Spirit is by no means useless.
…it is the definition of efficient lazy gating.
5 points go a long way towards making the rest of your kit that much more flexible.
If you take “spirit” completely out of the equation the answer is no. It’s impossible to have that much improved duration on any magic build. But even without investing into “spirit” many builds end with around 200-300% bonus DoT from just gear and devotions, so most end game builds would have around 500% improved duration regardless.
Except for electrocute builds that is. It’s invest into spirit or fail, which is why you don’t see any “electrocute” builds being posted.
The elemental damage returns through Spirit are not worth investment from end game perspective
DA is a much more valuable stat
and skill points can’t be respec’d at the moment. So better safe than sorry imo
I think that you two were talking about different things, he was talking about direct dmg multiplayer and you are talking about increased duration.
Investment in spirit do state duration dmg increase but I did some testing long ago and unfortunately it didn’t affected increased duration or in other words elemental DOTs as example didnt lasted longer (in full power) with heavy investment into spirit. So to my knowledge investing in spirit does not affect increased duration but only direct dmg multiplier.
To OP: Imho spirit is not worth it for anything more than meeting gear requirements. Unfortunately these days physique is only way to go if you want you char best optimized, ofc for fun you can do what ever you like 
I dunno, I’ve never found any of my characters to be squishy enough that I felt like I absolutely had to have 900+ Phys gear. There’s plenty of good gear around the 600-700 Phys mark that provides decent chunks of Armour, and that’s not to mention all the extra survivability you can get from skills, augments and components. Stuff like ADctH helps a lot too, and I imagine most melee-range characters would be able to benefit from that.
But again, things like Gladiator Crucible are a different meta entirely so I can see why more Armour might be needed there, but my dual pistols Pyromancer managed to do fairly well despite only being clad in 500-700 Phys gear. True, he’s technically a ranged character, but considering how many enemies Gladiator Crucible bombards you with he might as well have been melee for all the times he got smacked in the face.
Quickly checked on a lightning build. You are right.
Spirit’s increased duration bonuses do not apply at all. Which is one less reason to consider the stat I guess.
Yup, that “Bonus duration damage” means DOT’s percentage damage, not their duration 
If that is one less reason then doesn’t that equate to zero reasons :rolleyes:
Btw i don’t think bonus duration would help electrocution’s dogshit performance. Maybe they should start by reducing the ridiculously wide range of damage as pointed out by Slightly Forum Member Drizzto
Compared to any other damage type, Lightning and its DoT counterpart have the widest damage range. Stats usually range from single digits to high end double digits which adds to RNG of DoT (on top of crit RNG)
You know I’ve been playing this game since early access and I’ve been reading it wrong the entire time.
On another note I always took magic damage to mean everything including DoTs. So am actually surprised the devs decided to separate their bonuses when it comes to adding spirit
The question is how much more advantageous those extra Spirit provides for your damage. See below for my thinking.
Spirit only increases DOT damage, not DOT duration. And the problem is that everybody will end up having 200-300 Spirit without spending a stat point due to mastery. With the additive stat scaling, more points get diminishing return, for example when you have 0% bonus (aka 0 Spirits), spending to get 100% bonus double your damage. But when you have 300% bonus (the usual amount I see with just mastery bar filled), getting another 100% just increase the damage by 20%.
Thus investing in Spirit is not scaling well enough. Meanwhile both Physique and Cunning scales really well because both dodge and crit chance get adjusted as the game goes on.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I do feel like Spirit gains could do with a buff, but take my Elementalist for example - by investing half his skill points in Spirit, his overall damage is increased by around 13% over had he not put any points into Spirit. Sure, 13% extra damage is hardly a number to get overly excited about, especially not for 45 skill points, but haven’t there been entire rage threads over nerfs of a similar or lesser amount? Heck, Shadow Strike builds are likely getting a 5-8% damage nerf next patch and even that resulted in a few people screaming about how Crate should be fed to the dogs. 
So 13% is definitely a number some people care about to some extent, even if it seems rather small on paper - and if that means I can kill enemies 13% faster, I take less damage as a result too. The 720 extra energy I get is certainly helpful as well, since I already find myself running a bit low as is.
OA though? Yeah, OA can definitely give pure damage some competition. I’m interested in trying out Duck’s 48/21/21 setup and seeing how it goes.
I gotta question why DA and OA were ever tied to attributes. It made sure that one stat was going to be left out somehow. Even if they gave Spirit OA or DA, one stat would still be odd. If Spirit gave more of either, or both, it’d be the new best stat for many builds. If it gave less, it’d still be less good. Tying a two variable system to a three variable system doesn’t sort out all nice and tidy.
Well, if they ever give OA to Spirit (which I think they should), it would even out Spirit vs Cunning, but it doesn’t solve the issue that Physique is still superior
The way I see it is that each stat should give both offensive and defensive bonus, for example: physique = HP + regen + dodge, cunning = physical damage + resistances + accuracy, spirit = magical damage + absorption + energy. That would even out the difference in stats and encourage the diversity of builds. For example you can build a high spirit melee character and live with absorption instead of HP, or high cunning character and live with high resistances instead.
Which is why we need a third variable for Spirit - say, Magic Find.
lol
Nah. We need to yank OA and DA out of our Attributes and base the game’s balance around that.
It would, significantly, tho value range would be still an issue tho not much as lack of proper gear and more dedicated devotion (I do hope that devotion is coming with expansion )
Imagine SS trickster with something that converts acid or/and pierce to lightning wielding 2x Spark of Ultos, or elementalist with fire to lihtning conversion
It was fooling me also in beginning so I needed to test, they should change description on it, its way to misleading.
That’s a relic from TQ. DoTs scaled a little better with spirit back then already. However since magic and duration damages were both dogshit in TQ anyway it didn’t really matter :rolleyes:. I never got very good at that game being just a teen then but from memory the only real good magic damage builds were based on Spirit mastery’s split-shot thingy for staves. I’m sure it’ll flood back once I pull the trigger on TQ:AE. I just hope Soulvizier got ported over too.
We should be glad that Bleed, Poison and Vitality scale with stats now too, cuz they didn’t then :D.
Vitality damage scales with int in TQ.