Question about Fire Arrow damage

Can anyone shed some light on Fire Arrow's damage calculation steps?

I've searched through some 280 posts and could not find a suitable answer. ATM, all I know for sure is that total physical damage is calculated (including Critical and Deadly Strike) and then the ED% listed under the Fire Arrow skill description is converted to fire damage.

I'm specifically interested in knowing if Amplify Damage or Decrepify benefit fire arrow in any way.

Hypothesis 1: If conversion to fire happens on the moment the arrow is actually shot then I'm assuming monster physical resistances won't affect the fire damage dealt. Only the monster fire resistance will have an effect.

Hypothesis 2: If conversion to fire damage happens upon hitting the target then there's the possibility that monster physical resistance% will decrease physical damage dealt, resulting in a lesser amount of physical damage available for conversion into fire. This would imply doing zero physical damage and consequently zero fire damage to a PI monster unless using a source of Amp Dmg/Decrepify first. This is how Dragon Tail works. However, DTail doesn't benefit from Deadly or Critical Strike, so it's mechanics are different from those of Fire Arrow.

I'm assuming Hypothesis 1 holds true for Fire Arrow (and Cold Arrow, Lightning Bolt), but I'm not sure, hence the question.

Thanks in advance!|||Ya, it works like lightning bolt.

But don't compare it to the messed up DTail. Fire Arrow actually hurts phy immunes and'll hurt em bad. I prefure it over magic arrow to deal with PIs.|||Quote:








Fire Arrow actually hurts phy immunes and'll hurt em bad. I prefure it over magic arrow to deal with PIs.




Then why not use cold arrow? It slows on top of the damage it does, and the difference in damage or mana cost really can't be worth it, it's a prerequisite anyway.|||Because with most players, speed is more important that anything. When you dedicate your life to a game and run the same random maps thousands of times, saving a single second every run will make up for hours of saved time over a career.

Cold damge is, by theme, the weakest of the damage spells. Fire damage takes less points to be as damaging as the cold counterpart. So basically, no, the slow effect does not make it more desirable. Damage and speed only! Gwa!|||But that's my point, cold arrow almost does the same damage. It's barely noticeable. And the damage difference is only there when you assume equal points. Something that isn't true as cold arrow is a prerequisite same for his synergy.

And then it bowls down to resistances. And as far as I know, fire damage is the most resisted element of all. It certainly has the most immunes IIRC.|||I thought cold arrow's base phy dmg is nerfed.

Besides, you hardly ever see Fire/PIs in one monsters. PI seems to like cold immune things much more often.|||Thanks for the reply Ghoulz. You've just removed my doubts, as I was 90% sure Fire Arrow worked as described in Hypothesis 1 (I'm familiar with using Fire Arrow). However, recently while planning an Assassin, I've read about the "messed up" DTail splash damage calculation, and got concerned whether the same mechanics could apply to FA.

@ NASE: Fire damage has its uses. For instance, regular Gloams have 33% cold resistance and 0% fire resistance, and they cannot be frozen.|||Honestly for my magezon, fire arrow works much better than exploding arrow. Both are maxed at around level 44ish. Because souls have such ridiculous phy resists fire arrow kills em with just 2-3 shots in a full game.|||Actually I think CI is the most common regular immunity, monster-for-monster through the whole game. In the commonly run areas, though, I think FI is about as prevalent as CI. Personally, anecdotally, it seems that in most common areas I run, FI monsters tend to be more "pack attack" type monsters while CIs tend to be more "solo" monsters.

And the amount of PI/CI and PI/FI monsters are pretty much statistically the same, since you usually only get PI/CI or PI/FI on natively CI or FI bosses with Stone Skin (which IIRC adds 50% PI).

So unless you're building specifically with one trouble monster in mind (like Gloams in WSK), its pretty much a tossup between Cold or Fire Arrow, with the difference being as was mentioned before that you have to take a point in CA anyway. The online planner says that Cold Arrows do half damage, but I dont know if thats an old version or if thats still true in 1.13? Obviously if you're working off 50% base damage, though, FA is the skill of choice for PIs....|||So, does this mean that the damage bonus to physical damage from Heart of Wolverine or Might would be partially converted to fire damage? Or would bonuses like that only apply to the physical part of the damage, like they do for Vengeance? I figured the two skills might work differently, since Vengeance doesn't split the physical damage, it just adds elemental damage to the physical damage.