come up with a good, viable physical bow build; but it was heavily reliant on Diamond Flasks, and since those were removed, I quit bothering with physical bow damage. It just cannot provide enough "oomph" to compare with ED, and it isn't worth the investment. If you want the extra damage, just invest into the 20% shock chance, however worthless it seems, it is a giant DPS boost. When it comes to the elemental nodes near the templar tree; I was contemplating removing those to get some more efficient ones. But more on that later. I apologize for not being able to answer every single post anymore; I'm not here non stop, and I wish to thank people answering questions. On another note, I wish to tell you all that when you read forums, you should take everything with a pinch of salt, no matter who wrote it, and evaluate the information carefully before adopting it. Otherwise you just end up jumping from one place to another, clueless as to what is true and what not. Life is tough... but it is tougher if you're stupid.
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