Hello,

I'm building a PvM bowazon for hell difficulty level which has Atma's Scarab amulet and a Raven Frost ring.

I have 3 questions about this setting:

1) Does the 40 poison damage over 4 seconds prevent monsters from healing, even if their healing per second is greater than the poison damage?

2) Is the 15-45 cold damage from Raven Frost computed in the same way as the physical damage? Is it affected by +dexterity or enhanced damage jewels like physical damage?

3) With this setting, I have 3 different damage types, physical, poison and cold. I suspect they are all applied at the same time (ignoring monsters' immunities for the sake of simplicity). Is this true?

Thank you for your time reading this.

1) Yes, it cancels completely. Long duration is preferable obviously in that case. Open wounds has the same effect by the way! But is much harder to come by, so for pvm you would almost always rather use poison damage.

2) No, elemental damage is only affected by +elemental damage (%) and -resistance to enemies (via gear or conviction/lower res curse)

3) Yes. Though I am not sure at the exact process. Interesting question, which damage type is applied first. But "just like that" it is applied at the same time. You hit, you deal damage. Thats it. But in the deeper mechanics its possible that one type of damage is applied before the other. Crushing blow for example is indeed applied before the actual damage.

In conclusion any small elemental damage that comes from your gear will only be good to stop healing (psn), freeze/chill enemies (cold) or (if the amount is big enough) kill physical immunes. The actual damage dealt of those small bonuses will not result in you dealing considerable damage compared to your main damage source (physical). Except possibly if you stack your inventory with high damage poison smallcharms. But that is a different story.

This post was edited by Timophinchen on Aug 14 2018 05:01am

Thanks a bunch for your help.

I guess it doesn't really matter in which order damage is applied. What I really wanted to know is if one type cancels the other, but that's obviously a dumb question, as cold damage from Raven doesn't cancel the physical damage.

I guess I'll keep both Atma's for the nifty amplify damage and prevent monster healing properties and Raven for the slowing effect.

This post was edited by Grinderedge on Aug 14 2018 05:01am

Those effects should not affect your gear choice! You can easily get poison and cold damage from small charms, especially as the amount of damage does not matter!

So if you need to get to a certain IAS breakpoint, possibly Highlords as preferable over Atmas. And a dual leech ring might be preferable over raven, but it depends on your build. A raven is usually part of the build anyway because of the cnbf. But for atmas I would doublecheck your IAS breakpoints.

I'm using strafe predominantly and reached max speed with that. I use multishot also occasionally, and have no problem with speed (it's at the 89 IAS/9 frames/2.77 APS breakpoint).

But I find Atma's to be insanely useful for physical resistant monsters, or just to apply more damage with strafe when they are lined up.

This post was edited by Grinderedge on Aug 14 2018 05:10am

It sure is Nothing better than amp damage!

Words of wisdom. Strafe + Atma + 100% Pierce + Ignore Target's Defense = Win.