It took a couple tries but we ended up winning. Popping full cooldowns at the start of the fight did serious damage to the boss and even though I died twice we still managed to eke it out. Yay! Inferno Act 2 was hilarious. Regular dudes would melee for 160% of my maximum health. Annoying ranged attackers would hit for 80% of my health and would shoot 4 projectiles at a time! Things are clearly getting serious and I'm going to need to crunch some numbers so I know what gear to focus on acquiring and so I can work out if wizard is worth playing or if I should level an alt up.
Ideally I'd be able to turn to the internet for help with these numbers but with Diablo III that doesn't seem to be the case. It took me forever to find information about weapon damage impacting spells! Part of the problem is Google searches keep returning information about Diablo II, or about beta iterations that aren't valid, or lead to websites known for distributing viruses. I certainly have the ability to work a lot of this stuff out on my own and my plan is to figure out what needs to be researched, get the gear to run the tests, and test it out. Hopefully my desire for that information will outweigh my desire to just play the game!
At any rate, here's what I really want to know:
- When an item adds +damage is the speed of my weapon taken into account?
- Does having a different base speed on the weapon impact how often an attack ticks? I believe the laser beams tick more often but what about hydra attacks, the meteor dot, and blizzard?
- Does adding attack speed change the numbers in any meaningful way?
- I have the ability to amplify damage by 20%, 15%, and 10%. Do these stack? Multiplicatively? Additively? Do they stack with abilities from other classes?
- How useful is arcane power regeneration?
- If I want to focus on defensive stats am I better off with armor, resistance, or health? Does int provide a relevant enough bonus to be worth considering?
- When an item grants life per hit does it proc once per spell or once per monster hit?
- Do dots (like hydra or meteor) proc life steal? Is the amount relevant if so?
- What about health per second?
Part of the problem is the high variance in damage done per attack. The damage range on my current weapon/orb combo is 470-987. How can I possibly tell if 15% and 10% damage are stacking together when a given attack can do more than double the previous one? I'm thinking the solution lies in the +minimum damage stat. Coupled with some low level weapons I should be able to shrink my damage range to a fixed number. I also need to find two weapons with identical DPS stats but drastically different speeds and run some tests on them.
Any other thoughts on things I should test when I get my testing groove on?
4 comments:
Some really important stuff to know in general is that for classes that don't use 'power generation' abilities weapon speed is *massively* important. You need the slowest weapon you can get since your spells do a ton more damage with a slow weapon and cost the same. This is pretty much true for both witch doctors and wizards.
I know Sthenno did some testing to find these things out in the beta so you should contact him if he doesn't read this.
It turns out I can beat Butcher in about 90 seconds by myself. It is dicey and I can die easily but it only took me 3 tries. He is definitely easier than many champ/unique packs. I often find myself running into enrage on packs and getting blown up by it so I guess I need to be a lot tougher so I can stand there and eat more damage to beat down faster.
For what it is worth for my toon the stat weights are:
Int = 5
Vit = 5
Resist All = 10
Resist Physical = 2
Armor/Str/Dex/Resist Elemental = 1
I don't have good weights for many of the random mods, just the straightforward combat ones.
Anything you can beat with me around in inferno should be very easy to solo yourself. With the two of us monsters will have 2.1x as much health and do 1.15x as much damage. With Tom as well they have 3.2x as much health and do 1.3x as much damage.
For channeled spells you pay in ticks equal to your weapon speed but the damage output is determined by your dps. So higher weapon speed means more cost, but unless it comes with higher dps it doesn't mean more damage (a 1.5 weapon is terrible compared to a 0.9 weapon with the same damage, but 10% attack speed increase from gloves gives both damage and cost).
+ Damage is added to your weapon's list damage, so it is effectively multiplied by weapon speed to determine its effect on dps.
I know some percentage bonuses stack additively, which makes me think they all will, but you really never know.
Life per hit is a total mess. It seems to proc of each hit but on many spells it doesn't proc at all.
From what I found percentage bonuses come in two categories which stack additively within themselves and multiplicatively with each other. So making a mob take 10% more damage and 20% more damage means a total of 30% more damage. But making the mob take 10% more damage and making your party do 20% more damage with result in 32% more damage.
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