Confused about how Forces complement Pure Str builds

[DragonsFury]

Alright, I'm a newbie but thanks for answering my question. =)

I'm hearing about all these pure str/fire glavie builds and other pure str builds with lightning/ice.
How is that effective? With low int, doesn't your magical balance gimp your damage once you activate your skill(imbue?)? Or do I not understand how physical damage/balance and magical damage/balance work?

Thanks for your time.

[kagenutto]

Imbue works by stacking magical damage ONTOP of physical damage. The point of a pure STR build is mainly weapon skills + imbue + buffs. Powers like Wolf's Thunderbolt is not going to be used by STR builds unless they are retarded. Ooops.. I mean challenged. STR builds are going to do less damage per attack then INT builds. The higher the level between the two builds, the bigger that gap becomes. STR builds make up for that by being able to take a beating before going down. Even from magical sources due to high hit points.

[SuicideGrl]

Imbue works by stacking magical damage ONTOP of physical damage. The point of a pure STR build is mainly weapon skills + imbue + buffs. Powers like Wolf's Thunderbolt is not going to be used by STR builds unless they are retarded. Ooops.. I mean challenged. STR builds are going to do less damage per attack then INT builds. The higher the level between the two builds, the bigger that gap becomes. STR builds make up for that by being able to take a beating before going down. Even from magical sources due to high hit points.

couldn't have said that better. though some pure str players get their nukes anyway just for shits and giggles.. it's funny to see a lvl50+ char do 300 dmg w/ a nuke ;)

[penquinz]

that's why you get the highest level skill with your weapon if you're a STR user.

like the spear throw.

almost the same as the nuke.

just a weapon version.

[Devotia]

For the fire glaive build:

You take an embue at a low level because you're not going to be doing much damage, and your magical balance is still pretty high, so you can do decent damage with it. As your levels progress your magical balance drops down to about nothing. You then take the fire skills such as flame body (7% phys dmg at the end) and flame devil (another 6%) to boost your magical damage. Since you already had the fire embue, you don't have to drop as many points, plus these skills are very useful to a pure str user. All that to fire protection and you have a magical tree that very nicely complements your strengths as well as lessens your biggest weakness.

The embue, like I said is only used at the early levels. Since you start out at 50/50, even a pure STR user gets a big benefit from these in the beginning. However, at a certain point the extra damage frmo the embue is negligible (I add about 30 dmg for 80 mana at lvl 20).

Balance is how much damage you actually do. EG, if I do 100-200 physical damage, that's my possible max. However, a 50% balance will take that down to 50-100. This is one of the hybrids biggest weakness: They'll (almost) always have low balances, regardless of how much their listed damage is.