Puncture

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Vipermagi wrote:

...?
There have been Melee Damage nodes since forever (look at the current tree?), Strength has always granted Melee Damage, both Melee Phys Supports grant Melee Damage as the name implies. It's not exactly an uncommon modifier.

With the exception of one node in the Shadow tree, all of the other nodes grant "Melee PHYSICAL Damage" and not "Melee Damage". The word difference is very important.

Strength gain only applies to the attack and not to Physical damage generally.

The reason I asked the question is because untyped "Melee Damage" nodes seem to be the equivalent to AoE nodes and to Projectile nodes. Both AoE and Projectile nodes effect the bleed damage.

Is this just another case of melee being left out of nice mechanics?

GGG has been very consistent in providing a logical rule set for their damage types up to this point. If "Melee" damage nodes don't also boost secondary effects of Melee skills, it would be a little bit odd.

Although this is the Puncture feedback forum, a ruling on the interaction of "Melee Damage" would also have great implications on the Viper Strike skill. I would really like to see an official word on this and a possible change to the tooltip information if it does not interact with secondary effects. Something like "+n% Melee Damage with Attacks" or "+n% Damage with Weapons in Melee".

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Vipermagi wrote:

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elboyo wrote:

With the exception of one node in the Shadow tree, all of the other nodes grant "Melee PHYSICAL Damage" and not "Melee Damage". The word difference is very important.

No, it really is not important at all. Melee Damage is Melee Damage - whether there are any other tags attached is irrelevant to the function of the 'Melee' tag.

Every Damage node on the tree is simply Increased Damage. The only difference between them is the Damage tags they adhere to:
Increased Melee Damage only applies if the Damage packet has the 'Melee' tag.
Increased Physical Damage only applies to Damage with the 'Physical' tag.
Increased Melee Physical Damage applies to all Damage with both the 'Melee' and the 'Physical' tag.
'Increased Totem Elemental Projectile Attack Damage' does not exist in practice, but its function is already known because we know how each individual tag works.


Bleed benefits from Increased Physical Damage. This is a well known fact.
If Bleed does not benefit from Melee Physical Damage, then it cannot ever benefit from Melee Damage either - after all, we already know the Physical tag on MPD applies, which means the Melee tag prevents it from applying.

This just makes Melee as a tag inconsistent with Projectile, AoE, Trap, and Mine as tags. Each one of the other tags functions for both the primary and secondary effects.

I don't doubt that it doesn't apply, but it is very strange that it works in all of those other instances and not with Melee. Poison Arrow's cloud is not a projectile and bleeding isn't an AoE (but it is boosted by Concentrated Effect and the Increased Area Damage nodes if triggered by an AoE skill).

I know that, for balance issues, these new Melee Nodes cannot possibly apply to Bleed or to Viper Strike effects, but they need a new descriptor to separate themselves from their parallels.

I thought I knew what was up with the damage increases and double dipping until I read the last few pages.

So basically, it looks like melee damage affects the initial hit and not the DoT. Makes sense, that's fine.

Melee physical damage. DoT's are not melee damage, they're "just physical", so I'd guess those don't apply.

But this is where it gets confusing to me. Projectile damage modifiers. The bleed is a physical dot, so physical damage and DoT damage modifiers should work. It's NOT projectile damage, it's a DoT. So why does projectile damage modify the bleed?

Furthermore, if projectile damage can affect the bleed, why does melee damage not affect it? The dot is either applied by a projectile attack, or by a melee attack. If projectile damage works on the projectile attack bleed, why would melee damage not work on the melee attack bleed?

Now I'm all fucked up. Halp.

The way it works is that projectile damage is more like a general modifier, when melee physical damage is more specific. You can't put melee damage and projectile damage on the same page, as if they were on the same level of the "damage modifiers hierarchy". You have to see the modifiers in PoE like a nest of sets and subsets. The wiki is quite clear with that concerning puncture and the 1.0.2 DoT modification :

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Wiki wrote:

"Generic modifiers to damage dealt will now apply to damage over time that your character causes. Damage over time is not spell damage, nor attack damage, so modifiers specific to those types will not apply. Non-specific "increased damage" modifiers will apply to damage over time. Type-specific modifiers will apply as well."

I know it can be confusing but you should look at what the words denote, their "object" (for projectile damage, a "superior" category of damage), and not the words themselves that are always a bit weak at indicating what they're really meaning (and yes "projectile damage" sounds like it's on the same level as "melee"). Some people like Frege or Leibniz tried to create pure logical languages throughout history to overcome that issue, but we're not speaking those ^^.

But in general, PoE makes a really good job at being precise concerning how things work, what apply/what doesn't, etc. I played some Grim Dawn lately and even if the game is good, it's really confusing when it comes to describe mechanics, skills behavior, modifiers etc. It's like everything is written in flavor texts, when people are expecting a bit of maths.

That's just really fuckin confusing. Can we please get better naming for these damage modifiers if that's the case? Maybe highlight them differently if they are on different "tiers" coding-wise?

I mean really, it doesn't look like there even ARE tiers anymore. Spells I've never seen on an attack gem, so that seems to be the only immutable differentiation. We'll call that tier 1 then. I've seen projectile and melee on the same gem (molten strike, lightning strike) so they don't really seem to be exclusive or on a separate tier of any kind. One would assume that if gems are separated by categorical tier like that (as with spell/attack) they would be mutually exclusive. Since projectile and melee can exist on the same gem, they seem to just be "modifiers" thrown onto gems that are either attacks or spells.

However, based on this thread it actually looks as if projectile and melee are on yet ANOTHER separate tier, one which I can't even understand why it exists. Is it because melee is so separated from spells and projectiles? I'm just in a state of utter confusion right now. From a coding standpoint, it makes sense to me that there would be classes such as "casts", "projectiles", and "melee". While some projectiles and casts could be spells, some may not be, and melee can create projectiles, but nothing will ever be "both" projectile, and melee, at the same time. IE molten strike is an attack, that has a melee component, and a projectile component. However, based on what I see here that is not the case.

TLDR can we get a categorical list of how gems are coded? Because as it stands I have no idea how melee is different from projectile from a "categorical" or "tier" perspective. Clearly they are coded differently, but there's no way to tell that by the naming or by analyzing the gem mods at all.

I guess in the end though, the only thing left to find out is clarification on weapon-specific nodes. Are there any weapon-specific nodes that increase bleed damage on puncture (bow, dagger, etc nodes?) and if so, which ones apply and which ones do not? What about mods on gear itself? Does x-x% increased physical damage on an amulet double dip?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

There are projectile attacks and there are projectile spells. "Projectile" is not limited to certain kinds of skills, it's simply a method of causing damage that can be used by skills of any type.

Melee, however, is fundamentally a subset of attack. Melee is only defined in terms of attacking with melee weapons. There isn't any concept of melee outside of attacks in the game. Since DoT fundamentally cannot be attack damage, it also cannot be melee damage.

This is unfortunate, and not quite intuite since Projectile Damage does work when used with a bow. Either disable Projectile Damage affecting DoT (best), or allow Melee generic damage as well. It would also work if it were Melee Attack Damage and not just Melee Damage.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

There are projectile attacks and there are projectile spells. "Projectile" is not limited to certain kinds of skills, it's simply a method of causing damage that can be used by skills of any type.

Melee, however, is fundamentally a subset of attack. Melee is only defined in terms of attacking with melee weapons. There isn't any concept of melee outside of attacks in the game. Since DoT fundamentally cannot be attack damage, it also cannot be melee damage.

So does this mean that increased projectile damage would increase the burn damage from ignites made by projectiles, such as projectile attacks with fire damage and spells like Fireball and other projectile spells converted to fire damage.

I know this question is not about Puncture but your answer isn't limited to Puncture(it seems) so I just thought I'd ask.