% lightning damage vs % spell damage

I bought a focus with % spell + % lightning.
The old focus has greater % spell but % fire damage, so I bought a new one with lightning.
The combined % spell + % lightning is about 100%
The old % spell is about 35%
When I equip the new focus my spark dps metric on the skills page goes down.

Why?

Does "% lighting damage" not count to wards spark or is there something wrong with the metric not reflecting the combined increase?

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Pathofwexcellence#5517 wrote:

I bought a focus with % spell + % lightning.
The old focus has greater % spell but % fire damage, so I bought a new one with lightning.
The combined % spell + % lightning is about 100%
The old % spell is about 35%
When I equip the new focus my spark dps metric on the skills page goes down.

Why?

Does "% lighting damage" not count to wards spark or is there something wrong with the metric not reflecting the combined increase?

DPS is based on how much every source of damage occurs every second so first thing is to look into the advanced information your skill have : how much % of your Spark damage is actually lightning damage ?
If you are using some source of flat / conversion of damage into physical/chaos/fire/cold instead of lightning that would explain why it goes down .

Then of course if your cast speed was quicker before that would also explain why your DPS is going down . There's also other stuff like critical hit and so on , just check the detailed infos and compare what both items does change .

Here's my focus stats. i don't see anything that would negatively affect DPS. It seems as though the reduction in DPS comes from the reduction is spell damage, but I thought the much higher lightning + spell combined damage would increase DPS significantly. This is why I wonder if either I misunderstood lightning damage with Spark works or maybe the dps metric doesn't take lightning damage into consideration?

OLD
35% increased energy shield
55% increased spell damage
50% increased fire damage
+1 to all spells
35% to cold resistance
53% increased mana regeneration rate
SPARK DPS = 6137

NEW
81% increased energy shield
32% increased spell damage
62% increased lighting damage
11% cold resistance
60% increased mana regeneration rate
SPARK DPS = 5770

the old one has +1 to all spells so it makes your spark 1 level higher = more base damage = scales higher

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Tari_#4170 wrote:

the old one has +1 to all spells so it makes your spark 1 level higher = more base damage = scales higher

Yep that's the reason why the DPS is better , the downside to that is higher skill level = higher mana cost too .