These two items have physical base damage, but then convert a large portion of it. However:
Soulrend has 70 flat cold damage in the weapon tooltip (above attacks per second), and so is fixed item to item.
Shar’Zul’s has 72-84 flat fire damage, but in the body of the item, and so it can vary item to item.
My suggestion is not that they have the same bonus damage, but just that these, and every other item like this, has the damage in the same place. Either move it out of the top tooltip (Soulrend --> Shar’Zul’s style), or vice versa. Having both ways of adding flat damage just seems slightly unnecessary / confusing.
Physical conversion is useful on certain skills. I’d for one keep it there.
For example, if shar’zuls dealt only fire damage, and had 0 conversion, then the flat physical damage on skills like FW would remain unconverted (assuming of course you’re not using things like the justice set).
Could you elaborate by what you mean with this statement? Is it that there is some minor difference that is intentional? And might I ask, why has it been decided that some items roll different flat damage values, and others have them fixed?
All weapons at least have some fixed damage values. Whether they have any more with variance is up for debate. Stats listed in the top portion of the item are fixed, those in the bottom can change.
Edit: For damage types as a whole…
Cold is usually static (frozen, get it?)
Fire usually has a slight range
Lightning usually has a very large range (courtesy of Diablo)
Acid usually has a lot of flat damage scattered all over the place. Kind of like Chaos, too.
Aether tends to have a range like Fire’s
Vitality tends to have smaller fixed values or with a very slight range
Piercing tends to have smaller fixed values that are all over the place
I know, I’m just trying to understand the decision behind doing so. My guess at the moment is that some items need a minimum number of stats to vary, and moving all flat damage into the top tooltip would reduce variables.
In truth, it makes little difference in gameplay (I’ll never farm multiples of an item for a slightly better roll, personally), but it is more a curiosity thing, or if it was some strange TQ relic…
The values in the top part can still give a range - this is more a variance on the values that can appear on the item as opposed to giving a damage range. Otherwise, all items could just do x = (a+b)/2 damage instead of a-b damage (which I don’t mind how it currently works).
Soulrend: Base damage of x (where x:= a+b, a being physical, b being cold).
Worldeater: Base damage of y (where y:=a)
Separately, it has been decided that Soulrend will have stats i, j, k, and Worldeater stats I, J, K. It just so happens that one of those stats for Worldeater is additional damage.
It’s a little strange to me but I understand it now.