Physical spells lack fundamental damage scaling tools

Physical Spells: Fundamental Lack of Damage Scaling Potential


1. Baseline Comparison: Elemental vs. Physical Spells

Elemental spells have several independent, stacking damage multipliers:

Shock — up to 50% increased Damage Taken. Exposure — reduces enemy resistance by 20-30%. Curses (Flammability, Frostbite, Conductivity) — further resistance reduction by 20-40%. Penetration — ignores part of enemy resistance. Support gems for each element. Ignite — a non-stacking DoT that scales with Magnitude and is boosted by Curses and Exposure.

Physical spells have:

Vulnerability curse — causes hits to ignore part of enemy armour. However, against Fully Broken Armour (which every physical build achieves), this curse does nothing — there is no armour left to ignore.

Armour Break — at Fully Broken Armour, grants 20% increased Physical Damage taken. This is the only working debuff. For spellcasters, it is fixed at 20% (unlike the Warbringer ascendancy, which can scale into negative armour values, but spellcasters have no access to this).

Bleed — a non-stacking DoT that scales with Magnitude. Pin — immobilisation mechanic. Impale — on a single specific spell, Bonestorm. Poison — available through conversion or minions.

The gap: Elemental spells have several multipliers working together. Physical spells have a curse that does nothing at the crucial moment, and Armour Break at 20%. That is all.

2. Core Issues of Physical Spells

The problem is not a lack of mechanics — Bleed, Pin, and Impale (on Bonestorm) exist. The problem is that none of them work at full potential for spells, and the tools to scale them are critically scarce. These same mechanics work perfectly well for attacks — they have clusters, dozens of nodes, and support gems. Spells have none of this.

Impale — a mechanic of a single spell, Bonestorm. One fully channeled cast releases up to 20 projectiles, each applying Impale with a final Magnitude of 108% (30% base × 200% more from the skill × 20% increased from Cut to the Bone). For scaling Impale on spells, there is exactly one passive node — Cut to the Bone in the top part of the tree. No other nodes, clusters, or support gems exist. Other physical spells (Reap, Exsanguinate, Bone Cage) have no built-in Impale at all. Physical attacks have dozens of nodes and support gems.

Bleed and Poison — two potential tools. Each faces fundamental problems.

For Bonestorm: The intended mechanic requires minions to extract Impales and then apply Bleed/Poison. Bleed does not stack — only one Impale out of 20 is used. Poison requires investment in stack limit and provides no multiplicative benefit from 20 Impales — each stack requires its own minion hit.

For other physical spells (Reap, Exsanguinate, Bone Cage): Minions are not needed — the spells hit directly. But these spells cannot deliver a single powerful hit, which is necessary for effective Bleed. Their damage coefficients are average; they are not designed for one big hit (unlike Comet for elemental spells).

Additional for Bleed: Scaling Bleed for spells requires the Pin mechanic: critical hits (Bone Chains node) and Rupturing Pins (40% increased Magnitude against Pinned enemies). Ignite has Flammability and Exposure working directly. Bleed for spells has nothing like this — no Flammability analogue, no Exposure analogue, no support gems increasing Magnitude for spells or minions.

Additional for Poison: Poison investment (stack limit, Magnitude, chance) is located in the right part of the passive tree — far from the spellcaster's starting area. A hypothetical build already requires investment in critical hits, minion attack speed (for Bonestorm), physical spell damage, and survivability. Adding the right-side Poison branch is impossible — there are not enough passive points.

Support gems: There are no support gems that work on minions and directly increase Bleed or Poison Magnitude. Existing Bleed supports (Bleed I-IV) increase hit damage against bleeding enemies, not Bleed Magnitude itself. Haemocrystals, Incision, Rip, Rupture only support the player's own attacks.

3. Asymmetry in the Blood Mage Ascendancy

The Blood Mage has the Blood Barbs node, which allows elemental damage to contribute to Bleed Magnitude and makes Bleeding Aggravated against cursed targets.

Staves have regular affixes for "Gain as Extra Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos Damage". There is no regular "Gain as Extra Physical Damage" affix on non-unique items.

An elemental Blood Mage can take a powerful elemental spell (Comet, Flameblast), find a "Gain as Extra" affix on a staff, and through Blood Barbs get double contribution to Bleed — from the base spell damage and from the added damage. A physical Blood Mage has no access to such affixes. Blood Barbs is specifically tied to elemental damage, so even the rare "Gain as Extra Physical" mods do not provide the same opportunities.

Thus, even in the ascendancy meant to support blood magic, physical spells receive fewer tools than elemental spells.

4. The Core Problem

Elemental spells have several independent multipliers working together. Physical spells have a curse that does nothing against broken armour, and Armour Break at 20%. That is all.

Bleed, Pin, and Impale (on Bonestorm) could close the gap, but:

Impale has one passive node for one spell

Bleed and Poison face fundamental problems: for Bonestorm — minion extraction and lack of stacking; for other spells — lack of a single powerful hit

Bleed lacks Flammability/Exposure analogues

Poison requires investment in an inaccessible part of the tree

Even in the Blood Mage ascendancy, physical spells receive fewer tools than elemental spells, due to the lack of "gain as extra physical" affixes and Blood Barbs being tied to elemental damage.

As a result, physical spells have fundamentally lower damage potential than elemental spells.

5. Suggestions

Add armour break scaling, like Wither or Shock.

Add more passive nodes for spell Impale Magnitude in the top part of the tree.

Add a physical spell with a single powerful hit (high coefficient, slow cast time).

Add support gems that increase Bleed and Poison Magnitude for minions.

Consider changing Vulnerability to provide a damage bonus even against Fully Broken Armour, or add a new curse for physical DoT.

UPD:

Additional testing has shown that Poison stacks do not work on minions. Even if the character has an increased poison stack limit (e.g., +1 from passives or gear), minions still apply only one stack of Poison. This means that it is impossible to effectively scale Poison through stack limit for minions, rendering this mechanic practically useless in builds that rely on minions to apply Poison (e.g., in combination with Bonestorm).

Therefore, Poison as a scaling tool for physical spells that rely on minions is completely non-functional.