these skills benefits from fire/burn, lightning/electrocute, cold, chaos, aether, poison/acid bonuses. so you can imagine a lot of builds not relying on your weapon range. doesn’t mean that magical ranged weapon are uninteresting though, but not necessary in many ranged magical build (hope it was clear enough, if not sorry^^).
In my reality where I live only DEE is good spammable spell. Examples like phantom blades look like bad joke.
While I wouldn’t use the phrasing you did, as I feel it’s a bit insulting, I do have concerns on the effectiveness of these items with the various stated spamming skills.
Having said that, I need to actually try it before I can determine if my concern is warranted.
I’m certain that there will be a balancing pass with this new addition of caster weapons.
Once you do that, they will be asking for 1H ranged, so they can use it with focus items 
Somehow, your post helped me figure out what i want, 2 handed off-hand items, shaped like a big stick. Thanks! 
As the saying goes, people are entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. So if your reality differs from those of others that is on you. If it is consensus that the others are not viable, that should (and probably will) be addressed.
Can’t tell you either way, haven’t used most of those skills and will wait for Arcanist + caster weapons before I try - as anything before that is not really valid any more once they are available.
That is the ‘problem’ with playing a beta, either some things work fine, but you do not know, as other things they rely on are not yet available - or the devs would constantly have to rebalance to keep everything viable at all times, even though they know they have to adjust it later on once more features are in.
If I were a developer I’d definitely not do the latter…
So I guess we will have to wait, test it and then form an opinion, instead of basing it on outdated data.
That was not what I meant. In TQ staffs are ranged-only weapons that deals elemental damage. They don’t shot arrows or bullets that inflicts physical/pierce damage. So it is ok for me that they have base magic damage only. But crossbows, guns and melee weapons are supposed to deal physical damage as well. It doesn’t make much sense to me a shiv and a dagger having different base damage types if they are basically the same kind of weapon. Also, for a pure caster ranged build, a caster melee weapon could buff stats and damage but would be useless as a weapon. Just my opinion.
I know, but some physical damage is useful for hybrid builds. There’s also the option to stick to a non caster weapon with a good component with magic bonus in it.
don’t worry i don’t feel insulted by Grohuf, even if your answer is more interesting than his 
i wasn’t saying that caster weapons will be perfect for spamming skills, just that :
the two things weren’t totally related but i understand it was confusing, sorry. as you and mamba said we’ll have to try builds ourselves to see what works or not, and most likely there will be changes based on the players feedbacks.
Yeah, I think we are on the same page. I wasn’t sure how much of a difference there will be between skills that use a % of the weapon’s damage (like DEE), versus the skills that don’t (like Stun Jacks).
I think part of that concern is my lack of digging into how all that works.
So I trust the devs and the testers opinion on things, and try it out when it gets here.
Are you seriously trying to make sense of magic?
Magic is magic, this isn’t the real world. This is Cairn, a world where magic imbued swords do not cut, they freeze/burn/electrocute. You ask, how can a sword or gun shoot/slice and not deal physical or bleeding damage? The answer is simple, and you don’t need to over think it at all. MAGIC. That is the concept and the beauty of magic. You can’t explain it, it just is what it is.
I mean its ok for a guy with firestrike equipped to go around punching things dealing fire damage, or another guy to throw EYEBALLS WHICH EXPLODE AND SPRAY ACID EVERYWHERE. but a gun that fires lightning or a sword that can burn flesh instead of cut doesn’t make sense?
You can’t use logic or real world physics in a game world like this. It isn’t the real world, these things don’t apply
and talking about skills, here’s the spammable skills atm which could benefit from spirit :
demo : cocktail, jacks (with transmuter)
occ : dreeg’s eye*
nb : phantom blades* (with transmuter and modifier)
arcan (to be confirmed ) : tempest*, flash freeze, nullification, aether ray (chanelled)
Flash freeze is not spammable, will not ever be I don’t think. A 100% chance to freeze enemies with 0 cooldown would be broken.
Nullification atm is not spammable either, not sure if this will change since it doesn’t do damage either, it’s a cleanse spell currently.
And you are missing one: Panetti’s Replicating Missile.
Ok, makes more sense now
Still, you can easily explain this away with magic, and ultimately you want weapons that deal only elemental damage. Gameplay trumps realism.
I know, but some physical damage is useful for hybrid builds.
And they have plenty of items to choose from already, no need to turn caster weapons into hybrid weapons for that
ok thank you for correcting
the only informations about Arcanist skills available before B21 were from Shalie’s database, and it seems they weren’t exact/complete, as it should be expected from pre-release data. now that we can try the mastery by ourselves, data will be much easier to collect 
Has anyone figured out if Weapon Damage based spells inherit damage types from caster weapons?
Of course they do, that’s the whole point of the new damage types
They have to, where also would your weapon damage come from while equipping them ?