Physical damage clarification (convertion)

[MTB-Fritz]

I think I grasp the basics but coming to this example I m just standing there kind of dumbly because I dont know how I would confirm or verify it.

- Physical Damage and Internal Trauma are two different types of damage even tho both are physical damage (listed in the physical damage tab)
- Fire damage and burn damage also are two different types of damage as in boni to burn damage will NOT affect fire damage and boni to fire damage will NOT affect burn.
- the same logic applies to Vitality and Vitality Decay

Going with the Oathkeepers Righteous Fervor skill which deals physical and Burn damage. The modifer Dreegs Reproach will convert physical into acid (direct poison damage) damage and fire into vitality damage.

According to what I know about the convertion sequence the fire into vitlity already makes no sense because there is no fire damage present in Rightrous Fervor, only burn damage. BUT appearantly despite this very clear distinction that the game upholds in the rest of the mechanics in THIS case the descriptor "fire" encompasses fire + burn damage types. This is continued in the modifer Retribution which adds a bonus to Fire damage even tho Righteous Fervor doesnt feature fire damage to begin with. It seems in THIS CASE the +fire modifer applies to burn and not fire even tho other skill modifers in other classes can differentiate appropriately and give boni to frostburn and not just Ice or Vitality Decay and not just Vitality.

So its already confusing but let me finish.....

I m thinking about Picking Retribution for my poison melee build and considering how the rest of Righteous Fervor and its modifer seem to work I would assume that the Internal Trauma damage would convert into Poison damage (poison damage over time) BUT its also feasable that it would stay internal trauma damage due to the way convertion works in the rest of the game which would make it mostly worthless to my build.

Unfortumately the game doesnt feature a damage log so I dont know how I would approach confirming if Dreegs Reproach affects Retribution in the way I think it does or not.

I could simply follow build guides but I really like to understand what I m doing and the whole convertion thing makes my head spin.

[gNuff!~©~gNom3™]

i think you're confusing yourself unnecessarily,
they're not separate dmg *types*, there separate in terms of bonus dmg addition.
Think of it like this, do you need burn resist to reduce inc dmg from burn or do you use fire res? or do you increase a trauma char's dmg output stacking physical RR?
fire conversion = burn conversion, phys conversion = trauma conversion.

Sole separation distinction there is mechanically is flat phys dmg vs trauma "extra mitigation", where flat phys in addition to phys res is also mitigated by armour, but trauma still only checks phys res (gotta love them game quirks)

base conversion rule is, if the input and output dmg types has dot, dot is converted, if there is no dot it's not (eg phys-> chaos = trauma not converted, and chaos -> phys ofc likewise no trauma bonus to be obtained as chaos has no base dot)

On extra dreeg's reproach note, you wont have to worry about that confusing double conversion tooltip anymore, in v1.3 it gets finally made into pure acid conversion for ease of clarity

As a technical note, it does what it says, converts phys to acid (including trauma -> poison) only, fire(thus burn) into vit/decay, this largely only had an impact playing with certain wps or base phys dmg weapons (lot of weapons have base phys dmg in GD making them more applicable to acid). Whether or not the vit conversion was ever only truly "thematic" or actually slightly balance oriented ("builds dont' get 100% conversion for free) i can't say, both could fit, but in reality balance impact was kinda minor, acid builds got minimal flat fire/burn dmg anyway, and vit RF builds just didn't take transmuter and used a different item for vit conversion.

[MTB-Fritz]

thank you for your reply. I wont deny that I probably overthink the whole issue. I usually would go with whatever "feels" right and whatever makes me perform objectively better but I would like to approach these things with a more analytical view rather then just trying stuff out. Thats what I did when I was younger and it worked for me back then. Nowadays I find it highly frustrating and time consuming so I d rather make educated decision instead of empathic ones.