I’ve seen a lot of Life Staff / Hatchet builds online suggesting that you should stakc everything into FOC and whack an amber gem into your hatchet. The idea being, you get all your healing and benefit from decent attack with the hatchet. However, I’m not sure that is the case.
The tooltip/description says that 30% of damage is converted to nature, also that scaling with focus if focus is higher than the weapon base damage.
So that means at level 40 for example, you could have 150 focus, yet that is potentially lower than the base damage of your weapon? So your focus is doing nothing.
Is this only effective if you have say max focus. Otherwise it’d be best to just offset the focus into strength to achieve a balanced attack/heal.
Depends on the quality of the amber gem you use. The higher it is, the more % you scale from FOC: converts 20/30/40/50% of damage into nature damage. This damage scales off the weapon’s stat or the focus attribute, whichever is higher.
It means that if you have 150 focus, the best amber and 10 dex, your hatchet will scale from focus (as 75 foc is more than 10 dex) and it will behave like you had 75 dex (because you have 75 foc) when recalculating the bonus damage to hatchet.
You also need to take into account that weapons have a base damage not reliant on attributes. So with a Tier 5 Cut Pristine gem that converts 50%, that is actually more like 75%.
However this being said, it seems abit bugged atm, it doesn’t seem to be changing the overall damage value on the weapon, which during Beta it did.
A friend and I did some testing, the full damage of the weapon scales on FOC if higher, but the tool tip is incorrect.
Test scenario:
Two close in level Ice Gauntlets.
One with base damage 97 Ice
Other with base damage 93 Ice
20% Amber in the second one changed base damage to 75 Ice and 18 Nature
Character had 10 Int and just a tad over 100 FOC.
Tool tip damage value of 97 Ice weapon:: 203
Tool tip damage value of 75/18 weapon: 187
Light attack against test enemy with first (non-gemmed) weapon: 167 damage
Light attack against test enemy with second (gemmed) weapon: 199 damage and 38 damage (two damage numbers)
Based on those results, what seems to be happening is the damage number at the top of the tool tip is only taking normal weapon stats into account, and not the gem, but the damage numbers dealt to enemies do scale properly with FOC. It’s the only way to explain the higher observed damage numbers on the weapon with the lower tool tip value and the gem.
We didn’t have an Amber gem available to do the obvious test of take a weapon with a socket scaling off a low stat, hitting a few times, then putting the amber in and seeing if the damage numbers go up significantly, but they should given what we’ve seen.
Yeh I can confirm that the gems are working correctly but that the overall damage number at the top does not update due to increased damage from focus. In reality it does work though, I have a 50% gem in my GA, and it’s doing something like 200 slash damage and 600 nature damage.
It is worth to add that the corrupted monsters take increased damage from thrust, arcane and nature damage so if you are into portals/invasions then this might be a really good choice.
Doing arcane or nature damage at PvP might also be very good since not many players have arcane or nature damage reduction.
I’m a newbie to the game, but could anyone also explain why Life Staff / Hatchet build uses amber gem? It seems to me that any weapon can be paired with Life Staff and get benefits by investing in FOC.
Yes you could use any weapon you want.
Hatched has some good healing on it that’s why it pairs wel for a solo build or something like that.
Though i am not sure it works on spells from firestaf.
so if a weapon that had no INT (to keep it simple) scaling, and 100 base damage, got a 40% int gem put into it. you would need mroe than 40 int before that would pay off for that weapon?
If you have a musket (scales off DEX primarily) that does 100 base damage
…and you put all your attribute points into INT (say, 200 INT) and your DEX remains at base 5… then slot the musket with a gem that switches it to INT and converts 30% of its damage to FIRE damage.
This is what happens:
Your 200 int is higher than DEX. The gem will therefore scale the musket out of INT/INT (replacing DEX for INT as primary).
The 30% damage conversion to fire makes the musket do 70 thrust damage and 30 fire damage.
Why do this? INT has elemental damage bonus and dot duration bonus so that 30 damage from fire gets boosted by 15% (of 30). Then any dot you apply (like powder burn) will tick more times AND for more damage (the 15% bonus also applies to dot ticks).
However in the end equation, you still have more DPS going full DEX with a musket than switching it to INT. INT only gives you bonuses to dots and lets you play as ice/fire magic+musket which otherwise you would be locked out of since INT is what magic stuff is based from.
For FOC it is different though. FOC does not boost any attribute other than healing. If you are spec in FOC then you are primarily a healer and your 2nd weapon is just there for when you not healing but that secondary weapon is not getting any benefit from the FOC line other than the per point scaling.
The gems are NOT working correctly and never have. I’ve finally got easy, concrete proof of it now that we have PTS.
Look:
In the beginning I am equipped with a Life Staff with an Amethyst gem in it to convert 50% damage to Void, scaling on INT; and a Void Guantlet with an Amber gem in it to convert 50% damage to Nature, scaling on FOC.
At 300 INT 50 FOC, light attacks with the Void Gauntlet do 498 void and 498 nature damage, as expected. Light attacks with the Life Staff do 260 nature and 444 void damage, where the Void damage is obviously scaling to INT as expected.
However, at 300 FOC 50 INT, I saw a different outcome. Light attacks with the Life Staff do 445 nature and 445 void, as expected. But light attacks with the Void Gauntlet only did 386 void and 386 nature damage. I would have expected that the nature damage of the Void Gauntlet would have scaled in the same way that the Life Staff did when the attributes were reversed as above.
This isn’t true. Focus has to scale nature damage, or a life staff would do the same amount of damage at 0 focus as it does at 300 focus, which is not true at all.
Is this not normal? I thought damage scaling with foreign stat means less damage. Like intellect scales 65% for Rapier for example, while Dex scales perfectly or Str for hatchet over Dex. I think its the same no? I mean, FOC becomes like a secondary stat, not main stat and thus doesn’t increase damage as much… I could be wrong but I sort of feel this is the case after levelling and playing up to 60 with life staff + rapier.
