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SvennoJ said:
Mummelmann said:

"Attack damage" bonuses/buffs are all forms of attacks except spells, it includes elemental attacks, AoE, Impact, Projectile, Physical etc. Ice Strike is AoE, Melee, Strike, and Cold. Boosting the various attacks that are listed below a skill boosts the total damage output. Elemental skills like the ones you and I use on our monks convert your weapon's physical damage to the corresponding elemental damage - usually a percentage. So a "Strike" might consist of different forms of damage types. Other bonuses are stacked on top of that base, meaning that your damage grows exponentially as you add bonuses and synergies to them (via support crystals, for instance). Like in my previous examples, where 20k becomes well over 30k from one boost (Charged Staff). Also, don't forget about Critical Hits, many powerful builds center around Crit Chance and Crit Damage. My Monk has around 28% Chance and 300% Damage, this is even more DPS that doesn't get tallied in the skill menus or descriptions the same way.

I generate Frenzy charges with the use of Combat Frenzy (a skill gem), every time I freeze or shock an enemy. This allows me to activate Charged Staff and use said charges to add lightning damage to my Ice Strike. On top of that, there's Unbound Avatar from the Invoker ascension, yielding even more elemental damage based on charges (and activated the same way). All that jazz, and the bell on top, is what gives me the insane damage output, even with a pretty poor weapon. My main weapon isn't even mainly cold-based, it has mostly lightning damage besides physical, this is why my Charged Staff gives such a big boost since it scales lightning damage. If I got a weapon with 400-500 physical damage, and as much cold damage as I have lightning now, my DPS would be hilarious, even at level 71. Even as is, the Act 3 final boss on Cruel was melted with three Bell cycles. The wait for the phase transition was nearly longer than the entire fight around it.

If you want to have more of a good time, I would recommend one Ranger or Mercenary paired with a Witch using minions. Safe distance, lots of distracting tanks that can also deal insane damage, and an overall fun play-style!

Thanks for the tips! I should look into charged staff and combat frenzy and figure out where all the stats are. (No clue what my crit chance is although I did put points toward it). I feel like this game would be a lot easier on PC!

Ranger Witch combo sounds fun. We've been finding lots of cross bows with much better stats than our weapons doh.

So far we've mainly been trying to stun or freeze the boss. When it works we can get through the fights yet this last one doesn't want to stay still lol. And maybe do the ascension stuff solo, not having to worry about dragging the other over the screen into traps while having a shared honor bar. (And unbind the X button, that's why the death crystal stuff doesn't work :/)

I kinda wish developers would realize there's a blue ocean out there of matured gamers that want to play couch co-op! It always feels like a box ticking addition when it's even added, doing it in such a way that makes it much harder than playing solo.

Couch coop is amazing, all forms of local multiplayer are leagues ahead of online play, in my opinion. I think the full release of PoE2 will set things right, or at least make them considerably better. Maybe they'll throw in crossplay as well, we'll see!