I understand, in case of 50%, Pierce builds just pick up the node at Blades of Naadan/equip two swords (assuming different piercing sources stack the same way as other conversions) and enjoy full pierce damage without a speck of physical. Or hybrid builds can take 1 50% source/2 25%/1 25% with Naadan’s and either leave 50% as physical or convert it to something. But in no way in hell I’d make a single damage type build with something like 31% conversion and say “hey, this is EXACTLY what I want, some useless type shitting up my damage output”.
GD in general has the problem of shitting up DPS with useless damage types, because the assumption behind skill design is multi-elemental, but the game itself requires to specialize on single element. But two-handed guns have it the worst, afaik only one gun in the whole game has pure damage and this is Vortex of Souls (aether-only). All others, even a double-cursed rifle straight outta Solael, are generic guns with 20-30% piercing (so it’s 1/5-1/3 of base damage down the drain) and maybe additional damage of related type. Moreover “piercing-only” legendary guns all have 50% at best, which means even super-pierced 2H (and DW too) ranged builds will never achieve 100% conversion. There is a rare prefix/suffix, don’t know exactly, which gives 100%+ increased conversion rate, but the joke is none of base items which it can roll on have 50% piercing.
Another problem is fair share of physical damage sources also have Internal Trauma going along with them, but Piercing and Bleeding aren’t linked together, so it doesn’t convert for shit. Which leads to a situation where a 100% converted piercing build has internal trauma hanging around with no use.
This clusterfuck of a system is one of the reasons I didn’t even try a piercing-based character, despite at least 20% of devotion tree being physical and/or piercing constellations.
I agree. Conversion is clearly, specifically, done to make reaching exactly 100% difficult. Damage types in general are mixed in odd fashions, forcing players to go out of their way to use those poor conversions, or waste damage. Night blade is the worst example, it’s not uncommon to see Physical, Pierce, Cold, Poison, Acid, and Vitality all in one DPS breakdown. Scaling all of those would be impossible, so what you really have is 1-3 large chunks of actual significance, and the rest is wasted space. Crate seems to have gone out of their way to do this, however, so I very much doubt they’ll ever change it.
Pretty sure there are some components that increase piercing ratio. I don’t use pierce damage either but that is because there is no DOT counterpart of it.
I’m relatively certain that the only physical->X conversions that can reach 100% are piercing and elemental. I’m fairly certain anything else maxes out at ~75% depending on item variation (15% per weapon + 10% per component + 10% amulet + 15% skill.) This is only possible for conversions which have a skill and an amulet, which are pretty limited.
That said, having 2 damage types isn’t necessarily bad if they’re types which have equipment/skill support (like chaos and vitality.)
Armour piercing takes place after all other conversions. If you have a way of reaching 100% conversion such as Mindwarp, the armour piercing doesn’t factor in.
Only Physical gunners suffer from armour piercing as there is no melee equivalent to maces that have no armour piercing, though they can work around this.
Which brings me to my next point, i get the impression that you are overly focusing on getting 100% conversion for damage, conversion does provide a source and allows you to scale all of your damage instead of most of it but it’s important not to forget that a good chunk of your damage will come from stacking flat damage. A few updates ago, this is one of the reasons that made JoV’s Crossbow Blademaster so powerful.
Finally, i wouldn’t say the multitude of stringed damage types is by design but just done accidentally. For example, many buids take Rhowan’s Crown for Elemental Storm even if they arn’t scaling all 3 types of damage in Elemental. Well, the first node contains flat Elemental, so builds with Weapon Damage skills that are focusing on Fire/Lightning such as Fire Strike will have a tiny bit of Cold lingering around that they arn’t scaling very well.
Similarly, as pointed out, Nightblade has a few of these, the Cold/Acid on Lethal Assault and the flat Piercing on Dual Blades that Nightblades have to take for their WPS skills.
Piercing occurs last in the conversion chain. You don’t lose any base damage UNLESS you want pure phys damage rifle or guns.
Pierce was fine until it was nerfed recently
As for swords, there is also blessed whetstone to increase pierce conversion ratio