I have a piercing/bleed BM. I have a few decent Slicers, but some of the best ones have some type of conversion to a damage type I don’t need. For example, 10% of Physical damage converted to Fire. Does this harm me? I’ve worked to get my +%Armor Piercing as high as possible…+150% currently, unless I’m wielding a Sinister prefixed sword, which I’ve never seen on a Slicer. Does this Fire conversion reduce the base damage of the sword before the Armor Piercing conversion kicks in? Or is it afterwards, in which case it’s essentially irrelevant (although I do have a small-to-moderate amount of incidental Physical damage from, for example, Cadence)?
As far as I remember, Armor Piercing is unique as a conversion in that it is applied after the other conversions.
The physical to fire conversion will occur before any armor piercing is calculated - so a straight up 10% loss to the physical damage getting converted to pierce if you have 10% phys to fire. Btw if you are using Derm weapons with their base 50% armor piercing you only need 100% global modifier to get all of your physical damage to become piercing - going above 100% with derm weapons is useless.
Also worth noting is that armor piercing will convert ANY physical damage - so long as the attack in question has any amount of weapon damage (and the weapon has armor piercing, if you mix a sword main with mace off your offhand hits still have zero armor piercing) This includes the flat physical on cadence, deadly momentum, and items like ‘Crushing Ring of X’
What the others said si correct. Shouldn’t be too hard to find a slicer with a prefix that gives bonus flat pierce/phys damage instead of conversion though