Energized and damage scaling - how do they fit?

EramTheLiar · January 18

I hadn't considered this because when damaging scaling was officially released I wasn't playing a sorcerer at the time, but today I was looking at the energized passive and I started to get a headache.

The in-game info states that energized will give you a 3%/5% bonus to shock and physical damage. These are purposefully specific words and probably mean more now that damage scaling is a thing because you can't just apply the bonus to either your magic or weapon damage score - it has to be the "right kind" of damage. So my assumption is that if you had a lightning staff, damage scaling would choose the highest of your weapon or damage skill to calculate the "scaled" damage, and then energized would add the 3 or 5 percent bonus on top of that calculation. I can grasp that.

But in a world of damage scaling, what the heck is physical damage?

My reflexive assumption is that it's your weapon damage, because those are all physical attacks, but that doesn't seem thematically true. If the magic side of the skill is giving a boost to only a select piece of the magic damage range, the same has to be true for the physical side, right? so that 3/5% bonus has to be going to a specific type of attack. What kind of attack is that? Your weapon choice? So, for example, would it treat dual wielding daggers as a physical attack? So if you were casting mages fury while dual wielding daggers, would you get a bonus both for shock AND physical? Or would it just be the active skills for those weapons that get the bonus?

Can anyone explain how these bonuses actually work?

Soarora · January 18

Physical damage is in fact a specific damage type. What you’re thinking of is Martial damage, which is the umbrella term for “physical” damage types. It’s confusing and messes me up sometimes too.

So, yes, I think your dagger attacks are physical damage (unless it’s stated otherwise, like bloodthirst does bleed damage I think). You wouldn’t get the physical damage bonus into mage’s fury because it’s doing shock damage, irrelevant of what weapon you’re holding. Same thing with holding a lightning staff, it won’t give you the shock damage bonus unless you’re casting a destruction staff skill or attacking with the weapon (light attack/heavy attack).

El_Borracho · January 20

This is a strange one, but if I remember correctly, you can get both with a Lightning Staff that is enchanted with the Absorb Stamina glyph because Absorb Stamina causes physical damage. Its likely an artifact to cover stam sorcs in addition to mag sorcs.