Is physical damage useful at all for spells?

[Naewyng]

So does physical damage help in any way with spell damage?

So a friend said that when he got more physical damage, his arc damage went up.

So considering all other factors the same, will a wand that has 50 physical damage deal more damage with arc than a wand with 10 physical damage?

[Yeti.^^]

Wand's physical damage is not added to spells.Only if something says ,,adds <..> to spells'' , it does.In his case , physical damage.And you usually don't care about physical damage with spells , unless you run something like , glacial cascade which scales off your physical damage.

[Drake]

Spells and physical damage are not on the same category. Spell is a type of skill.

There are 2 types of skills, spells and attacks (attacks use your base weapon stats, ie damage, speed and crits, spells do not).

Then there are 5 types of damage : physical, chaos, fire, lightning, cold.

A skill can be any combination of those 2 categories. You can get lightning attack, cold spells etc. and among them you have physical spells, which are spells dealing physical damage.
Specifically those are ethereal knives, bladefall, blade vortex etc.

So if you spell does physical damage, yes you should up physical to get them.

That said : spells don't use your weapon damage, so the base base damage of a wand does nothing to spells. Only mods will up damage for spells. And there are no mods that increase physical damage for spells on weapons. So you need to use spell damage mods (which ups all damages from a spell).

[Rafein]

the damage numbers a weaon gives have no bearing on wands. Only modifiers to spells, lke Spell damage, or + fire damage to spells, affect the damage spells do

Now, adding physical to spells (like with something like Herald of Purity) does add damage to the spell. And does make way for things that interact with Physical, like Dread Banner gaining stages.