Nightblade, newbie questions

Nightblade has a lot of damage modifiers that I am utterly confused about.

Take a skill such as Dual Blades. It says it adds +5% cold damage. Am I correct in thinking that ANY/ALL cold damage I do is increased by that 5% or does that only apply if I attack with a melee weapon that has cold damage?

Now, looking at Ring of Steel/Ring of Frost/Circle of Slaughter combo (assuming 1 point in each). Steel does 135 piercing, Ring of frost changes that all to cold, so does the +10% pierce damage from Slaughter get added as cold damage as well?

Then there is the skill Merciless Repertoire, on the skill tree its a circle which leads me to believe its a passive. So how then is the 35 poison damage over 5 seconds applied?

I see things like these on weapons as well. If I have a weapon that adds say +10% acid damage, does that only apply if the weapon does acid damage or does it boost any attacks that provide acid damage? When I look at the character stat sheet, it doesn’t seem like everything is matching up properly.

% damage increase applies to everything unless it’s an active offensive skill what doesn’t grant a buff (example Ring of Steel and Circle of Slaughter).

It does. Conversion applies before % damage bonuses, with an exception for skills like Ring of Steel and Circle of Slaughter (don’t know how it works in this situation, probably adds up the % pierce increase to your cold damage before the attack and then removes it).

On-attack. Each time you attack and the attack has % Weapon Damage (or is an auto/basic attack), the poison will be applied. It literally works the same way as in items.

It’s all-type damage increase. If you have 10% Acid boost, all acid damage will be boosted by 10%. There are separate damage types for DoT effects.

> Yes. But only if you (surprise, surprise) are dual wielding

> Let’s call RoS and CoS a skill line. And let’s call the %bonus damage offered by nodes in any skill line %skill damage.

All % skill damage is added before transmutation - so yes.

> The flat poison damage is applied the same way as any other flat damage source would be applied - it is multiplied by any skill with a %WD component, with the highest %WD component skill having the greatest priority.

This means that if I for some reason decided to make an acid blademaster, and if I hit enemy X with both a 26/16 cadence (500% WD) and a 1/16 ABB (~80% WD), the flat poison damage from merciless repertoire will be multiplied by 5 only.

> %bonus damage (regardless of the source) applies to everything. The tricky thing is WHEN does it apply. As mentioned earlier, %skill damage applies BEFORE transmutation, whereas %bonus damage from gear applies AFTER transmutation. It gets more complicated than this, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s ignore the minutiae.

So, if I took the Ring of Frost transmutor, the %pierce damage from circle of slaughter would apply BEFORE transmutation. And any %cold damage I have from my gear would go on to benefit the now transmuted skill.