Wand Physical Damage and Attack Speed is Misleading

Edit: I don't know what it is doing. POB never returns the values given in the game for DPS. Playing around with calculations sometimes yields the right value but I'm never sure if it is correct or coincidence. all i know is that POB predicts a sub par return for the Wand Physical Damage and Attack Speed. Something is NOT being scaled for POB to predict a 55 lightning damage increase from a 36% wand physical damage increase. My base wand physical damage is 181. If the 36% increase was applied to wand damage alone i would get closer to 82 damage to each element just from the wand physical conversion, before elemental increases and spell damage increases. If POB numbers are right, WPD passives have been arbitrarity nerfed into uselessness.

It says that with 3 nodes it will give 36% increased physical damage with wands. This implies that it will act as a if it were a wand %physical increase modifier to the base like an explicit on the wand, which would then be converted to another type and scaled by damage type modifiers.

Instead, Wand Physical Damage and Attack Speed appears to be only applying to the base item physical damage before any flat adds or increases or quality increases to the wand physical damage, then converting, and then adding the value to the type converted to without any other damage type scaling.

At least this how it is implemented in POB. It makes the increase from Wand Physical Damage and Attack Speed trivial and meaningless. The increase does not scale off anything except the base item type damage without any other mods or scaling.

The question then is, is this a bug in POB or is it the way it is implemented in the game? Seeing it behave this way on POB has made me not even bother investing in it in the game. If that is the way it is in the game, then what is the point of it? It offers no significant benefit to the build, because the only reason to invest in it is to scale wand physical damage for conversion and then to scale the damage converted to. If it is added after all other conversion and scaling it is pointless.

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ScottSteven8295#4411 wrote:

This implies that it will act as a if it were a wand %physical increase modifier to the base like an explicit on the wand,

Modifiers to physical damage on a weapon aren't going to be the same as any other modifiers to physical damage.

The modifiers on the weapon itself are "local modifiers", meaning that the item naturally has the stat and the modifiers on the item change what the item grants. This is why attack speed and crit chance modifiers are so important on weapons, as well as physical damage modifiers when scaling off the weapon's physical damage.

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ScottSteven8295#4411 wrote:

The increase does not scale off anything except the base item type damage without any other mods or scaling.

What were you expecting it to scale, other than physical damage or damage converted from physical?

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ScottSteven8295#4411 wrote:

It offers no significant benefit to the build, because the only reason to invest in it is to scale wand physical damage for conversion and then to scale the damage converted to. If it is added after all other conversion and scaling it is pointless.

Based on the notable, I would assume it'd be for scaling wand damage when using a physical wand, rather than a wand with modifiers adding elemental damage to attacks.

The "increased physical damage with wands" modifier would provide the same bonus to attacks with a wand as any other applicable "increased physical damage" modifier.

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Jadian#0111 wrote:

What were you expecting it to scale, other than physical damage or damage converted from physical?

I am expecting it to scale the wand physical damage, just like it says it does. Which would then be converted to elemental damage, 33% each element, and would then be scaled by elemental damage and spell damage multipliers, exactly as wand physical damage is always converted and scaled from the modified base. That is exactly the conversion chain i see from the 181 wand base damage without Wand Physical Damage. There is no other way that i could go from 181 wand physical damage to 1k and 2K elemental damage for each element...but increases from Wand Physical Damage and Attack Speed are not being applied the same way. even if the spell damage multiplier is applied to physical damage before conversion, the elemental damage should still be exploding from my elemental damage multipliers after conversion.

If those nodes worked the way you wanted they would be the most broken on the tree. Local damage from a weapon gives base damage which everything else is multiplied off of for attacks or spells if you use battlemage. You are basically asking to get second merciless mod from the passive tree which would be absolutely nuts.

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gladiatorpie#3317 wrote:

If those nodes worked the way you wanted they would be the most broken on the tree. Local damage from a weapon gives base damage which everything else is multiplied off of for attacks or spells if you use battlemage. You are basically asking to get second merciless mod from the passive tree which would be absolutely nuts.

That's fine, but at least tell the player what it's actually doing. But my latest calculation indicates that it is doing what i think it should do in game. It seems to be POB. It's DPS calculations all over the place and i suspect that POB is not applying the wand physical damage nodes properly. Once i get my damage converted in Mirage ill test it. That's the only way i can know for sure.

Its not as crazy as you make it seem. The way i am thinking it should work is like a flat %physical increase on the wand. The wand would simply have a minimum 36% base increase. %physical increase mods on the wand would just be added to this base. the prophecy wand then would have a min base physical damage of 65 instead of 48.

The elementalist requires this kind of scaling on wand physical damage. By act 10 a wand without at least 15 physical damage added to wand damage and 100% physical damage increase to the wand is useless. making the wand physical damage and attack speed node apply this way would increase the spread of useful gear late game.