Electric vs Earth Weaponry

What are everyone's thoughts when it comes to choosing an elemental type for their weapons?

Electricity is an obvious favourite due to its 20% armour penetration, but what is often overlooked is that earth damage usually does more damage as well, because very few armours and skills are designed to protect against it.

I spend most of my time in BWEs playing pve, so I personally don't know the lack of protection which monsters have against earth damage is also the case in the pvp games.

Anyone who has experimented with both please do enlighten me.

Note that lightning damage weapons don't have any innate armor penetration.

Skills that deal lightning damage typically have 25% armor penetration but that lightning damage sword just won't.

The best elemental damage to use, then, is whatever your opponent is weak against. You want to have several wepons to switch between, anyway, so having a few elemental types of damage to pick from means that you don't have to outguess your opponent before the match starts, you can switch to the weapon that'll give you the biggest hit mid-battle.

If you only have one weapon, though, the choice is still whatever's going to work best. If you're fighting a lot of Rangers you don't want any elemental damage. Fighting a lot of Warriors then it doesn't matter as long as you have elemental damage period. The rest of the professions, it depends on which suit of armor is most popular. At the moment, the best Monk suit, Silk, is weak against cold damage so that's probably going to be what you'll want most.

Ah, I didn't know about the penetration not counting for weapons, thanks for the info.

i think the best combo would prob be fire and air. i mean if they group up hit them with an AoE attack, but if they seperate, just take them down one at a time with high damging fast casting air spells. of course dont forget the air 25% armor penetration,so against a ranger trhe best weapon would be air, although anything else then elemental damage is actually the best, lol.

What qualifies as physical damage vs. elemental? A sword with no mods is clearly physical, but if you put a fire upgrade in, does that completely transform its type? What about elemental conjures, do they change the weapons type at all, or is it just physical damage +1-11 elemental damage?

If I had a cold damage sword, and someone cast greater conflagration would the damage change to fire, or stay cold based?

Maybe some alphas can clear the air?

[COLOR=Navy]i think the damage is seperate, u deal physical damage with the sword and any runes or spells that add damage are seperate daamge, so against a ranger u would deal normal physical damage to him, but the extra damge from the rune or spell will be weakened against an armor with + against element damage...[/COLOR]

Earth, hands down. Often you just want the physical damage, so don't slap elemental damage onto your main weapon. If you just have one elemental weapon, though, make it an Ebon one. Why? Because nothing has a specific weakness to earth damage besides Geomancer's Armor, and that's easily the least popular. Plus you get a small bonus against Mesmers, since pretty much all of them use Regal now.

Cold would be nice to metagame against Silk, but let's be honest, -5 AL vs. Cold is a joke of a bonus - you'd be better off breaking out your Vampiric or Zealous weapon than chasing that, though it's a decent option.

I don't think that the choice really matters too much, though. Why? Because you're just swapping in the elementalized weapon to get around armors with +damage vs. physical. How many armors have that property, but also care about what elemental damage you do? Not many. The element doesn't matter against Warriors, and you don't want to use any of them against Rangers. You use physical against Monks, unless you need to get around Judges - against silk I'd rather have the Vampiric bonus than the extra +5. Same goes for Mesmers and Necros - use physical except against the +vs. physical sets, and then it doesn't matter. Plus you never want elemental damage against an Elementalist.

Basically bring either an Earth (vs. Regal) or Cold (vs. Silk) weapon if you don't have a Vampiric one, otherwise you shouldn't even care.

Peace,
-CxE