Now to hopefully dismiss some long standing misunderstandings concerning elemental damage and weapons, lets take the
Scimitar of Chaotic Flame as the +3 fire will give easier to understand numbers. Numbers used are confirmed, and parsed a long time ago by Zaela.
Elemental damage is all or nothing on weapons. So on every swing, the Scimitar will either be 14/20 or 17/20 depending on if it makes the resist check. What does that mean for weapon comparisons?
An enemy with a FR of
100, would get the 17/20 about
66% of the time and the 14/20
33%.
Or if looked at from a slightly different angle,
66% of the time you'd get the full +3 fire damage.
33% of the time you'd get +0 fire damage.
Thus, on average, the +
3 fire damage is worth
1.98 damage on the 100 FR mob (66% of 3).
While +3 fire dmg isn't literally turned into 1.98, you can short hand your expected damage of the Scimitar to 15.98/20. Thus over a reasonable period of time, the Scimitar and a 16/20 weapon would do fairly equivalent damage on a 100 FR mob.
The next relevant question is, how common is it for a mob to have more or less than 100 resist? Outside of raids, unless the mob is immune, you are looking at less than, most all the time. In raids it starts out notably higher, but depending on the resist can be debuffed in short order to ALOT lower. Assuming your raid isn't lazy, you are generally doing more damage with an elemental weapon in a raid, then with an elemental weapon in a group or solo.
There are a few other factors I'm not mentioning here, and I won't give you some crazy table showing odds of resist per resist level at a 5 level range either way (we do have that by the way). But I've said it once, and I'll say it again, +elemental damage on weapons is highly under-rated by the community.
