So ive been working on a pure Arcanist. One thing that has caused me some troubles is trying to figure out what type of weapon I should be using.
I 99.9% of the time attack with just my abilities. This means Elemental/Aether/Cold/Lightning damage for the most part. Offhand items are easy to figure out. But for main hand weapons, i think I need some clarification.
If I have a sword that has the following mods:
+30% aether damage
10% of physical damage is converted to cold damage
Does this mean my spells that do aether damage get +30% damage, or is it saying that when i hit with the sword I do an addition 30% damage as aether?
Does this take the physical damage of the sword, and convert 10% of that to a flat cold damage bonus to my skills like Trozans Sky Shard? Or is it a cold damage to just the weapon attack. IE: Sword hits for 100 physical damage, which turns into 90 phyiscal, 10 cold damage.
if your sword were to deal Aether damage it too would deal 30%more as well
Does this take the physical damage of the sword, and convert 10% of that to a flat cold damage bonus to my skills like Trozans Sky Shard? Or is it a cold damage to just the weapon attack. IE: Sword hits for 100 physical damage, which turns into 90 phyiscal, 10 cold damage.
the first part is wrong, the second correct, the weapon damage is only for weapon attacks (and skills with % weapon damage)
Your sword will not help TSS, as TSS deals Cold and Lightning, so there is no Physical damage to convert
On the other hand when you hit with your weapon it will deal 90 physical and 10 cold (base, adjusted by whatever bonuses you have to the two damage types)
The 30% bonus damage gets added to your character sheet, so every skill you use that does aether damage will benefit from it. That said, the 30% only get added to a multiplier so in practice it’s not 30% extra damage.
Every source of physical damage that you deal will have 10% of it’s base value converted to cold damage (unless the converted value exceeds 100% then it’s weighted). Physical damage isn’t linked to the fact you attack with a weapon or not, it’s just a type of damage that will be listed as such on the spells if there’s any or on the weapon if using it to attack.
As for the damage from the weapon being added to your spells: only if it’s explicitly written in the tooltip (for example: “55% main hand damage (4674-5173)”). TSS offers no such bonus, but Calidor’s Tempest does for example. Wasn’t in the question but interesting to note: debuffs that aren’t explicitly listed as part of a spell, or granted skill, or celestial power, can usually only be applied through % weapon damage component of attacks or spells and scale in efficiency based on the %, up to 100%.