With the new system of elemental damage, I was wondering when given the choice (for a reroll at the Mystic) if I should pick elemental damage over another historical damage stats (like Crit Chance or Crit Damage) ? How does elemental damage affect my overall DPS compared to those stats ?
Diablo – How should one weight elemental damage compared to other damage stats
diablo-3
Best Answer
Since the 2.0.1 update came out, elemental damage has been the bread and butter of every class. Every skill in the game was given an elemental type (Fire, Poison, Holy, Physical etc.) in order to allow player to benefit from the new items affixes +X% to element damage
Let's take a quick example :
You are playing Wizard with the skill Ray of Frost. As you can see, the skill deals 510% weapon damage. Let's assume you have a legendary bracer that add 20% damage to cold skills, Ray of Frost now deals 510% x 1.2 = 612%.
Now imagine you have a Stone of Jordan equipped aswell giving you another source of 15% cold skill damage. Since elemental damage is additive your total bonus to cold skills is simply the sum of all your bonuses. It will be calculated as follow :
Total bonus = 1+ 0.2 (bracer) + 0.15 (Stone of Jordan) = 1.35. Ray of Frost will now deal 510% x 1.35 = 688,5% weapon damage.
As you can see, stacking %elemental damage is immensely powerfull and provide a more stable DPS than Crit Hit Chance (CHC). The CHC and Crit Hit Damage (CHD) are complementary and rely on each other to be efficient (you need a good balance between both in order to output a good DPS). A normal character will usually get about 9.23% total damage increase from the 6% Critical Hit Chance stat (because it depends on the CHD number and the attack speed for more or less Crit Hit). If, instead of that stat, you went with 15% element damage you would be getting a huge 15% total damage increase to all your element skills.
What the 2.0.1 has brought with this stat is sustained damage. You don't have to rely much on the 50% CHC and 400% CHD to deals big damage but instead your damage are better constantly. Of course a well end geared Character will benefit from both elemental damange and the couple CHC/CHD. But at low level or when your gear is not finished, I would advise to go for elemental damage when given the choice.