I’ve seen this topic, googled it, etc., but I’m seriously not getting it, and I want to make sure I make the right decision before I use my attribute points. They’re irreversible, right?
(I’m new to the game, obviously.)
I notice there’s a good handful of items in this game which convert Physical damage to Lightning damage. Weapons can do that. Components can do that. You can also get 26% physical > elemental damage via the Arcanist tree, and I find that the largest amount of damage I deal at level 29 comes from Lightning, by far. That’s with me spending my points roughly evenly in all three stats up until this point.
My understanding on damage conversion is that you convert damage before you factor in damage bonuses. So, if I have +100% physical damage, but 50% physical > lightning, 50% of my physical damage is converted to lightning BEFORE I calculate physical damage bonuses.
At present, I get 38% of my physical damage converted to Lightning from my weapon alone (with a gem in it). Even if I only ever got that much conversion from gear, that’d be a potential 38%+26% conversion for physical > lightning/elemental. I also noticed that the Arcanist tree offers me lots of ways to boost Elemental damage.
So, my instinct when playing (since so much of my damage comes from Lightning already) was that Spirit would be the best stat, but the forums say Cunning is better for my damage. What gives, and when does the math change in favor of this?
Looks like your understanding is correct that spirit will boost your base damage thanks to converting to an elemental type. For cunning, it also improves your Offensive Ability, which impacts both chance to hit, and critical chance/damage, the latter being one of the few damage multipliers in the game (spirit based damage will be additive with everything else).
That said, the current forum meta is to dump at least 50% of your stat points into physique regardless. The defensive boost you get from phys outweighs the offense you can get from spirit or cunning (haven’t run the numbers myself).
Cunning boosts Physical, Internal Trauma, Piercing, and Bleeding damage types. Also provides an OA bonus (accuracy+crit).
Spirit boosts every other damage type (aka “magical”). Also provides energy+energy regen (which doesn’t really matter since energy is incredibly easy to manage in GD).
So this depends on whether you plan to focus on physical or lightning damage. You’ll probably want some physique for survivability either way since PS is a melee skill.
