Deathwish Secondary Damage Type

Hello all, I’m new to wizard and building a Firebird set. It’s my understanding that people recommend lightning damage on the Deathwish in order to cover all the elements for the Elemental Exposure passive, but I was wondering why normal damage isn’t used as the secondary damage affix? Since the set scales 1500x off of Weapon Damage, wouldn’t having a full extra 1700 base avg wep damage (upwards of 30-40% increased avg wep damage) yield better damage increase over the 5% you get off an additional EE stack?

Anyone with knowledge of the maths please let me know why this isn’t the case. Thanks.

Don’t know what you mean. It’s only for elemental exposure that ligthning damage plays a role. For all the other damage calculations the damage type on the weapon doesn’t matter.

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The point is to have the base damage BE lightning, such as 1538-1847 LIGHTNING damage, not the 20% lightning damage you can have on, say, bracers or ammy. You aren’t rolling off the base damage at all, just trying to have it be both a good high roll AND lightning type. Hope that helps.

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From the 2pc description: “Disintegrate ignites enemies, causing 3000% weapon damage until they die.” and then from 6pc “You gain 5000% increased damage when ignite is applied to a target. Hitting an ignited enemy […] deals ignite damage multiplied by combustion stacks.”

From what I understand of the set based off the guides I’ve seen, most all of the damage you do comes from the weapon damage scaling in the set, being ignite damage which is defined in the set as 3000% weapon damage ticks, multiplied by up to 50. So this is why I’m wondering wouldn’t your overall damage scale better by having normal damage as the secondary roll rather than an elemental on your deathwish, since that would increase your baseline average weapon damage substantially, yielding the 3000% * 50 scaling, instead of just 5% from one additional stack of elemental exposure.

So is what your saying that when your secondary roll is an elemental type, it converts your weapon damage stat to that element, rather than just the elemental damage being a secondary category of damage, which gets its own separate multipliers?

Hm.

are you perhaps referring to “black” (i.e. physical) damage? This was a thing a loooong time ago. In the old days items with affixes like this existed:

“+x% bonus to [?] damage”

with ? being one of cold, fire, lightning, arcane, poison or holy element. These affixes only worked on the physical part of the weapon damage, and directly increased it, so you wanted a black weapon. Firebird does not work this way.

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By “secondary roll” do you mean the up to 10% more damage? In that case; yes it’s probably better to get that 10% (if the weapon doesn’t already has something close to 10%) instead of rerolling the main damage stat. If you look at the leaderboards you’ll see lots of different Deatwish swords on players with high clears.

PS. I don’t even think it’s worth rerolling the main damage stat, unless you get a weapon where all the other stats are “perfect” (whatever “perfect” might be).

Best deathwish drop would be a primal with lightning damage, 10% increased damage, 1000 Int, 10% cooldown reduction. I would roll Int to 10% increased damage against elites.

I am talking about the the first primary stat on the weapon, which is an additional damage range of either any type of elemental, or non elemental damage.

So what I’m saying is wouldn’t a weapon with “1560-1940 Damage” in that slot, rather than “1560-1940 Lightning Damage” give you a better damage boost. Doesn’t the lightning damage have its own multipliers in elemental damage? So going with raw damage in that stat would add to your base average weapon damage by a large amount, which in turn is scaled by the 3000% and 50x bonuses of the 2/6pc, where the majority of firebird damage comes from?

Or is taking lightning damage in that spot STILL adding to “weapon damage,” rather than a separate elemental damage category?

This is just a common “misunderstanding” because it doesn’t matter if it says fire, holy, poison, physical, (or nothing). The element is not calculated in the damage formula at all - apart from a special case like elemental exposure, where it just adds a bit of overall damage (5%). If the elemental damage mattered it would be best to have fire because of CoE and also if you have fire% on offhand, bracers and amulet, but it doesn’t. So all in all you can just ignore the elemental affix - unless you have a choice between two equally good weapons and one of them has lightning and the other doesn’t.

There are a few other instances where the weapon element on the damage range plays a role in proc’ing something on a follower as far as I know. There are also a few weapons that can have up to 20% elemantal damage on them. But that’s a different story.

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So regardless of what type it is, that damage range is still added to the “weapon damage” category, which boosts the multiplier of the 2/6pc FB?

Yes, that’s how it works.

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And see that’s just confusing as fug cause why the hell would there be a non-elemental “Damage” roll for it then. Misleading.

There is another equivalent DW drop that is equivalent to lightning , which is cold .
Ie : Physical / arcane / holy / fire / poison or black damage DW is not as good as Lightning or Cold DW

Just to add more data
Its not 15% multiplicative damage if you dont have lightning or cold with EE . Its only 10% multiplicative damage from your FB skills of fire and arcane .

Put it in the D3 planner and you can see the difference in Elemental Elite damage
BTW: the 10% or 15% max EE damage is not flat but damage per seconds . So in a fire cycle from COE , that 4 sec damage is another multiplier . Its huge DOT ( damage over time) even if the difference is only 5% multiplicative damage (difference between a cold / lightning DW vs a poison / holy / black / arcane / fire DW damage

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rather shameful it took over twelve posts before someone mentioned lightning damage on weapon is the same as cold; in fact cold is slightly better. The reason simply being you pick up fire and arcane from other sources to get the full 20% multiplier from Elemental Exposure.

Not exactly. It’s an extra 5% damage you deal with everything for every element you have, stacking up to 20% more damage with every element represented. The damage is also multiplicative ( IE, stacks with everything, like Audacity or Power Hungry).

nope

you get
arcane = Desintigration
fire = FB+EB
cold = Frostnova (in solo push)
lightning = Your Weapon Roll

cold is not better


He was talking about the Weapon-DMG and not about Elemental Exposure :man_facepalming:
Lexa already sayed it right at the beginning of this Discussion

It doesnt matter, since Loot 2.0
The Reason behind it, was a Bug that accured with some Items, that had a special Propperty wich converted the “Black-Damage” or the real Weapon-Dmg into Elemental Damage

Such Items like :

  • Zunimassa’s Trailboots
  • Tal Rasha’s Allegiance
  • Triumvirate
  • Stone of Jordan

That looked like this (glad i still have some lvl 60 Items)



On this SoJ 6% of my (main) Weapon-Damage is converted into Poisen-Dmg and than put on top of the Dmg i had dealt

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