Fine/Sharp charm and additional mods

[Ax2Grind]

What is the preferred order of damage charms when deciding which to keep?

I just put together all my RLvl21 charms and tried getting the highest maximum damage for each 1x4 slot (a grand and a small versus two larges), using attack rating as a tiebreaker. Having only nine 3MAX smalls, five 10MAX and four 9MAX grands made it easy to use 7MAX and 6MAX larges for the tenth spot, and even ditched a 9/50 and 3/10 in favor of 6/38 and 6/32 for the ninth, but after that suffixes start playing a role.

I took some of these off my double-thrower, who loves strength and dexterity suffixes due to the javelin damage bonus, but elemental damage and others make me question whether I chose properly. Consequently I still have almost thirty spaces of charms I don't know whether to keep or not. Advice, even from the PvP crowd, would be helpful.

[crawlingdeadman]

shun all elemental damage like the plague if you're going to be up against people using MDR.

oh i see "even from the pvp crowd" so is this not for pvp then? if you have no trouble hitting things then perhaps ar shouldnt be the tiebreaker but instead have additional mods play a bigger factor.

i've come up against this before in lld where i've chosen 5max/ar/smattering of life over the 6max/higher ar/plain gc.

[Ax2Grind]

Since I mostly PvM, I'm less aware of the dueling advantage. Life is definitely one of the mods I'd consider for sticking in, but I understand about elemental damage - that's an all-or-nothing deal. The touch of cold damage we'd use to shatter monsters doesn't visibly chill players and is entirely negated by MDR. Don't get me wrong, a 10/76/1-33 LDam grand is great for getting the maximum sky high, but I'm more interested in the value of FHR, FRW, dex, str and such.

Do MDam/AR/Str-Dex charms work better for ranged attackers (thr/bowers) or are other affixes far more desired (i.e. how much additional damage can strength or dexterity do)?
Are Barbarian Mastery skillers with strength/dexterity more viable for throwers than Fine/Sharps considering the stamina/defense/resistance bonuses the page has (FRW is questionable)?

[helvete]

Mastery skillers won't give you the highest damage output (14max GCs will beat them, even 10max will, but these are rarer) BUT it will help in a lot of ways. However, some of the masteries suffer from diminishing returns (nat res, critical on mastery, increased speed) so adding skillers affect them less for each charm.

The reason CDM wants you to not have magic damage is that when, say, 1-2 cold damage is absorbed by 15mdr, then the mdr that doesn't get used will reduce your physical damage instead (provided there's at least one point of dr). Works the other way around too, but that's less important.

[Ax2Grind]

Assuming the defender has both MDR and PDR, if you trip the MDR stage with a little elemental/magic damage the remainder will be treated as PDR? Is that a bug or the way it's supposed to work (never heard it myself and sounds like a bad bit of programming)? If true, I'll definitely need to have enough replacement Fine/Sharp charms to switch out, if not for dueling at least for PKs.

[brokensvt]

A really extreme example of the MDR bug involves most LLD trapsins. Most(I said most guys) I can stand in their traps and heal on my LLD wolfie.

As far as your original query, I think the answer is simple. Build around suffixes to hit break points for FHR, then enough r/w to satisfy, then go for life/dex. As you find/trade for more, upgrade the prefixes.

Greg *gmdeux