What happens if I have no Physical damage to convert?

[Ashyne]

If my skill converts 100% of physical damage to lightning damage, but my attack weapon (quarterstaff) has only lightning damage and no physical damage, how does the conversion happen? Does my skill become useless?

[Wutever]

Conversion doesn't add damage. It just converts X% physical to lightning. The rest remains physical and whatever other elemental damage you deal with your attacks.

If there is no physical component then the skill just deals pure elemental damage.

[Weird Grim]

The skill simply uses the damage that you got, in this case it's only lightning damage.

[Baron01]

Well, in short, nothing happens. What does this means? You will do low damage as long as the skill you are using is attack, ie. damage is based on a weapon you use to deliver the hit.

Let's say you are using Frost Strike but you have a weapon that only does Lightning damage. This would make your Frost Strike deal very low damage as its main element is Frost and you spend your skill points to increase your Frost damage and use gear to boost your damage. GGG has changed the way most skills work in PoE2 compared to PoE1 it seems--skills in PoE2 do not grant flat damage as the skill level increased but rather the attack damage modifier is increased. This means you need appropriate weapon to use a skill in order to deal damage. There are cases where you can side track this when you have access to a way to add flat damage to your build--this is a case of Hand of Wisdom and Action where you can stack a lot of Intelligence that in turn will grant you a lot of lightning damage to your attacks. This item would allow you to use weapon without physical damage but with other useful stats such as high attack speed and critical hit chance to effectively use it.

[Ashyne]

So if I am only using lightning skills, for example, that converts 100% physical to lightning:

Is it better to use a weapon that has 50 Lightning damage (that has no conversion),

or, a weapon with 50 physical damage (that gets converted all to lightning)?

Since both still do 50 lightning damage, are both equal in power?

[Dwane Dibbley]

Originally posted by Ashyne:

So if I am only using lightning skills, for example, that converts 100% physical to lightning:

Is it better to use a weapon that has 50 Lightning damage (that has no conversion),

or, a weapon with 50 physical damage (that gets converted all to lightning)?

Since both still do 50 lightning damage, are both equal in power?

It all depends on your build and how you scale things. Theres no difference between 50 lightning damage and 50 phys damage with 100% conversion to lightning, but you wont get such simple thing in real game.

If you are using weapon, phys damage is in general the best cuz you can scale it much higher than elemental or chaos.

There might be very specific situation where you want just pure single element or chaos, but when you do such niche build, you wouldnt ask this question.

[Baron01]

Originally posted by Ashyne:

So if I am only using lightning skills, for example, that converts 100% physical to lightning:

Is it better to use a weapon that has 50 Lightning damage (that has no conversion),

or, a weapon with 50 physical damage (that gets converted all to lightning)?

Since both still do 50 lightning damage, are both equal in power?

Again, what skill are you talking about? Attack skill or spell?

In your example, if no other aspects come into play, the damage dealt would be the same. You would deal 50 maximum lightning damage to enemy reduced by their lightning resistance. However, this is rarely the case as you have passive skill points that improve your damage in certain ways, you have support skills that modify your main skill and many other effects that impact the amount of damage you deal.

I assume it is attack skill, which means you want to use a weapon to deal damage. You increase the amount of damage dealt by several means, 1.) use weapon with higher damage values, 2.) use your skill points to increase damage dealt of certain type or element.

You generally want to use weapons that has as high amount of base damage, physical in most cases, as this is start of the equation. The higher your base damage is, the more effective are your skill points and support gems in increasing your damage output. If you want to use lightning skill that converts 100% of physical damage to lightning damage, you start with physical damage weapon and now have a choice: 1.) Increase your physical damage dealt or 2.) increase your lightning damage dealt. What damage scaling you use often depends on what class you play, where in the skill tree are you positioned and what nodes you have access to. Each part of the tree have some sort of a theme, ie. what scaling type will be available--warrior or archer will usually have access to a lot of physical damage scaling or scaling based on weapon type. There are usually several clusters of nodes with different damage type scaling around the trees as well. You just have to travel to them effectively, without wasting too many skill points, to use them. Again, in your example you can pick either physical damage or lightning damage scaling.

[Wutever]

Originally posted by Baron01:

Well, in short, nothing happens. What does this means? You will do low damage as long as the skill you are using is attack, ie. damage is based on a weapon you use to deliver the hit.

No it doesn't mean that he would do low damage, especially not with a lightning damage build. The skill damage multiplier multiplies all damage, not just physical. The absence of a conversion does not mean an inherent reduction in damage.

Originally posted by Baron01:

Let's say you are using Frost Strike but you have a weapon that only does Lightning damage. This would make your Frost Strike deal very low damage as its main element is Frost and you spend your skill points to increase your Frost damage and use gear to boost your damage.

Again, no it would not (and where the hell did Ice Strike come from?). There is no inherent reason for why that would happen. The Ice Strike would simply do lightning damage instead of the 80% phys to cold damage. The conversion does not add any damage in and of itself nor does its absence reduce damage in and of itself.

While this can result in lower DPS if you are mostly scaling cold damage (which OP is not, by the looks of it) there are plenty of ways to scale attack damage, melee damage and elemental damage as a whole. All of which would increase damage independent of what elemental damage is dealt.

Would you want to use a Crackling Quarterstaff on a cold build? Probably not, but mostly because you would lose the ability to apply relevant elemental ailments, such as Chill and Freeze, making you unable to shatter consistently.

Originally posted by Baron01:

Originally posted by Ashyne:

So if I am only using lightning skills, for example, that converts 100% physical to lightning:

Is it better to use a weapon that has 50 Lightning damage (that has no conversion),

or, a weapon with 50 physical damage (that gets converted all to lightning)?

Since both still do 50 lightning damage, are both equal in power?

Again, what skill are you talking about? Attack skill or spell?

In your example, if no other aspects come into play, the damage dealt would be the same. You would deal 50 maximum lightning damage to enemy reduced by their lightning resistance. However, this is rarely the case as you have passive skill points that improve your damage in certain ways, you have support skills that modify your main skill and many other effects that impact the amount of damage you deal.

I assume it is attack skill, which means you want to use a weapon to deal damage. You increase the amount of damage dealt by several means, 1.) use weapon with higher damage values, 2.) use your skill points to increase damage dealt of certain type or element.

You generally want to use weapons that has as high amount of base damage, physical in most cases, as this is start of the equation. The higher your base damage is, the more effective are your skill points and support gems in increasing your damage output. If you want to use lightning skill that converts 100% of physical damage to lightning damage, you start with physical damage weapon and now have a choice: 1.) Increase your physical damage dealt or 2.) increase your lightning damage dealt. What damage scaling you use often depends on what class you play, where in the skill tree are you positioned and what nodes you have access to. Each part of the tree have some sort of a theme, ie. what scaling type will be available--warrior or archer will usually have access to a lot of physical damage scaling or scaling based on weapon type. There are usually several clusters of nodes with different damage type scaling around the trees as well. You just have to travel to them effectively, without wasting too many skill points, to use them. Again, in your example you can pick either physical damage or lightning damage scaling.

You're explaining a very simple thing in an extremely complicated way.

Conversion simply converts damage of type X to damage of type Y. The action itself has no inherent loss or gain of damage.

Two scenarios:
1. you use an attack with 100% damage scaling that converts 50% physical damage to cold with a weapon that does 50 physical damage
2. you use an attack with 100% damage scaling that converts 50% physical damage to cold with a weapon that does 50 lightning damage

Both attacks would do the same exact damage - 50 damage.
In scenario 1 that damage would be 25 cold and 25 physical.
In scenario 2 that damage would be 50 lightning.

Whatever happens afterwards with damage scaling, elemental resistances, armor, afflictions and whatever else is irrelevant to the topic of conversion.

[Ashyne]

Thanks, but I have another question.

As I know, Physical damage has 50% increased stun build-up.

Is this affected by conversion? And does this apply before or after damage conversion?

1) If I have 80% physical damage converted to lightning damage, does my increased stun build-up from physical damage become only 20% effective? (i.e. 10% instead of 50% increased stun build-up)?

2) If I convert all physical to lightning damage, does this mean I don't benefit from the increased stun build-up from physical damage?

3) Or does physical always do 50% increased stun-up regardless of whether part or all of it is converted? (meaning the bonus applies pre-conversion)

[Wutever]

Originally posted by Ashyne:

Thanks, but I have another question.

As I know, Physical damage has 50% increased stun build-up.

Is this affected by conversion? And does this apply before or after damage conversion?

1) If I have 80% physical damage converted to lightning damage, does my increased stun build-up from physical damage become only 20% effective? (i.e. 10% instead of 50% increased stun build-up)?

2) If I convert all physical to lightning damage, does this mean I don't benefit from the increased stun build-up from physical damage?

3) Or does physical always do 50% increased stun-up regardless of whether part or all of it is converted?

All your damage from gear gets added up. Then conversion happens. Everything else gets calculated after conversion.

The only exceptions to this, apparently, are things that modify minimum and maximum damage ranges (e.g. Heft support gem). Those apply before conversion.

Converting phys to lightning would result in less stun buildup, but more shock chance and electrocute buildup (if the skill can electrocute). The exact damage split would determine the final buildup values.

This is how the double Herald setup works ("gain X as Y" works under the same rules as conversion). Herald of Ice gets converted to lightning damage and Herald of Thunder gets converted to cold using support gems so that they can proc off of each other by applying ailments.