with weapons its really only the physical that matters. A bow with a lot of elemental damage might look cool if its boasting a big dps number. But in actuality that elemental damage only adds the amount of elemental damage and does not scale or gain bonuses like the physical damage would.
For instance on my hunter if I put on a bow with 800 dps that is all real physical damage then my DPS is about 35000. However If I put on a bow that does 800 damage but its 400 physical and 400 fire then my DPS drops drastically and is only about 22000.
So in other words elemental damage does not gain bonuses from dex, physical does.
Anyone tested this? If it's true I will have to completely re-work how I examine weapons for purchase on the AH. I kind of doubt it is true, but if it is I would rather know now than later...
From my testing and experience, this is wrong. Damage, regardless of the type is added to DPS and is affected by modifiers. There is even a physical damage modifier on top of +% modifiers.
The reason for differentiating the damage types is that mobs/players have a different resistances to different damage types and that is factored into the end damage.
For example, if a weapon had 200-400 dmg @ 1/sec, that is 300 DPS base. Let's say it has added + fire damage at 100-200. That means the overall DPS of the weapon is now 450 DPS.
Now you shoot a mob that has fire resistance equivalent to taking 50% less damage from fire. That mob is taking the full 200-400 dmg + 50-100 fire dmg for a total of 375 DPS.
If you shoot a mob that has no fire resistance, you will do a full 450DPS.
This is all assuming you are using the weapon to attack. Some abilities transform the weapon DPS to skill DPS and the damage type becomes the skill damage type.
For these classes, the damage type pretty much doesn't matter. For example, a wizard just get the highest DPS weapon. Their spells determine the damage type to the mob.