Weapon damage stacking question (kind of)

Hello

I have a longbow that for the damage just says 11-17 cold damage (in blue). There is no other damage or enhancements. Normally you see #-# piercing dmg for a bow then any other stuff.

So my question is this: Is that cold damage in addition to the inherent damage (piercing?) of the bow or is that all you get?

Thanks for your time.

D

It has an Icy bow string on it so instead of piercing dmg it does Cold dmg.

The cold damage (from this mod) replaces the normal piercing damage.

the cold damage is replacing the piercing, so against mobs that are weak vs. cold you will do more damage, against ones that are strong vs. cold you will do less etc...

Thanks for the replies guys.

Ok so I look at the bow string and it just says "cold damage". So If I salvage the bow string and put it on another bow that does 11-18 piercing damage it will change that to 11-18 cold damage?

The reason that I ask is that I have a nice bow that has a lot of attributes and does 11-18 piercing dmg that I'd like to make even more powerful. but if it's just going to change the base damage from piercing to cold then it's just a wash and I won't spend the money.

Thanks

D

That is correct, good sir.

The only difference one can make with a bow, is the Hornbow. It provides a natural 10% Armor Penetration. If you were to add a Cold Damage String to this, you would have Cold Dmg with a natural 10%AP *not stated on bow*

ur prolly thinkin of other typical rpgs
that have weapon bonuses like +3ice dmg

for gw, it only changes damage type
not add extra dmg

teh closest thing to adding more dmg is a vampiric bow string
which steals 5hp per hit

elemental damage is good against wariors, who have base 100AL vs physical damage (which includes piercing) but only 70AL vs elemental, whereas it is not as effective against rangers, who have base 70AL vs physical and 100AL vs elemental.

Guilty as charged. Too many years of playing Diablo.

Warriors have 80 base armor, and 100 vs physical.

yep it only change the damage type, never stacks. I prefer an ebon bow string(earth damage) against warriors and never a fiery bowsting. This is mainly due to many people expect fire damage, and to some degree cold damage but few people use al vs earth. Just my opinion.

Going by the low dmg stats of the bows you mention Im assuming this is for low end pve. If this is the case then best to leave the bow at piercing. You only need to alter the damage type when facing specific mobs/areas, have specific builds that utilise fiery/icy/ebon etc. These you likely wont come across until much later in the game when you should have a max dmg bow by then.

Where do you find that kind of information? Is there a place where you can see a list of the base AL of characters and armor?

The mod on your bow does icy damage besides piercing damage, so it only does the icy damage. Not the piercing plus the icy damage, sadly.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Basic_armor

There are two wikis for Guild Wars: the official one hosted by Arena Net, and the unofficial wiki that started first.

GuildWiki

Official Guild Wars Wiki

You can access the official wiki in-game by pressing F10 or typing /help in chat to bring up a help menu of basic topics. You can also type /wiki in chat to open a new web browser window to the main page, or type /wiki [search term], without the brackets, to perform a search for that topic in a new window.

Guilty as charged.

Lvl 8 ranger/necro. This is my first character. Me and several buds have started the game at the same time. So we are working the coop campaign thru together for now. This is the first time on GW for us all.

Thanks for the replies guys, greatly appreciated.