Base Damage Mods Vs Elemental Damage Mods

[NutellaPhreak]

For rifles, the damage mod adds 15% and the fire damage mod adds 15%. Is this the same amount of damage? If I upgrade my damage mod to 60% is that the same as 2 damage mods giving 30%? The only elemental affect i want is ice so the most affective way to mod for damage is a level 1 ice damage mod and then fully upgrading a normal damage mod right? Someone please tell me if im wrong, how do you guys mod for damage?

[TehJumpingJawa]

Rather than repeating what's already been said, I'd suggest you have a read of the wiki.

It explains all the damage logic pretty thoroughly.

[Gio21]

1st it adds the base dmg and then the elemental dmg 

its awesome :)

[RunNGun]

First off, Understand that elemental mods scale off of damage mods.

For example. I have a hypothetical gun that does 100 base dmg per shot (Old snipetron)

If I mod it with 60% serration, it will do 160 damage (100 * 1.6)

If i also add a 50% Armor Pierce (AP) mod, it will do 240 total damage (to an unarmored enemy). The AP mod adds 50% of the base damage PLUS 50% of the increased mod damage ((100 * 1.5) + (60 * 1.5)).

However, many enemies are armored, and it is not uncommon to see 50%+ damage reduction. Let's do the math again accounting for this.

100 Base damage is now 50 damage.

with 60% serration, total damage is now 80.

With 50% Armor Pierce, total damage is 160, because the 80 Armor pierce  damage ignores enemy armor reduction . This is increased to 120 damage when shooting Grineer, and reduced to 40 dmg when shooting lesser infested (however, ancients take full damage).
Because of this mod, your effective damage is basically doubled

Lesson: Get base damage as high as you can with maxed or near maxed Armor pierce mods. Also try to get multishot if you have it. Multishot can almost double your damage (including AP). Most of your damage will come from that armor pierce mod (when also paired with base damage and multishot). Everything else is just icing on the cake.

 

Except for maybe freeze damage. That might save you from ancients if you can take advantage of the slowed movement.

[Firebat86]

Basically ele dmg is calculated AFTER your Serration etc.  So your elemental damage is an additional % of that dmg. 

 

Edit:  Forgot to say that elemental damage is also useful for whichever faction you are fighting.  Ice slows but also does double damage to shields.  Lightning does double to Corpus.  Fire double to Infested.  Generally you want to mod according to what you are playing against, but the only ele that becomes worthless is lightning against infested.  Otherwise it's just added damage.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Firebat86