Lightning +10 mace vs Regular +10 Mace - Test Results Are Alarming

[Nic]

Last night I imbued my +10 mace with lightning. I have since carried out a series of tests to see whether it deals more damage to various types of enemies. Alarmingly, the +10 lightning mace deals less damage than the regular +10 mace against every enemy I have tested it on.

My build is 50 strength, 50 faith and 28 dex. I have the ring of blades +1 equipped also.

I tested damage by using a regular swing and repeated the test several times to ensure the results were accurate.

The results are as follows:

Alonne Knight (Iron Keep): +10 Lightning Mace 478 +10 Regular Mace 539

Dog (Lost Bastille): +10 Lightning Mace 328 +10 Regular Mace 351

Mummy (Lost Bastille): +10 Lightning Mace 372 +10 Regular Mace 399

Bandit (Huntsman's Copse) +10 Lightning Mace 397 +10 Regular Mace 425

I am puzzled by these results. I thought the +10 Lightning mace would deal far more damage.

Can anyone shed some light on why the +10 lightning mace is performing relatively poorly?

[Lv 20 Bolting Bot]

Your lightning mace goes against the enemies' lightning and physical resistances, while your normal +10 only goes against physical. Enemies that are weak to lightning should take more damage from the lightning mace. Buff your lightning mace with a lightning spell for good results.

[SundownKid]

Could be that the Mace's high strength scaling means that it performs better unimbued. That wouldn't be the case for weapons with lower strength scaling though.

It's true that Lightning weak enemies will take more damage though.

[Zvy]

Combine the above two posts and you have your answer.

[Piszczel]

Now use Sunlight blade and the Lighting Mace will come out on top.
Which is why in PvP you see people using elemental weapons exlusively. No one uses "normal" weapons unless it's a dagger.

[Rhorge]

This was well known since Demon's Souls. It's completely logical too because otherwise having a pure physical weapon would be 100% pointless.

[Detergent]

"The change in STR scaling from B to A does not add any attack bonus. At 50/10 STR/DEX the +9 and +10 mace gives an attack bonus of +149."
http://darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com/Mace

Most of the time I only infuse weapons when I plan to buff them.
Sunlight Blade for example would give your lightning mace +50 lightning damage, +30% of your maces current lighting damage.

Also Ring of Blades only adds half damage to infused weapons.

[ZakisFluffy]

It's because of split damage.

With the normal +10 mace, it only passes through one defense check, whereas the +10 lightning has to pass through two defense check i.e. lightning and phys.

To give an example and i'm gona keep it simple, not gona use the such accurate numbers.
An enemy has physical defense of 5 and a lightning defense of 5.
Normal Mace has an attack rating of 20 on physical damage and 0 on lightning.
So, the end damage would be 20-5 = 15

The way infusion works, is that it reduces the base damage by a certain amount and then redistributes it to whichever infusion you are opting for. In your case, lightning.
Lightning mace would have an attack rating of 10 on physical damage and 10 on lightning damage.
So the end damage would be (10-5 for phsysical check) + (10-5 for lightning check) = 10

So why would anyone go for infusions?

1. Enemies have certain, weaknesses or is less resistant to a certain element. For instance, armored enemies like the Old knights or Ruin sentinels have weak resistance to lightning hence, would do more damage with a lightning infusion

2. Buffs. The way buff works in this game is something along the lines of increasing the x element of it by 30% and gives additional 50 points of x Attack. Lasts 90 seconds.
So if you consider the above example,
30% of 10 = 3, and add 50 to lightning damage = 53 bonus lignthing from the buff
Hence the end result would be (10-5 for physical check) + (10+53-5 for lighhtning check) = 59

That's why you see a crap load of buffers in pvp.

^ do note, not an accurate example, its just to provide some light to understand it better.

Anyone willing to give an accurate explanation feel free to do so and, if there's some error in my logic, feel free to rectify it.

[Beel]

Infused weapons have a higher AR, but deal less damage due to split damage

This can be overcome with buffs, as they boost elemental damage a ton.

Elemental damage can also be shat upon by GMB

Long story short, long live physical damage

[Rhorge]

Originally posted by Beel:

Long story short, long live physical damage

This. I don't get why people are so obsessed with buffs with the current GMB meta. You just do dumpster damage and by the time their GMB is gone then so is your buff and you do dumpster damage anyway.

[Shifty Mario]

I'm not sure how infuse do vs physical in pvp. The fact that elemental D does percentage reduction seems like it can do more at all times than pure physical even when not infused. In fact, I think that splitting damage across all elemental types might do similar to damage pooled into 1 type. Maybe for elemental AR something like 50/50/50/50 might do similar to 0/0/200/0. Anyone want to test that?

[Beel]

Originally posted by Shifty Mario:

I'm not sure how infuse do vs physical in pvp. The fact that elemental D does percentage reduction seems like it can do more at all times than pure physical even when not infused. In fact, I think that splitting damage across all elemental types might do similar to damage pooled into 1 type. Maybe for elemental AR something like 50/50/50/50 might do similar to 0/0/200/0. Anyone want to test that?

Absolutely not true

its not a strict percentage system

200 phys 200 magic will do far less damage to someone than 400 phys or 400 magic, considering equal resists to all.

[Shifty Mario]

I'm not saying phsical D. That's not percentage for sure. It's just I keep on hearing that elemental resist is percentage based with 1000 being 100% mitigation. If someone had a weapon that had 100 of each element, how much damage will that do against someone with all elemental resist being say 250 vs a weapon that had 400 of 1 element type.

a weapon with -/100/100/100/100 vs resist of -/250/250/250/250 and
a weapon with -/ - /400/ - / - vs above resist

Physical not taken into consideration.

[Detergent]

They want every element of this game to be hard. Combat, lore, mechanics.

[holloloh]

Did they fix enchanted path in current update?
Because that ♥♥♥♥ was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless

[Nic]

Thanks everyone for your replies. I am a bit disappointed.

I knew that elemental damage could be buffed but I did not realise that it was, in effect, REQUIRED in order for an infused +10 mace to perform better than a regular +10 mace in ordinary play. Since buffs will only last a few mins at most, they only seem suitable for boss fights and short PVP bouts, making a +10 lightning mace a poor option for long bouts of PVE play.

I have been using the regular +10 mace since about half way through my first playthrough (and I am now about half way through NG+) so I had hoped that the lightning imbue would spice things up a bit. Sadly, since I will be removing the imbue, it looks like I will be stuck using the same old +10 mace and dealing the same old damage as I have been for the last 20 hours of play.