Hey there, I was thinking of making an elementalist melee build using the Discord transmuter for Cadence and Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange from the Arcanist skill tree to achieve 75% physical-to-elemental conversion.
I have a few questions regarding this:
Does Discord apply to all basic attacks, or only every third attack that triggers Cadence?
How does +Physical Damage% interact with physical-to-elemental damage conversion? Does it multiply your physical damage, then convert the total sum to elemental? Or does it only multiply what’s left of physical after conversion?
Does the physical-to-elemental damage conversion affect flat physical damage that is added via skills, namely the flat physical damage gained from the Deadly Momentum upgrade to Cadence?
Hello! Unfortunately Discord gets a lot of flak on these forums, and when I answer your questions you’ll see why…
Discord only affects the Cadence strike, so every third attack. Your other attacks will only have 25% elemental conversion, so having some source of +% Physical is important even if you do this build.
This is a complex question and I’ll illustrate it in an example.
Let’s say you have a hypothetical Cadence that triples your weapon damage and adds 75 physical. You have a hypothetical Fighting Form that adds 50% Physical damage to the Cadence strike. You have a hypothetical Deadly Momentum buff activated that adds 50% Physical damage and 25 flat Physical damage. You have IEE that converts 25% of Physical damage to Elemental, and you have Discord that converts 50% of Physical damage to Elemental for your Cadence Strike. The breakdown of normal attacks and Cadence attacks, given a base weapon damage of 50 Physical, looks like this…
Normal Attacks
(Base Weapon Damage + Flat Physical from Deadly Momentum) --> 25% conversion takes place --> Physical damage bonus from Deadly Momentum
(50 + 50) --> 75 Physical, 25 Elemental --> 75*1.5 = 112.5 Physical, 25 Elemental
Cadence Attacks
((Base Weapon Damage + Flat Physical from Deadly Momentum) * 3 + Physical from Cadence) * Physical damage bonus from Fighting Form --> 75% conversion takes place --> Physical damage bonus from Deadly Momentum
((50 + 25) * 3 + 75) * 1.5 = 450 Physical --> 112.5 Physical, 337.5 Elemental --> 168.75 Physical, 337.5 Elemental
The reason the bonus from Fighting Form takes place before the conversion is because it modifies the Cadence strike skill specifically, whereas Deadly Momentum happens after the conversion because it is a global buff that affects all attacks/skills (this is what “affects all attacks while active” means). Looking at http://www.grimdawn.com/guide/gameplay/combat.php#q20 shows that the order is skill modifiers --> conversion --> equipment/buff modifiers.
The reason the Deadly Momentum physical damage is tripled for Cadence is because it is Flat damage. Flat damage is any damage listed on an equipment/buff/devotion, and it is added to base weapon damage. The Cadence physical damage listed is only a part of the Cadence skill, and therefore is simply added instead of tripled.
From the above example, you can see that the Flat physical damage is indeed converted.
In this example, if you calculated the percentage of damage type for 3 consecutive strikes (2 normal + 1 Cadence), 49.6% would be Elemental and the rest Physical. To help increase that number you can equip Elemental damage bonuses, and other sources of Physical to Elemental conversion (the Elementium shield, for example).
