Parsed both melee and archery elemental damage for a Level 65 Ranger against a Level 75 Dummy with Motm 5 (PoP Era). The updated resist check appears to be working for melee, but not for archery. The parses below show the parse damage distribution and weapons in use where you can observe the distribution of damage on melee (Fiyare Pierce, first image below) appears to capture the resistance check properly to apply full damage with a concentration of 7,000+ hits at one result. However, with Archery, we see a 5 layer distribution (most clearly at max damage on the right side of the chart). The distribution suggests there are resist rates applied resulting in 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 max damage outcomes based on some underlying logic that is still applying resists to archery damage. Melee: Archery: Here is the statistical distribution of the archery damage and the 11 + 4 cold resist arrow which shows that 60% of the time the result is 0 or 4, and 40% of the time the result is either 1, 2 or 3. Also, in an attempt to answer the question if elemental damage on a bow was working correctly, it is not. Using either a Bow with elemental damage, but no elemental damage on an arrow arrow also gives the same resist distribution:
Excellent work on this! Hopefully the devs can update the fix to include elemental bow damage as I'm sure that was intended. Thanks again for gathering the data.
Thank you for testing this and collecting this data! After review, I agree that this should be addressed!
I actually think elemental was “fixed” for archery. However, it’s not working as expected, or at least consistent with melee damage. Before this fix, old archery parses pre-update didn’t show a pronounced allocation at all. Instead the max damage concentration looked a LOT like the new melee max damage concentration - EXCEPT it also had these 4 little bars after it. This suggests previously elemental damage wasn’t impactful at all and was almost always getting resisted. Full disclaimer: I don’t have a huge parse pre-fix for this because Agnarr doesn’t have any test dummies to work on. I did review my last plane of time parse- which had around 1.2 million zonewide damage with around 2200 hits across everything (kicks, dots, nukes) - and it showed a large count of max hits followed by 3 or so higher damage values that had a only handful of hits counted at that value. Comparatively, it wasn’t reflecting any resist distribution like we see now - which suggests elemental damage pre-update was statistically always using 0. Arguably, this change is “better” for archery compared to what it was, but it’s not getting full damage treatment like melee weapons do. This suggests there is some subsequent logic in the archery damage calculation after the overall change to elemental resists that is still applying resistance to lower the elemental damage value used in the damage calculation. My guess is there was resistance logic higher in the overall decision tree (or calculation) that was not working and is now fixed. Then the subsequent damage calculation is occurring for archery that includes full elemental damage at the start which has another resistance check lower in the archery decision tree that is now observable / working. The end result is that melee is getting full elemental damage and archery is not. The hope is it gets reviewed and updated to have equal treatment in the logic. Through at least the PoP era, this doesn’t change a whole lot though. It moves that P3 Time Dagger (DoD) up ahead of EOE that drops later in P4. Ranger sword still parses better in main hand and I would expect rogues will see more DPS using that DoD dagger in MH as well because ratio + backstabs will benefit from a higher overall damage value piercer. And Quarm Hammer is still best ratio for anyone except monks.
It's hard to really say confidently without apples to apples parses but I think there is an explanation here that makes sense. Your PoTime parse is likely showing a similar distribution in much smaller quantities simply because the Time boss resists are much higher than the test dummy resists. The current parse on test performs exactly as predicted under the old formula, with a relatively low enemy resist value. I suspect your PoTime parses also match the old formula, considering higher enemy resists in PoTime, but would really need to look closer at the results. A large number of max physical hits with a very small number of elemental added hits above that actually sounds correct under the old formula and doesn't need an extra layer of resist calculations to explain it. Additionally, unless the exact same calculation ran twice for archery, it seems unlikely they would make a change for melee then change some entirely different formula for archery. It should be easy to compare a new PoTime archery parse to an older one and see if the distribution is similar. On the melee side it's very straightforward, the elemental damage always hits for the elemental max now, and the parses show the elemental damage is adding to the ratio as expected. It fits exactly as described in the patch notes. The same change just needs to be applied into the archery formula.
I agree I was very excited to see how this change would impact my ranger’s dps since elemental damage is a very significant amount on our arrows. I did a few parse comparisons, nothing as in depth as the original poster so thank you for including such great detail. But in my limited parse data (comparing zone wide parse before and after the patch) the difference in bow dps wasn’t there as I was expecting after the patch. It really would be great to be on an even playing field with other dps classes, particularly as a ranger who primarily uses archery while applying nukes and dots liberally to still capitalizing on maximum “melee” damage uptime via autofire. Please fix!
I'm not sure how "even" it will be if elemental on archery gets aligned to how it works for melee. Monks still bring some serious DPS in most of the early TLP expansions. However, it sure would be nice to experience the overall damage potential on my ranger that takes into account elemental damage. At least in PoP-Era, this seems to most affect rogues in a beneficial way because they can achieve almost their max DPS without needing a Quarm Hammer by looting a P3 dagger that generally goes to alts or rots after a handful of time clears by a guild. Right now, it has been under QA review for a few days now, so lets hope their findings are aligned with what my parses suggest and they take some steps to align archery elemental damage. Once in LDoN, that will give rangers using a bow +8 to the damage calculation between the cultural arrow (+4) and the LDoN bow (also +4).
This is not a bug. We made some test items with large amounts of elemental damage. We saw that when compared to items with no elemental damage there was an increase in damage. Arrows are a very small contribution to archery damage. So small that a difference of 8 will not show in a parse. At this time, elemental damage appears to function on archery.
