Not entirely sure there as my Elemental Archer builds never used the consumable arrows. Instead, I just buff using spells like Venom Coating, Elemental Arrowheads and the like. Lets you deal more magic damage than physical while keeping that physical damage. The consumable arrows never seemed worth it for me.

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Not entirely sure there as my Elemental Archer builds never used the consumable arrows. Instead, I just buff using spells like Venom Coating, Elemental Arrowheads and the like. Lets you deal more magic damage than physical while keeping that physical damage. The consumable arrows never seemed worth it for me.

I might be misusing the term compared to how others would. This build would still use Elemental Arrowheads. As I want those consumable arrows to be a focus in the setup, I am looking for a fairly definitive answer on whether it's more effective (meaning it inflicts the most water damage) to ditch the Warfare entirely or if it is still necessary in the skill distribution.

Oh no, I get what you're asking, I don't really know the answer. When I refer to "Elemental Arrowheads" I mean the Huntsman spell, not the items. Whenever I build a ranger character to deal magic damage, I don't use the consumable arrows like you're asking about as it just converts your damage to a single element. Instead, I build the character to stack elemental damage to their regular attacks. You stack Venom Coating, The Elemental Arrowheads spell, Crafted poison (or air later game), innate element damage from the weapon, an elemental rune, The Elemental Ranger talent and Firebrand (later game) to apply magic damage to the weapon. All of this combined deals I'd guess 130% or so of your base weapon damage to each attack, even if your attacks are Huntsman spells like ricochet or whatever. All the while, you still keep your base physical damage as well.

With how powerful the build is, as well as versatile since its a true hybrid damage setup, I just never saw a reason to try to do what you're doing, using the consumable magic arrows, as the center focus of the build. As such, I never really learned the math behind how the damage is calculated.

The only issue I see happening, unless you have a mod to help you around it, is that water arrows and particularly frost arrows tend to be a bit harder to acquire in large quantities if you intent was to use them for most of your attacks. Just figured I might mention an alternative setup for the concept of rangers dealing magic damage.

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Oh no, I get what you're asking, I don't really know the answer. When I refer to "Elemental Arrowheads" I mean the Huntsman spell, not the items. Whenever I build a ranger character to deal magic damage, I don't use the consumable arrows like you're asking about as it just converts your damage to a single element. Instead, I build the character to stack elemental damage to their regular attacks. You stack Venom Coating, The Elemental Arrowheads spell, Crafted poison (or air later game), innate element damage from the weapon, an elemental rune, The Elemental Ranger talent and Firebrand (later game) to apply magic damage to the weapon. All of this combined deals I'd guess 130% or so of your base weapon damage to each attack, even if your attacks are Huntsman spells like ricochet or whatever. All the while, you still keep your base physical damage as well.

With how powerful the build is, as well as versatile since its a true hybrid damage setup, I just never saw a reason to try to do what you're doing, using the consumable magic arrows, as the center focus of the build. As such, I never really learned the math behind how the damage is calculated.

The only issue I see happening, unless you have a mod to help you around it, is that water arrows and particularly frost arrows tend to be a bit harder to acquire in large quantities if you intent was to use them for most of your attacks. Just figured I might mention an alternative setup for the concept of rangers dealing magic damage.

That's another setup I haven't personally tried but would like to try out in the near future. The water arrows themselves are as plentiful as bones, rocks, and regular arrowheads are, since the arrows only need to be combined with a water barrel. I'd used a lot of poison arrows on an archer in one tactician run and easily acquired hundreds of them. With ranger vendors resetting every hour and level-up, the resource management is a nonfactor.

That tangent aside, do you estimate it is more effective (by this I mean doing the maximum water damage) to get that water damage just with a combination of Elemental Arrowheads, innate water damage, a frost rune, and Elemental Ranger?

Probably, you’d also be keeping the physical damage while doing so. It also means you can have that damage while also using Huntsman spells for AoE.