Talk:Tonkor/@comment-60.241.100.236-20160203161016/@comment-25938077-20160209132153

Yeah, but you don't suffer an accuracy loss when firing at ranged targets and elemental dmg beats pure dmg. 4 days ago by CherryNoble

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Nonsense, "elemental damage beats physical damage" is an old mith.

2 days ago by A Lone Tenno

Wow, wow, wait a sec you two. The statement "elemental damage beats pure damage" is false. Pure damage mods add to the base that's multiplied by all elemental mods. Essentially, Serration and Heavy Caliber are additive with each other and multiplicative with all else. Thus, "pure damage" actually multiplies all your elemental damage. Plus, 165% of pure damage, even additive with Serration, is way more damage than another 90% Elemental. However, physical damage (Impact, Slash, Puncture) is worse than elemental damage, on pretty much all fronts. See Damage 2.0, physical bonuses are the smallest of them all. Further, physical status procs are less impactful than comparable single element procs or multielement procs. Damage tiering is basically: Complex Elements > Simple Elements > Physical Damage, with the exception of Toxin being unique in bypassing most shields and thus often being preferrable to Complex Elements vs. shielded opponents.

Complex elements are the only way to get 75% bonus vs. appropriate opponents, the best way to get AOE damage procs (Gas beats Electric by a fair bit), the only way to ignore 75% of enemy armor and has two of the best CC procs (Radiation and Blast). Further, Viral procs can often be the most damaging single proc in the game vs. extremely high level opponents.

Simple elements, well, Impact proc is worse CC than either Heat or Electric (arguable with Cold), Slash proc is generally worse than Toxin proc (Toxic Ancients are the one exception here) and Puncture proc is worse than any hard CC proc (so Heat, Electric, Impact) or usually Cold proc. Further, Impact/Puncture/Slash have the most penalized types and the smallest bonuses in the favored types.

One last matter: IPS (Impact/Puncture/Slash) mods buff only that part of the weapon's damage while Elemental Mods count their damage bonus from the combination of all physical damage the weapon has. Thus on most weapons, even not accounting for types (which generally favor elemental damage), 90% elemental is often more than 120% physical. And IPS is weighted 3x for status procs while having the worst status effects (Slash is occasionally decent) so weapons with only elemental damage are significantly better at getting the desired, good status procs.

Summary:

1. Mod pure damage bonuses first on everything. Pure damage mods form the base damage that is multiplied by all other mods (though pure damage mods are additive with each other, so avoid Big + Small á la Hornet Strike + Magnum Force). You get the best results by maximizing the base damage and then multiplying it.

'''2a. Only use physical damage if you can get significantly more of it than comparable elemental mods'''. This can happen with a weapon like Jat Kittag or Bo Prime with a bonus as big as Primed Heavy Trauma's

'''2b. Only use physical damage if the high chance of a poor status proc is no hinderance.''' This is the case only if you either don't want to proc status anyways (low status weapons, enough damage to instakill whatever you plan to face), or if you're facing the one-in-hundred situation where a physical proc is preferable to elemental proc (in some cases, Slash can accomplish this).

3. Use at least two elemental mods to get the desired combination element. Combination elements are the best in terms of damage bonuses and status procs. Aside from Toxin vs. solely Corpus enemies, it's almost always correct to pick the appropriate combination element for the job.

'''4. Multishot and critical multiply all your damage another time. '''You should basically always mod multishot. It's like a multiplier for your base damage except it's multiplicative with the other base damage mods. Same with crit: if the weapon's crit stats are even decent, it multiplies all your damage another time resulting in much larger bonuses than extra additive elemental mods.

5. Firerate and punchthrough are essentially the last layer of multipliers. Punchthrough allows hitting multiple enemies with a single shot. It's not as automatic as the others as aiming for head with crit weapon is also an additional multiplier but there's something to be said about being able to kill multiple opponents with single shots (or being able to shoot through cover) in a game mostly based around fighting swarms of enemies. Firerate is another overall damage multiplier but only use it if the weapon's ammo economy allows. Particularly important on charge weapons since their low rate of fire generally means they have nearly infinite ammunition anyways.