Ike asked me the other day if I was at all interested in forming a regular hardcore group in Diablo III. I'd been thinking of starting a hardcore character in order to get more achievements, so the answer was yes! The last hardcore group fell apart mostly I think because most of the people involved got bored of Diablo III in general and not because of an issue with playing hardcore. It didn't help that I kept dying, but I figure that was mostly a problem with choosing the squishy class and having never played it in normal. As such, I figure I'm going to play the only class I've really played before, wizard, and see what happens.
So, the question is, does anyone else want to come along? The plan is likely to play a couple hours on the same night each week. Maybe something like 9pm-12pm EST on Thursday? I'm certainly open to suggestions one way or the other. Let me know!
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Friday, March 08, 2013
Ehrgeiz: Dungeon Mode
I gave the dungeon mode of Ehrgeiz a spin the other day and it didn't seem to have anything at all in common with the arcade fighting game mode. Arcade mode was a pretty standard 3D fighting game with combos and moves and such. Dungeon mode uses the same 3D movement but otherwise doesn't seem to have a lot in common. It's more of a full on action-adventure-RPG. Walk into a room, kill the enemies that spawned in the room, pick up the loot they dropped. Repeat. You start off as a guy and if he dies you restart back in town as a girl. At level 1. With no weapons or healing items. And with a cleared out dungeon. I saw all my guy's loot drop on the ground where he died so it seems possible that I could get down to it Wizardry V style and get all my gear back. The first time this happened she just died right away. The second time I got lucky and had a weapon drop off the first random respawn.
The game has the interesting and/or terrible game mechanic where you have to spend in game currency in order to save. I guess this is try to curve save/reload shenanigans but it was a huge problem when I wanted to go to bed shortly after being forced to respawn in town as the girl who had nothing at all. I eventually found a room with a lot of mushrooms growing, filled my inventory up, ran back to town, and sold them for enough money to save. But it feels like if I want to save in order to turn the console off (and not to save/reload a hard fight) that it should just let me.
There wasn't much of a plot thus far. My two characters were going on an adventure, got knocked out by something, and woke up in a strange town near a dungeon. Now we're crawling the dungeon. It's not really enough of a hook to interest me, and the 3D combat is actually pretty tedious. Find a long range weapon like a spear. Hit attack until all the enemies are dead. Hope they don't stunlock you.
I feel obligated to keep playing it because of the marathon, but this is a pretty offshoot game and doesn't seem very good at all. I think I'll give it another spin on the weekend and see if I can't get into it more because I don't want to just skip it.
The game has the interesting and/or terrible game mechanic where you have to spend in game currency in order to save. I guess this is try to curve save/reload shenanigans but it was a huge problem when I wanted to go to bed shortly after being forced to respawn in town as the girl who had nothing at all. I eventually found a room with a lot of mushrooms growing, filled my inventory up, ran back to town, and sold them for enough money to save. But it feels like if I want to save in order to turn the console off (and not to save/reload a hard fight) that it should just let me.
There wasn't much of a plot thus far. My two characters were going on an adventure, got knocked out by something, and woke up in a strange town near a dungeon. Now we're crawling the dungeon. It's not really enough of a hook to interest me, and the 3D combat is actually pretty tedious. Find a long range weapon like a spear. Hit attack until all the enemies are dead. Hope they don't stunlock you.
I feel obligated to keep playing it because of the marathon, but this is a pretty offshoot game and doesn't seem very good at all. I think I'll give it another spin on the weekend and see if I can't get into it more because I don't want to just skip it.
Thursday, March 07, 2013
League of Legends: Attack Damage vs Armour Penetration Runes
Robb's been talking a bit while we've been playing League of Legends about how armour penetration runes are 'bad' now and attack damage carry characters should be running all attack damage runes instead. I've been using attack damage quints and armour penetration reds for an awfully long time but I do have attack damage reds (I got them to use on Yorick who did a fair amount of magical damage that scaled off of the attack damage stat). Should I be switching my ADC rune page around?
First, note that from masteries you get 5 flat armour penetration, 3 attack damage, and .67 attack damage per level. Base stats for someone like Caitlyn are going to have no armour penetration and 50 attack damage. Most people buy a 10 ad item to start (doran's blade or long sword). So at level 1 we're looking at attacking with 63.67 attack damage and 5 armour penetration. The enemy is likely to have something like 30 armour. (Caitlyn starts with 16.5 armour and could have 12.69 from yellow runes.)
I made a little spreadsheet to calculate the damage done with an autoattack and a Q activation for each of the 40 possible combinations of reds/quints between AD and ArP. Autoattack damage at level 1 is maximized for Caitlyn by running entirely AD runes. Her Q damage is maximized by running entirely ArP reds and AD quints. The difference between best and worst combination is 3.0 damage on autoattack and 1.2 on Q.
Level 1 isn't the only useful spot. What about level 6? At this point you probably haven't gone back to buy yet, so you're just gaining the 3 AD per level while your Q gets 80 more base damage. You also get an ult. Your enemy gains 3.5 ac per level. In this configuration her autoattack remains optimized with entirely AD runes. Her Q changes and lines up with her ult, however, and are both optimized with entirely ArP runes. The damage differences swing here as well. The autoattack is now only up 2.1 damage, the Q is up 8.4 damage and the ult gains 23.0 damage.
How about level 11? By this point you probably have some attack speed (which only helps to change your attack mix by tossing in more autoattacks, it doesn't change the absolute power of any ability) and maybe, say, a bloodthirster. At this point the numbers swing entirely in one direction. All abilities are made better by stacking entirely ArP runes. Autoattack is now up 6.9, Q is up 23.7, and ult is up 54.4.
Ok, well, maybe we need to get some armor pen from somewhere else to make up that gap. Lets make the next item we buy a last whisper. Level up to 14 and add that on to our build and what happens? Nope. No go. It's still all ArP runes and the difference just keeps widening. I can give the enemy 100 bonus armour, and take away the last whisper penetration. ArP is still better. Caitlyn even has pretty good ratios on her abilities, with a 1.2 on Q and 2.0 on ult. It doesn't seem to matter. At the very beginning of the game you might want attack damage, but later in the game there's no contest. You want to have armour penetration.
Based on how Robb was talking I was expecting to come out of this with a need to build a good page with all attack damage on it. Now, I think I need to buy some armour penetration quints.
But wait! Caitlyn is probably the best champion for armour penetration since all of her abilities that scale on attack damage also do physical damage. What about someone like Ezreal or Corki? Ezreal's ult does magic damage, so armour penetration won't help it at all!
Well, at level 1 EZ wants all AD runes for his autoattack just like Caitlyn, but actually wants all ArP runes for his Q. His Q has a higher flat bonus and a smaller AD ratio and I guess those are good enough. At level 6 both of those remain true, and his ult obviously wants straight AD reds. At 11 with the bloodthirster he wants straight ArP for both his autoattack and his Q, and he more than makes up the difference from his ult with a single Q. At level 14 with the last whisper it's all ArP again, and this time a single auto-attack makes up for the difference on his ult and his Q has almost triple the gains of his ult.
Looking at this closer it seems that while Caitlyn may be awesome for ArP since she does all physical damage she's also awesome for AD because her ratios are so good. Corki actually only scales with AP when he does magical damage except his ult which only has a .2 AD ratio so I can't imagine it's actually different for him either. It's entirely possible he wants hybrid penetration instead of ArP, but he definitely doesn't want AD into the late game.
I guess if you're trying to get a kill at level 1 with a very aggressive support or a gank then maybe stacking AD makes sense. And maybe if you can't last hit well enough the extra 2.8 damage is relevant. I can see sticking with AD on some of my top laners who do try to snowball early. But for an ADC who really wants to come into power in the late game it feels like all ArP is the way to go.
First, note that from masteries you get 5 flat armour penetration, 3 attack damage, and .67 attack damage per level. Base stats for someone like Caitlyn are going to have no armour penetration and 50 attack damage. Most people buy a 10 ad item to start (doran's blade or long sword). So at level 1 we're looking at attacking with 63.67 attack damage and 5 armour penetration. The enemy is likely to have something like 30 armour. (Caitlyn starts with 16.5 armour and could have 12.69 from yellow runes.)
I made a little spreadsheet to calculate the damage done with an autoattack and a Q activation for each of the 40 possible combinations of reds/quints between AD and ArP. Autoattack damage at level 1 is maximized for Caitlyn by running entirely AD runes. Her Q damage is maximized by running entirely ArP reds and AD quints. The difference between best and worst combination is 3.0 damage on autoattack and 1.2 on Q.
Level 1 isn't the only useful spot. What about level 6? At this point you probably haven't gone back to buy yet, so you're just gaining the 3 AD per level while your Q gets 80 more base damage. You also get an ult. Your enemy gains 3.5 ac per level. In this configuration her autoattack remains optimized with entirely AD runes. Her Q changes and lines up with her ult, however, and are both optimized with entirely ArP runes. The damage differences swing here as well. The autoattack is now only up 2.1 damage, the Q is up 8.4 damage and the ult gains 23.0 damage.
How about level 11? By this point you probably have some attack speed (which only helps to change your attack mix by tossing in more autoattacks, it doesn't change the absolute power of any ability) and maybe, say, a bloodthirster. At this point the numbers swing entirely in one direction. All abilities are made better by stacking entirely ArP runes. Autoattack is now up 6.9, Q is up 23.7, and ult is up 54.4.
Ok, well, maybe we need to get some armor pen from somewhere else to make up that gap. Lets make the next item we buy a last whisper. Level up to 14 and add that on to our build and what happens? Nope. No go. It's still all ArP runes and the difference just keeps widening. I can give the enemy 100 bonus armour, and take away the last whisper penetration. ArP is still better. Caitlyn even has pretty good ratios on her abilities, with a 1.2 on Q and 2.0 on ult. It doesn't seem to matter. At the very beginning of the game you might want attack damage, but later in the game there's no contest. You want to have armour penetration.
Based on how Robb was talking I was expecting to come out of this with a need to build a good page with all attack damage on it. Now, I think I need to buy some armour penetration quints.
But wait! Caitlyn is probably the best champion for armour penetration since all of her abilities that scale on attack damage also do physical damage. What about someone like Ezreal or Corki? Ezreal's ult does magic damage, so armour penetration won't help it at all!
Well, at level 1 EZ wants all AD runes for his autoattack just like Caitlyn, but actually wants all ArP runes for his Q. His Q has a higher flat bonus and a smaller AD ratio and I guess those are good enough. At level 6 both of those remain true, and his ult obviously wants straight AD reds. At 11 with the bloodthirster he wants straight ArP for both his autoattack and his Q, and he more than makes up the difference from his ult with a single Q. At level 14 with the last whisper it's all ArP again, and this time a single auto-attack makes up for the difference on his ult and his Q has almost triple the gains of his ult.
Looking at this closer it seems that while Caitlyn may be awesome for ArP since she does all physical damage she's also awesome for AD because her ratios are so good. Corki actually only scales with AP when he does magical damage except his ult which only has a .2 AD ratio so I can't imagine it's actually different for him either. It's entirely possible he wants hybrid penetration instead of ArP, but he definitely doesn't want AD into the late game.
I guess if you're trying to get a kill at level 1 with a very aggressive support or a gank then maybe stacking AD makes sense. And maybe if you can't last hit well enough the extra 2.8 damage is relevant. I can see sticking with AD on some of my top laners who do try to snowball early. But for an ADC who really wants to come into power in the late game it feels like all ArP is the way to go.
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Diablo III: % Elemental Damage
Diablo III has a very poorly worded item mod: "adds X% to {element} damage". Any reasonable interpretation of that ability would indicate that it would amplify your {element} damage. Adding to your fire damage should increase the amount of fire damage you do! It turns out it doesn't do anything of the sort. What it actually does is amplify the physical damage of your equipped gear (including weapon) by tacking on some bonus {element} damage. It does not amplify any elemental damage on your weapon. It also doesn't actually do damage of the listed element if you use a skill with an innate element! So it's all kinds of counter-intuitive. Wizards have a passive that makes lightning damage stun people. It doesn't work with my storm crow hat if I'm casting blizzard, for example, because that added lightning damage is actually cold damage.
Ok, so the ability doesn't do anything resembling what it says it does. It does have a game effect, though, and the question then becomes how good it is. My current build doesn't make terribly efficient use of it (my weapon comes with a massive elemental boost on it, and it's pretty much the only option for me to use with my budget) but would another build with a pure physical damage weapon (apparently these are called 'black weapons' because they have a black background) make it an awesome ability or just an ok one? What about other sources of this mod? What are they, and could they be worth building around?
Assuming I had a black weapon then the 8% on my storm crow hat should be a straight 8% damage boost. For comparison I have 2177 int, so in order to get a similar 8% damage boost I would need to add on 182 int. That's a pretty good boost. Most items can only roll 100 int in a single mod, so adding on almost twice that is good. And if I already had, say, 30% elemental damage then adding 8% more from storm crow would only be a 6% damage boost and would be the equivalent of 140 int. Still good, but going downhill. For comparison adding on 50% crit damage would be worth 278 int in my gear according to d3up. So, a good mod, but not the best option by any stretch.
At any rate, what are the level 60 elemental damage options? I am going to skip weapons which aren't black.
Helm
Storm Crow (wizard only) - 7-8%
Gloves
Frostburn Gauntlets - 5-6%, also 15-30% more damage from cold skills (but no stats of any kind)
Belt
Inna's Favor - 7-8%
Boots
Zunimassa's Trail - 7-8%
Amulet
Tal Rasha's Allegiance - 5-6%
Ring
Stone of Jordon - 5-6%, also a massive 20-30% damage to elites
Offhand
Triumvirate (wizard only) - 15-18%
That's actually a fair number of slots covered by this mod. Triumvirate in particular looks potentially insane. 18% more damage? That's worth more than 400 int. That it also comes with 150-169 int, 8-8.5% crit chance, a ton of physical damage and a random mod makes it all the sweeter. Frostburn seems terrible except maybe if you're only using blizzard. Stone of Jordon can't have any stats at all which makes it seem pretty odd, but I guess 30% damage to elites could be sweet. The witch doctor and wizard set pieces with this mod both seem fantastic. (Boots/amulet.) Assuming you don't want arcane power on crit (say, you're running archon) then dropping storm crow for a better hat would be reasonable. Getting 32% extra damage from 3 slots on top of their built in stats could be pretty awesome. So I think I'm going to keep an eye out for Zunimassa's Trail, Tal Rasha's Allegiance, and Triumvirate to see what the prices are like...
I spent some time last night browsing the auction house between games of League of Legends and found some reasonably cheap items to go into this sort of build. The tricky thing with a lot of these legendary items that start with some good mods and can only roll 1 or 2 other things is the versions with relevant random rolls are actually really expensive. I wanted to get a set of Inna's pants for an extra 12% movement speed (apparently really important for an archon build) and it only has one random mod. Getting one with int was stupidly expensive. It is the pants with attack speed (and therefore awesome for the stunlock build too) so pretty much every high level wizard wants a set of them, despite it being the monk set. And with every wizard wanting them it isn't terribly surprising that pairs with int are expensive. I ended up buying a pretty cheap set that has armor instead. Similarly I bought a Tal Rasha amulet and a Triumvirate that had +gold find on them instead of useful stats. I figure gold find is better than something completely worthless like thorns or fire resistance and will eventually pay for itself! I also bought a fairly cheap socketed black weapon with crit damage on it. I made an 80% crit damage emerald and stuck it in the socket so my weapon alone is worth 124% crit damage. Yay pumping up my best stat!
My listed damage number has gone way up on the character sheet with the new items, but I know that's a bit of an illusion. Archon is pretty much a straight 3x multiplier from character sheet damage to actual DPS while the wicked wind spec was more like a 6x multiplier on a fight after ramping up. So I feel like this build is going to do less sustained damage, but is going to be significantly better at killing lots of things in a row. In other words, absolutely perfect for farming experience on a low monster power! I haven't tried it out yet, but it should be fun. I do feel like getting the Inna's pants will help with stun locking on the infernal machine bosses as well, though I may well need to spec for surviving instead of doing damage in order to use them.
I tweaked my spreadsheet a bit, because I want to see what stats are worth assuming a straight archon beam killing everything. Is crit damage still the best or do I have enough of it now? Generally because all the different damage stats stack multiplicatively you want a nice balance of them all. I went whole hog on crit damage (partly because my awesome crafted gloves and ring rolled it) and may need to double back and get some other stats now.
100 int = 21397
6% crit = 44215
50% crit damage = 33264
.1 base attack rate (switch from wand to dagger, though that has the issue that the dagger should have less base damage) = 31728
9% attack speed = 30286
4% damage to elites = 17084
8% damage as elemental = 27127
33 min damage = 7579
Ok, these numbers are all way bigger than they were for my other spec, even though it had such a high damage scaling factor. My current top stat is crit chance, which doesn't surprise me since I'm critting for +360% damage now. % damage as elemental still looks pretty good despite having 30% already.
My two worst damage items, according to d3up, are the two slots that have 12% movement speed on them. I guess that makes sense. Assuming I can play at a monster power where I murder everything then the ability to run to more things is going to be worth giving up damage and tankiness. I stuck two vitality gems in the pants so they're actually a fine tanky item compared to a lot of what I have. The Triumvirate looks to be as sick as I thought it might be. And that's one with gold find as the random mod!
I may still try to pick up a Zunimassa's Trail to replace my current boots. My boots are really good for tankiness with vit, armour, and resist all on them but maybe I'll be fine with doing more damage instead. It'll depend on how archon actually plays out.
Interestingly I plugged in what would happen if I replaced my worst ring with a Stone of Jordan and it was a 19% damage boost to elites and an 8% damage loss to everything else. So if I can find a sweet spot where I'm still killing trash trivially but could use some killing power on elites that might actually be a viable choice. It also chunks 8% off of my effective health. They were dirt cheap when I looked. I wonder if I'm missing something about them. Or maybe my second ring is just garbage and I should replace it with something better than both it and a SoJ?
Ok, so the ability doesn't do anything resembling what it says it does. It does have a game effect, though, and the question then becomes how good it is. My current build doesn't make terribly efficient use of it (my weapon comes with a massive elemental boost on it, and it's pretty much the only option for me to use with my budget) but would another build with a pure physical damage weapon (apparently these are called 'black weapons' because they have a black background) make it an awesome ability or just an ok one? What about other sources of this mod? What are they, and could they be worth building around?
Assuming I had a black weapon then the 8% on my storm crow hat should be a straight 8% damage boost. For comparison I have 2177 int, so in order to get a similar 8% damage boost I would need to add on 182 int. That's a pretty good boost. Most items can only roll 100 int in a single mod, so adding on almost twice that is good. And if I already had, say, 30% elemental damage then adding 8% more from storm crow would only be a 6% damage boost and would be the equivalent of 140 int. Still good, but going downhill. For comparison adding on 50% crit damage would be worth 278 int in my gear according to d3up. So, a good mod, but not the best option by any stretch.
At any rate, what are the level 60 elemental damage options? I am going to skip weapons which aren't black.
Helm
Storm Crow (wizard only) - 7-8%
Gloves
Frostburn Gauntlets - 5-6%, also 15-30% more damage from cold skills (but no stats of any kind)
Belt
Inna's Favor - 7-8%
Boots
Zunimassa's Trail - 7-8%
Amulet
Tal Rasha's Allegiance - 5-6%
Ring
Stone of Jordon - 5-6%, also a massive 20-30% damage to elites
Offhand
Triumvirate (wizard only) - 15-18%
That's actually a fair number of slots covered by this mod. Triumvirate in particular looks potentially insane. 18% more damage? That's worth more than 400 int. That it also comes with 150-169 int, 8-8.5% crit chance, a ton of physical damage and a random mod makes it all the sweeter. Frostburn seems terrible except maybe if you're only using blizzard. Stone of Jordon can't have any stats at all which makes it seem pretty odd, but I guess 30% damage to elites could be sweet. The witch doctor and wizard set pieces with this mod both seem fantastic. (Boots/amulet.) Assuming you don't want arcane power on crit (say, you're running archon) then dropping storm crow for a better hat would be reasonable. Getting 32% extra damage from 3 slots on top of their built in stats could be pretty awesome. So I think I'm going to keep an eye out for Zunimassa's Trail, Tal Rasha's Allegiance, and Triumvirate to see what the prices are like...
I spent some time last night browsing the auction house between games of League of Legends and found some reasonably cheap items to go into this sort of build. The tricky thing with a lot of these legendary items that start with some good mods and can only roll 1 or 2 other things is the versions with relevant random rolls are actually really expensive. I wanted to get a set of Inna's pants for an extra 12% movement speed (apparently really important for an archon build) and it only has one random mod. Getting one with int was stupidly expensive. It is the pants with attack speed (and therefore awesome for the stunlock build too) so pretty much every high level wizard wants a set of them, despite it being the monk set. And with every wizard wanting them it isn't terribly surprising that pairs with int are expensive. I ended up buying a pretty cheap set that has armor instead. Similarly I bought a Tal Rasha amulet and a Triumvirate that had +gold find on them instead of useful stats. I figure gold find is better than something completely worthless like thorns or fire resistance and will eventually pay for itself! I also bought a fairly cheap socketed black weapon with crit damage on it. I made an 80% crit damage emerald and stuck it in the socket so my weapon alone is worth 124% crit damage. Yay pumping up my best stat!
My listed damage number has gone way up on the character sheet with the new items, but I know that's a bit of an illusion. Archon is pretty much a straight 3x multiplier from character sheet damage to actual DPS while the wicked wind spec was more like a 6x multiplier on a fight after ramping up. So I feel like this build is going to do less sustained damage, but is going to be significantly better at killing lots of things in a row. In other words, absolutely perfect for farming experience on a low monster power! I haven't tried it out yet, but it should be fun. I do feel like getting the Inna's pants will help with stun locking on the infernal machine bosses as well, though I may well need to spec for surviving instead of doing damage in order to use them.
I tweaked my spreadsheet a bit, because I want to see what stats are worth assuming a straight archon beam killing everything. Is crit damage still the best or do I have enough of it now? Generally because all the different damage stats stack multiplicatively you want a nice balance of them all. I went whole hog on crit damage (partly because my awesome crafted gloves and ring rolled it) and may need to double back and get some other stats now.
100 int = 21397
6% crit = 44215
50% crit damage = 33264
.1 base attack rate (switch from wand to dagger, though that has the issue that the dagger should have less base damage) = 31728
9% attack speed = 30286
4% damage to elites = 17084
8% damage as elemental = 27127
33 min damage = 7579
Ok, these numbers are all way bigger than they were for my other spec, even though it had such a high damage scaling factor. My current top stat is crit chance, which doesn't surprise me since I'm critting for +360% damage now. % damage as elemental still looks pretty good despite having 30% already.
My two worst damage items, according to d3up, are the two slots that have 12% movement speed on them. I guess that makes sense. Assuming I can play at a monster power where I murder everything then the ability to run to more things is going to be worth giving up damage and tankiness. I stuck two vitality gems in the pants so they're actually a fine tanky item compared to a lot of what I have. The Triumvirate looks to be as sick as I thought it might be. And that's one with gold find as the random mod!
I may still try to pick up a Zunimassa's Trail to replace my current boots. My boots are really good for tankiness with vit, armour, and resist all on them but maybe I'll be fine with doing more damage instead. It'll depend on how archon actually plays out.
Interestingly I plugged in what would happen if I replaced my worst ring with a Stone of Jordan and it was a 19% damage boost to elites and an 8% damage loss to everything else. So if I can find a sweet spot where I'm still killing trash trivially but could use some killing power on elites that might actually be a viable choice. It also chunks 8% off of my effective health. They were dirt cheap when I looked. I wonder if I'm missing something about them. Or maybe my second ring is just garbage and I should replace it with something better than both it and a SoJ?
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Diablo III: Bonus Experience
On the weekend I picked up three rings with +35% bonus experience. I debated a bit about how much killing power I was willing to lose in order to get 70% more experience and was leaning towards all of it. 70% is a really big deal! It then turned out you can only wear one hellfire ring at a time (legendary items are unique equipped even though it doesn't say so in game) which made the debate a little moot. And now after reading some more I'm starting to wonder if the first one is even terribly good. You see, bonus experience stacks additively, not multiplicatively, and I already have an awful lot of bonus experience.
First, apparently at some point the Nephalem Valour buff got changed to include experience on top of gold find/magic find. (Looks like it was patch 1.0.4 when they added in paragon levels, which makes sense.) So with a 5 stack of the buff as my only source of bonus experience the ring would take me from 175% to 210% experience, or a gain of 20%.
Next up, the monster power boost. This last patch massively buffed the bonus experience gained for fighting on a harder difficulty level. I've been fighting on monster power 7 recently which gives 375% normal experience. Tack on the neph buff and I'm up to 450% experience. The hellfire ring on top of that brings me up to 485%, which is only a gain of 7.8%.
Now, apparently you can stick MF/GF/XP items on your follower and get 20% of the bonus as spillover from them. Sticking one of my three rings on my scoundrel friend has to be right. That's only a 7% additive bonus, which along with the MP7 buff and the neph buff is 457%. My own hellfire on top of that is 492%, or only 7.7%.
You can also get a socketed helmet for more bonus experience. My current hat doesn't have a socket, but what if it did? I could probably afford something like a 27% ruby, which brings my pre-ring number all the way up to 484%. Hellfire makes it 519%, which is only a 7.2% boost.
Now, don't get me wrong, 7.2% extra experience is still something. But it's not the massive 35% I thought I was looking at. I can totally imagine situations where a real ring would be better than a bad hellfire ring when fighting at MP7. Fortunately for me one of my three rings is actually insane. Randy pointed out an interesting stat website that breaks down your stats by item and it turns out it thinks my hellfire ring is my most damaging non-weapon slot item. It's more than twice as good as my other ring! And it has better defensive stats than my other ring. And it has an empty socket I haven't made use of! It doesn't have attack speed or crit chance which hurts my stun locking ability but I was able to play in MP7 with it so I can't be that big a deal.
Assume now that I want to efficiently farm for experience, not infernal machine keys. Getting more paragon levels to get more stats and more magic find is going to be pretty useful. Also assume I find a build with better initial damage so I can actually kill trash mobs. (The wicked wind spec can lock down and kill MP7 elite packs but it takes time to get going each fight. I know there are better initial damage specs like archon, meteor, blizzard, or maybe even disintegrate to play with.) What monster power level should I play on for optimal efficiency?
There are going to be two factors at play in this calculation. The first is the amount of time spent just walking around finding things to kill, or loading new games, or clearing out my inventory. The second is the ratio of monster health to experience earned. Raising the monster power level isn't really going to increase the downtime from doing a single run. (Well, you get a bigger magic find multiplier so I guess you'll spend a little more time dealing with items?) It is going to increase how long it takes to actually kill things. The formula for experience per time is then going to be X/(D+H*Y) where X is the experience multiplier, D is the downtime constant, H is the monster health multiplier, and Y is a constant based on how long it would take to kill things at MP0. I have no real idea how to estimate D and Y but the absolute size of them doesn't matter at all. What matters is the relative values of them. Estimating is even harder when I don't know what spec I'd be doing it in and have never played it! I feel like it should probably be well above half my time spent killing things? I'm going to pretend 30% downtime and see what shakes out?
Even with the hellfire ring this function maxes out at MP0. Ok, how much downtime do I need before a better MP level makes sense? Well, with D=.9 MP4 becomes the best. With D=.8 MP1 is the best. So, yeah... Unless all my time is spent running around looking for stuff to kill I should stick to the lowest level possible. Note that if your primary goal is finding keys then you actually are spending a lot of time just running around. And the key odds function increases much, much quicker than the experience function does. (Going from MP2 to MP4 will double your key odds but only gives me 24% more experience.)
The thing to point out here is that sometimes increasing monster health doesn't increase time to kill things. If I kill most everything on MP0 instantly then giving them all 50% more health probably doesn't slow me down much at all and the 10% experience bonus is going to be worth it. So realistically the 'optimal' choice is going to be finding a point where I can still trivially murder practically everything in my path. I feel like my gear is starting to get good, so I wouldn't be surprised if an archon or disintegrate build would be doing just that at something like MP2 or MP3. With my wicked wind spec giving all the monsters more health gave me enough time to ramp up my damage and get infinite resources back, which is another factor to keep in mind. I feel like with that spec I want to find the point where I can lock in a freeze, cast a bunch of spells for a bit, and watch everything explode. MP6 is probably right for that. But it's almost certainly going to be faster to use a different spec with no ramp-up time at a lower MP level. And my poor hand will love me for it!
The hellfire ring also gets relatively better at lower MP levels because it's adding in with a smaller MP bonus. Basically, it is going to add 35% of the base monster experience no matter how much health it actually has. So the more wimpy monsters you can plow through, the more experience the hellfire ring is going to add. So it feels like if you're playing on a low MP level then you really want to get a hellfire ring (and a ruby in your hat) but if you're playing on a high MP level then you probably just want whatever gives you the most stats. Or you want to get lucky and get a hellfire ring that happens to have a ton of good stats too.
First, apparently at some point the Nephalem Valour buff got changed to include experience on top of gold find/magic find. (Looks like it was patch 1.0.4 when they added in paragon levels, which makes sense.) So with a 5 stack of the buff as my only source of bonus experience the ring would take me from 175% to 210% experience, or a gain of 20%.
Next up, the monster power boost. This last patch massively buffed the bonus experience gained for fighting on a harder difficulty level. I've been fighting on monster power 7 recently which gives 375% normal experience. Tack on the neph buff and I'm up to 450% experience. The hellfire ring on top of that brings me up to 485%, which is only a gain of 7.8%.
Now, apparently you can stick MF/GF/XP items on your follower and get 20% of the bonus as spillover from them. Sticking one of my three rings on my scoundrel friend has to be right. That's only a 7% additive bonus, which along with the MP7 buff and the neph buff is 457%. My own hellfire on top of that is 492%, or only 7.7%.
You can also get a socketed helmet for more bonus experience. My current hat doesn't have a socket, but what if it did? I could probably afford something like a 27% ruby, which brings my pre-ring number all the way up to 484%. Hellfire makes it 519%, which is only a 7.2% boost.
Now, don't get me wrong, 7.2% extra experience is still something. But it's not the massive 35% I thought I was looking at. I can totally imagine situations where a real ring would be better than a bad hellfire ring when fighting at MP7. Fortunately for me one of my three rings is actually insane. Randy pointed out an interesting stat website that breaks down your stats by item and it turns out it thinks my hellfire ring is my most damaging non-weapon slot item. It's more than twice as good as my other ring! And it has better defensive stats than my other ring. And it has an empty socket I haven't made use of! It doesn't have attack speed or crit chance which hurts my stun locking ability but I was able to play in MP7 with it so I can't be that big a deal.
Assume now that I want to efficiently farm for experience, not infernal machine keys. Getting more paragon levels to get more stats and more magic find is going to be pretty useful. Also assume I find a build with better initial damage so I can actually kill trash mobs. (The wicked wind spec can lock down and kill MP7 elite packs but it takes time to get going each fight. I know there are better initial damage specs like archon, meteor, blizzard, or maybe even disintegrate to play with.) What monster power level should I play on for optimal efficiency?
There are going to be two factors at play in this calculation. The first is the amount of time spent just walking around finding things to kill, or loading new games, or clearing out my inventory. The second is the ratio of monster health to experience earned. Raising the monster power level isn't really going to increase the downtime from doing a single run. (Well, you get a bigger magic find multiplier so I guess you'll spend a little more time dealing with items?) It is going to increase how long it takes to actually kill things. The formula for experience per time is then going to be X/(D+H*Y) where X is the experience multiplier, D is the downtime constant, H is the monster health multiplier, and Y is a constant based on how long it would take to kill things at MP0. I have no real idea how to estimate D and Y but the absolute size of them doesn't matter at all. What matters is the relative values of them. Estimating is even harder when I don't know what spec I'd be doing it in and have never played it! I feel like it should probably be well above half my time spent killing things? I'm going to pretend 30% downtime and see what shakes out?
Even with the hellfire ring this function maxes out at MP0. Ok, how much downtime do I need before a better MP level makes sense? Well, with D=.9 MP4 becomes the best. With D=.8 MP1 is the best. So, yeah... Unless all my time is spent running around looking for stuff to kill I should stick to the lowest level possible. Note that if your primary goal is finding keys then you actually are spending a lot of time just running around. And the key odds function increases much, much quicker than the experience function does. (Going from MP2 to MP4 will double your key odds but only gives me 24% more experience.)
The thing to point out here is that sometimes increasing monster health doesn't increase time to kill things. If I kill most everything on MP0 instantly then giving them all 50% more health probably doesn't slow me down much at all and the 10% experience bonus is going to be worth it. So realistically the 'optimal' choice is going to be finding a point where I can still trivially murder practically everything in my path. I feel like my gear is starting to get good, so I wouldn't be surprised if an archon or disintegrate build would be doing just that at something like MP2 or MP3. With my wicked wind spec giving all the monsters more health gave me enough time to ramp up my damage and get infinite resources back, which is another factor to keep in mind. I feel like with that spec I want to find the point where I can lock in a freeze, cast a bunch of spells for a bit, and watch everything explode. MP6 is probably right for that. But it's almost certainly going to be faster to use a different spec with no ramp-up time at a lower MP level. And my poor hand will love me for it!
The hellfire ring also gets relatively better at lower MP levels because it's adding in with a smaller MP bonus. Basically, it is going to add 35% of the base monster experience no matter how much health it actually has. So the more wimpy monsters you can plow through, the more experience the hellfire ring is going to add. So it feels like if you're playing on a low MP level then you really want to get a hellfire ring (and a ruby in your hat) but if you're playing on a high MP level then you probably just want whatever gives you the most stats. Or you want to get lucky and get a hellfire ring that happens to have a ton of good stats too.
Monday, March 04, 2013
Blood Bowl League Odds
We're down to the final two weeks in our Blood Bowl league, where the top 3 in each division will advance to the playoffs. Finishing in the first seed is worth a bye which will heal your guys and earn some SPP so it's pretty clutch to get all the way to first, but it's still important to hit the top 3. My division currently has 4 teams mathematically eliminated and 4 teams clumped up near the top. 4-0-1, 4-1, 4-1, 3-1-1. The 4-0-1 team still has to play both of the 4-1 teams in the last two weeks. The draw came between the 4-0-1 and 3-1-1 teams. And the 4-1, 4-1, 3-1-1 form a cycle where each beat one of the others. I was planning on looking at all the different ways the last 2 weeks could play out when I remembered the Sports Club Stats website. It simulates the games in the regular season of the NHL (and many other leagues) to paint a picture of who's likely to be making the playoffs. It also has a feature allowing you to upload your own rec league so I decided to look into creating a league on there to see if it could handle our league. It turned out to be fairly easy to do (I had to type out all the games for every week and include the scores for finished games) but I actually like doing repetitive data entry and it didn't take very long.
The results are here.
I believe the simulator places a fairly large emphasis on prior goal differential being a predictor of future results. He's been running the simulator for many years so I imagine this predicting method works well for real sports. There's been some debate about how reasonable it is for Blood Bowl. In hockey if you get ahead by one goal early you can't reasonably expect to just hold onto the puck for the rest of the game. In Blood Bowl it can happen, and can be the right play. In my game against Randy I went up 1-0 in the first half, got the ball in the second half, and refused to move. My dwarves just stood in a big pile punching any elf that dared try to get at the ball. If I'd tried to score then there would have been a reasonable chance at winning 2-0 or 2-1, but it would have opened up an opportunity to tie 1-1 or maybe even lose 2-1 since elves can do all sorts of crazy things. I took my guaranteed win (I think I took a shot to score at the end of the half and failed) and only added 1 to my goal differential. Is that actually worse than when Robb ran up the score and won 4-0? I don't know. My team doesn't have the explosive ability to score 4 times and his does, so maybe it is reasonable.
At any rate, my group (group 2) has the 4 teams sitting between 72 and 80% chance of making the playoffs. The simulator pegs the odds of the 3-1-1 team losing another game at 2.3%. That seems really low, and is likely a result of the goal differential thing. His opponents are a combined 3-7 with a goal differential of -10 so maybe that makes sense? I did enter the odds of a tie at 25% which seems to be playing out in his numbers. Maybe that number is too high? Group 2 has only had 1 tie in 20 games. On the other hand group 1 has 5 ties in 20 games. Oh, small numbers of dice.
Despite currently having the second most points in group 2 I am currently the slight favourite to make the playoffs and to finish first. I have the advantage of still playing Sceadeau who is the only person ahead of me. If I win both of my games I'm guaranteed to finish first. Sceadeau is in the same boat. Win out and come first. On the other hand Sceadeau has two 'hard' games on the schedule since he has to play both the 4-1 teams. Lose them both and he's in a world of trouble. The other 4-1 team is really hoping we draw. I think that's his best chance at the first seed. Win out, and have us draw. Otherwise he needs to win out while Sceadeau beats me, or win out which I beat Sceadeau and then lose to a currently 1-4 team. All quite plausible, and he does have a 26% chance of finishing first.
The other division is more open. One team is eliminated. One team is guaranteed to make the playoffs and is 93% to finish first. Even if he loses both of his games he still has a good chance of finishing first. The other 6 teams all have paths to the playoffs and there's lots of interplay between them still. This week alone has current #2 in points against #3, #4 against #7, and #5 against #6. I think the large number of draws to date is what's causing the clumping and the craziness. Most everyone there wants to win while seeing everyone else tie again.
As far as my team is concerned winning this week would be awesome, but a tie is still really good. I'm guaranteed in the playoffs with a tie this week and a win next week. A draw will damage my chances of coming first and getting that precious bye... But I like playing games so maybe I don't even want a bye? We're playing cross groups for the first round of the playoffs so I'd get to play someone I haven't played yet. Sceadeau is playing Khemri and only has one guy with an agility above 2. I need to aggressively target that guy and hope he doesn't regenerate! Alternatively it's tempting to spend some money on petty cash in order to drug test his 'passers'. I don't want him to get a second guy who can handle the ball, or a first guy who can really handle the ball!
The results are here.
I believe the simulator places a fairly large emphasis on prior goal differential being a predictor of future results. He's been running the simulator for many years so I imagine this predicting method works well for real sports. There's been some debate about how reasonable it is for Blood Bowl. In hockey if you get ahead by one goal early you can't reasonably expect to just hold onto the puck for the rest of the game. In Blood Bowl it can happen, and can be the right play. In my game against Randy I went up 1-0 in the first half, got the ball in the second half, and refused to move. My dwarves just stood in a big pile punching any elf that dared try to get at the ball. If I'd tried to score then there would have been a reasonable chance at winning 2-0 or 2-1, but it would have opened up an opportunity to tie 1-1 or maybe even lose 2-1 since elves can do all sorts of crazy things. I took my guaranteed win (I think I took a shot to score at the end of the half and failed) and only added 1 to my goal differential. Is that actually worse than when Robb ran up the score and won 4-0? I don't know. My team doesn't have the explosive ability to score 4 times and his does, so maybe it is reasonable.
At any rate, my group (group 2) has the 4 teams sitting between 72 and 80% chance of making the playoffs. The simulator pegs the odds of the 3-1-1 team losing another game at 2.3%. That seems really low, and is likely a result of the goal differential thing. His opponents are a combined 3-7 with a goal differential of -10 so maybe that makes sense? I did enter the odds of a tie at 25% which seems to be playing out in his numbers. Maybe that number is too high? Group 2 has only had 1 tie in 20 games. On the other hand group 1 has 5 ties in 20 games. Oh, small numbers of dice.
Despite currently having the second most points in group 2 I am currently the slight favourite to make the playoffs and to finish first. I have the advantage of still playing Sceadeau who is the only person ahead of me. If I win both of my games I'm guaranteed to finish first. Sceadeau is in the same boat. Win out and come first. On the other hand Sceadeau has two 'hard' games on the schedule since he has to play both the 4-1 teams. Lose them both and he's in a world of trouble. The other 4-1 team is really hoping we draw. I think that's his best chance at the first seed. Win out, and have us draw. Otherwise he needs to win out while Sceadeau beats me, or win out which I beat Sceadeau and then lose to a currently 1-4 team. All quite plausible, and he does have a 26% chance of finishing first.
The other division is more open. One team is eliminated. One team is guaranteed to make the playoffs and is 93% to finish first. Even if he loses both of his games he still has a good chance of finishing first. The other 6 teams all have paths to the playoffs and there's lots of interplay between them still. This week alone has current #2 in points against #3, #4 against #7, and #5 against #6. I think the large number of draws to date is what's causing the clumping and the craziness. Most everyone there wants to win while seeing everyone else tie again.
As far as my team is concerned winning this week would be awesome, but a tie is still really good. I'm guaranteed in the playoffs with a tie this week and a win next week. A draw will damage my chances of coming first and getting that precious bye... But I like playing games so maybe I don't even want a bye? We're playing cross groups for the first round of the playoffs so I'd get to play someone I haven't played yet. Sceadeau is playing Khemri and only has one guy with an agility above 2. I need to aggressively target that guy and hope he doesn't regenerate! Alternatively it's tempting to spend some money on petty cash in order to drug test his 'passers'. I don't want him to get a second guy who can handle the ball, or a first guy who can really handle the ball!
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Diablo III: The Infernal Machine Event
Back in patch 1.0.5 Blizzard added in a new end game event to Diablo III. They added four new purple elites to the game, one in each act, which each drop a different bind on account item. Collect the 3 keys from the first 3 acts and a crafting recipe from Act IV and you can build yourself an infernal machine item which is also bind on account. Then going forward you just need the three keys again to make another one (meaning you can skip farming Act IV). Each of these items drops at X*10% where X is your monster power level, and only drop if you already have 5 stacks of the Nephalim valour buff.
Once you get a bunch of these infernal machines the real fun starts. Using an infernal machine opens a portal to a new zone which contains a new boss fight. There are three different boss fights beyond the portals and each one drops a different bind on account crafting item, again with a X*10% chance of a drop in any given kill. Collect all three of these items, buy a recipe for 2 million gold, and you can craft up a bind on account ring. These rings are bind on account and have 170-200 of a stat (your choice when you make it), a chance to shoot a fireball, 35% bonus experience gained, and 4 random ring mods. Oh, and no level requirement... Hello, alts!
Yesterday Randy put a little group together to try out the boss fights. Sceadeau, Tom, and I went along, though Sceadeau and I haven't played enough to have a lot of machines to use so we mostly just leeched off the items. I mean, we did help win the fights, don't get me wrong. But we didn't pull our key grinding weight. We did the first set at monster power 6, found it was pretty easy, and went up to 7. The fights on 7 took longer and were sketchier (but with only 1 wipe in 13 tries it was still pretty easy). Maybe we should have gone up to 8 for the better drop chance? On the other hand if we couldn't win on 8 it would have been really bad since we'd lose 4 shots at 70% (2.8 items) while hoping to earn 4*3*.1 = 1.2 items. I would have tried, as I'm always willing to try crazy things, but it may not have made sense. And since they weren't my machines it really wouldn't have been my place to make that call.
At any rate, we used 15 machines, did 16 fights, and I got the pieces to make 3 rings. I couldn't afford the 2 million for the recipe right away, but I ended up selling some gems I had lying around to get there. (And then finally sold a set belt I'd found for 6.8M so I'm flush with cash now!) But I'm in a bit of a quandry. My current build relies almost exclusively on having high amounts of attack speed and crit chance to function properly. My rings give me 7% of my 35% crit chance and 13% of my 44% attack speed. Swapping those out for other rings, even ones that give me 70% more experience, are going to make me worse. Perhaps so much worse that I can't function properly in this spec? On the other hand, getting 170-200 int is going to give a decent boost to my damage so maybe it'll be ok if I lose some of my stunlock? And if I have to start soloing at a lower MP level but with 70% more experience gained I bet it will be ok. Maybe I should keep my better stunlocking rings for the next time I run infernal machine bosses? Or maybe I can just get lucky and roll up some +xp rings with attack speed and crit! Alternatively I could just find a new spec entirely. I do miss shooting laser beams at people...
Well, what did I get on my rings?
ring 1 - int/vit, life on hit, crit damage, socket
ring 2 - str, vit, dex/vit, socket
ring 3 - damage, dex, cold resist, armour
No attack speed, no crit chance at all. The first ring seems really good, though. Really, really good. It rolled pretty high on the int, life on hit, and crit damage rolls and the socket is a reasonable bonus. The second ring has too many wasted stats. I don't need strength or dexterity on my ring. I'll give it to my follower for sure, and it'll be awesome on an alt. The third ring also has two wasted stats but I do need more defenses so getting armour isn't terrible.
I may research some other builds that can use two rings, but for now I think I'm going to try replacing my worst ring with ring 1 and sticking the other two on my follower and see how that works out. I can try to make up for the lost attack speed by using some of my newfound cashola on a better amulet or maybe buy a witching hour belt.
EDIT: Turns out they're unique equipped, so I will definitely just use ring 1 no matter what I end up doing, and giving just one of them to my follower. That makes things easier!
Once you get a bunch of these infernal machines the real fun starts. Using an infernal machine opens a portal to a new zone which contains a new boss fight. There are three different boss fights beyond the portals and each one drops a different bind on account crafting item, again with a X*10% chance of a drop in any given kill. Collect all three of these items, buy a recipe for 2 million gold, and you can craft up a bind on account ring. These rings are bind on account and have 170-200 of a stat (your choice when you make it), a chance to shoot a fireball, 35% bonus experience gained, and 4 random ring mods. Oh, and no level requirement... Hello, alts!
Yesterday Randy put a little group together to try out the boss fights. Sceadeau, Tom, and I went along, though Sceadeau and I haven't played enough to have a lot of machines to use so we mostly just leeched off the items. I mean, we did help win the fights, don't get me wrong. But we didn't pull our key grinding weight. We did the first set at monster power 6, found it was pretty easy, and went up to 7. The fights on 7 took longer and were sketchier (but with only 1 wipe in 13 tries it was still pretty easy). Maybe we should have gone up to 8 for the better drop chance? On the other hand if we couldn't win on 8 it would have been really bad since we'd lose 4 shots at 70% (2.8 items) while hoping to earn 4*3*.1 = 1.2 items. I would have tried, as I'm always willing to try crazy things, but it may not have made sense. And since they weren't my machines it really wouldn't have been my place to make that call.
At any rate, we used 15 machines, did 16 fights, and I got the pieces to make 3 rings. I couldn't afford the 2 million for the recipe right away, but I ended up selling some gems I had lying around to get there. (And then finally sold a set belt I'd found for 6.8M so I'm flush with cash now!) But I'm in a bit of a quandry. My current build relies almost exclusively on having high amounts of attack speed and crit chance to function properly. My rings give me 7% of my 35% crit chance and 13% of my 44% attack speed. Swapping those out for other rings, even ones that give me 70% more experience, are going to make me worse. Perhaps so much worse that I can't function properly in this spec? On the other hand, getting 170-200 int is going to give a decent boost to my damage so maybe it'll be ok if I lose some of my stunlock? And if I have to start soloing at a lower MP level but with 70% more experience gained I bet it will be ok. Maybe I should keep my better stunlocking rings for the next time I run infernal machine bosses? Or maybe I can just get lucky and roll up some +xp rings with attack speed and crit! Alternatively I could just find a new spec entirely. I do miss shooting laser beams at people...
Well, what did I get on my rings?
ring 1 - int/vit, life on hit, crit damage, socket
ring 2 - str, vit, dex/vit, socket
ring 3 - damage, dex, cold resist, armour
No attack speed, no crit chance at all. The first ring seems really good, though. Really, really good. It rolled pretty high on the int, life on hit, and crit damage rolls and the socket is a reasonable bonus. The second ring has too many wasted stats. I don't need strength or dexterity on my ring. I'll give it to my follower for sure, and it'll be awesome on an alt. The third ring also has two wasted stats but I do need more defenses so getting armour isn't terrible.
I may research some other builds that can use two rings, but for now I think I'm going to try replacing my worst ring with ring 1 and sticking the other two on my follower and see how that works out. I can try to make up for the lost attack speed by using some of my newfound cashola on a better amulet or maybe buy a witching hour belt.
EDIT: Turns out they're unique equipped, so I will definitely just use ring 1 no matter what I end up doing, and giving just one of them to my follower. That makes things easier!
Friday, March 01, 2013
Diablo III: More Numbers!
Both Snuggles and Sky have commented recently with mechanic based information for Diablo III that is pretty informative. My new build has been working out spectacularly and I want to know more about how things work so I know where the best places to invest money would be in order to get more powerful. Should I be saving up for a socketed weapon? A set source? Should I just be crafting more gloves/bracers/shoulders? I don't really know how things work so it's really hard to accurately answer those questions. I've read some guides and such so I know what other people think I should do, but I hate listening to just other people. I want to understand things myself so I can make decisions!
First off, proc rates on things. Snuggles found a post from a guy who did a lot of testing on the 'life on hit' mechanic. It turns out the amount of life you gain on hit isn't what is listed on your gear. Instead every skill in the game has a 'proc coefficient' number (listed in this spreadsheet) which determines what ratio of your 'life on hit' you actually get. So while my gear says hits add 893 life in actually wicked wind is only adding 112 life per hit because it has a .125 pc. It works similarly with the critical mass passive which makes crits knock a second off of all my cooldowns. Apparently some people on the forums have been doing some testing and think the chance is actually twice the pc here. I don't know why, and people are still testing. But for now I'm willing to assume that a quarter of my wicked wind crits will reduce my cooldowns by 1 second. The other spells I'm using are storm armor/shocking aspect which has a 0 pc, diamond skin/diamond shards which has a .167 pc, and explosive blast/chain reaction which has a .111 pc.
Ok, but what counts as a hit? Chain reaction is easy. It pulses for damage three times, and therefore is 3 hits for one spell cast. Each hit has a .111 pc, so every time I hit the chain reaction button I heal for 300 life per enemy near me and do 291% damage. (On a time delay, but you can stack up a bunch of them if the cooldown refreshes often enough.) Diamond shards is also easy. It has a similar delay (when the shield runs out or when you cast it again) and does damage to everyone around me once for 150 life and 210% damage. This is worse than chain reaction, except it also puts up an 11k shield and has no resource cost. I also think it's off the GCD? And I can cast it while frozen which is nice when I screw up. Wicked wind, on the other hand, is super complicated. You cast it and it spins around for 6 seconds. How many times it ticks over those 6 seconds depends on your attack speed according to the formula/chart in this thread. I currently have 2.187 attack speed, which means I get 28 ticks per cast. This means each cast of wicked wind heals me for 3126 per enemy hit. It also does 252% damage which means it does less damage than explosive blast. (And has a smaller area of effect.)
All those extra ticks also mean big things for my 'chance on crit' effects. I have a 31% crit chance and have 28 arcane power on crit on my gear. This also uses the same pc ratio as life on hit. This means chain reaction, in the long run, will return 3*.111*.31*28 = 2.89 arcane power per enemy it hits. It costs 20 arcane power, so I can't spam this. Diamond shards gives .167*.31*28 = 1.45 arcane power, on average, per enemy it hits. Diamond shards is completely free. Wicked wind gives 28*.125*.31*28 = 30 arcane power, on average, per enemy it hits. It costs 35 arcane power. So against a single target I'll run myself out of arcane power by spamming wicked wind, but if you add in a second enemy I'll have infinite arcane power in a very short amount of time. In practice I find I have infinite arcane power all of the time except when something goes wrong. If the enemies get out of stunlock for an instant and blink away, or if I'm in a party and they knock the enemies out of my winds it can set me back. Or if I just hit the wrong buttons because I'm bad or my hand cramps up or something. I'm wondering if I can afford to drop the 8 arcane power on crit from my source and buy a more powerful one. I may test it out at some point. I know if I get more attack speed and crit I shouldn't need all 3 pieces, but I'm still pretty low on both values. The guides have recommended getting up to 36 ticks per wind as a baseline and I only have 28.
As far as cooldowns go, dividing each of the above numbers by 14 should give me the number of cooldown seconds shaved off per cast. Which means chain reaction should take off .2 seconds per cast per enemy, diamond shards should take off .1 seconds per cast per enemy, and wicked wind should cut 2.1 seconds per cast per enemy. My spells have cooldowns of 10.2 seconds (frost nova), 12.75 seconds (diamond shards), and 5.1 seconds (chain reaction). With full diminishing returns a monster will break out of frost nova in 1.05 seconds, which means I need to shave off 9.2 seconds from the cooldown every second in order to maintain stun lock. With only 2.187 attack speed this means every second spell needs to be worth 9 seconds of cooldown. Well, except I think diamond shards is off the GCD so I can just spam it when the cooldown refreshes. And by looking at the guide closer it claims explosive blast is also off the GCD, so I can spam it too. (I just mash all the buttons constantly!) This isn't enough reduction to stun lock one monster, which is definitely something I've noticed. I can keep a single elite mostly locked down but if he has teleport he'll often get away which is a big pain. Three enemies is absolute gold since a single wicked wind is then worth 6.3 seconds of reduction. Note the initial frost nova is a full 3 second stun so I have a ton of time to get winds up and ticking! Also reality is discrete, not continuous, so I don't get .1 second of reduction per diamond shard. Mostly I get nothing but sometimes I get a full second off.
Ok, fine, so I can see that getting some more crit chance will up my cooldown reduction more, and will give me more arcane power. Upping my attack speed will let me both cast more spells and get way more life, arcane power, and cooldown reduction. Dropping some arcane power on crit is probably a fine thing to do, especially if I get more attack speed or crit chance. But given that I can mostly stun lock stuff as is, and I can survive most single hits, how can I do more damage?
Sky pointed out that the item mod 'adds X% to {elemental} damage' works in ways I didn't expect. I have a Storm Crow hat with 'adds 8% to lightning damage' and my thinking was that it would increase any lightning damage I did by 8%. Storm armor does lightning damage so this seems like a small boost. Not so! It turns out it adds 8% extra damage (from your physical damage) to every attack you do! It won't even be lightning damage if the spell has a different damage type. So my wicked wind (which does arcane damage) will be getting a damage buff from the hat. As best I can tell I have 443 physical damage on my gear and 408 magical damage on my gear. This means about 52% of my damage is eligible for this bonus, which makes this stat on my hat a 4.16% damage boost. That's pretty hot! The issue here is most of the damage on my weapon is +fire damage, and that's by design of the weapon. Theoretically I could get a different weapon to make this mod better, but that would drastically reduce my attack speed and that just seems wrong. Stunlock first, kill things later!
One of the things I like to do to work out how good stats are is build a spreadsheet and then vary the numbers a little to see what the incremental worth of a stat is going to be. You have to build assumptions as far as what you expect your rotation to be, and I think I'm going to assume 2 wicked winds for every frost nova with the other two damage spells being spammed on average based on expected crits. I'm also going to assume 100ms between casts even when stuff is cooled down. I'm really not good enough to keep that up but it should at least give a decent relative ranking of the stats. I am considering using my gaming keyboard to macro all of the spammy spells onto one button to save my poor left hand which would probably help bring things more in line with this mythical expected value.
Man, I must say, some of these numbers in my sheet get pretty absurd. A WW+WW+FN rotation with 1 target does 175k DPS, but the mob gets to run around some. A WW+FN rotation with 3 targets does 237k DPS per target and locks them all down forever. If somehow you got 20 mobs to stand around me I'd be looking at doing 18M DPS per target! (Ok, that's right insane, since the sheet now assumes I can cast chain reaction 191 times in a little over a second. This probably means the way I'm dealing with cooldown reduction from crits is wonky for big numbers.) Not like 20 mobs would live very long regardless.
Anyway, here's the DPS gain for the WW+WW+FN case on a single dude:
100 Int = 10626
6% crit = 20007
50% crit damage = 27236
3 base attacks per second (maxxed chantodo) = 2322
9% attack speed = 13462
4% damage to elites = 7806
8% damage as elemental = 8113
33 min damage = 4080
I tried to use what seemed like the max possible roll for a stat on a secondary item like a ring. It turns out the stuff I've been trying to keep an eye for is the best stuff. Int does have the advantage of also being damage reduction. The %damage as elemental stuff is interesting for sure, but it doesn't look like something I need to be targeting. The problem is definitely with my weapon, as the same 8% damage as elemental would be worth around 23k if my weapon did purely physical damage. Chantodo maxxes out at a base of 1.65 attacks per second and has to come with fire damage. The fastest other weapon is 1.5 from a rare dagger. Daggers can't roll arcane power on crit, so there are two big problems to deal with if I switched weapons: needing more attack speed to maintain the same number of wicked wind ticks, and needing to keep arcane power on crit stats on my hat and offhand. It's not inconceivable (Triumvirate is a ludicrous offhand for that plan since it can add 18% to elemental damage) but not really in my budget right now. I can't afford great pieces for one gear set; there's no reason to go branching out into a second one.
It's also important to point out that the DPS numbers here are only for once a fight gets rolling and I have enough wicked winds spinning to grant enough arcane power to keep casting all this stuff. It actually makes me pretty terrible at fighting regular easy guys. But wow, when I'm able to teleport onto a group of champions and go to town on them does it ever feel good.
As far as where I should go with my gear, I think short term goals are going to be:
First off, proc rates on things. Snuggles found a post from a guy who did a lot of testing on the 'life on hit' mechanic. It turns out the amount of life you gain on hit isn't what is listed on your gear. Instead every skill in the game has a 'proc coefficient' number (listed in this spreadsheet) which determines what ratio of your 'life on hit' you actually get. So while my gear says hits add 893 life in actually wicked wind is only adding 112 life per hit because it has a .125 pc. It works similarly with the critical mass passive which makes crits knock a second off of all my cooldowns. Apparently some people on the forums have been doing some testing and think the chance is actually twice the pc here. I don't know why, and people are still testing. But for now I'm willing to assume that a quarter of my wicked wind crits will reduce my cooldowns by 1 second. The other spells I'm using are storm armor/shocking aspect which has a 0 pc, diamond skin/diamond shards which has a .167 pc, and explosive blast/chain reaction which has a .111 pc.
Ok, but what counts as a hit? Chain reaction is easy. It pulses for damage three times, and therefore is 3 hits for one spell cast. Each hit has a .111 pc, so every time I hit the chain reaction button I heal for 300 life per enemy near me and do 291% damage. (On a time delay, but you can stack up a bunch of them if the cooldown refreshes often enough.) Diamond shards is also easy. It has a similar delay (when the shield runs out or when you cast it again) and does damage to everyone around me once for 150 life and 210% damage. This is worse than chain reaction, except it also puts up an 11k shield and has no resource cost. I also think it's off the GCD? And I can cast it while frozen which is nice when I screw up. Wicked wind, on the other hand, is super complicated. You cast it and it spins around for 6 seconds. How many times it ticks over those 6 seconds depends on your attack speed according to the formula/chart in this thread. I currently have 2.187 attack speed, which means I get 28 ticks per cast. This means each cast of wicked wind heals me for 3126 per enemy hit. It also does 252% damage which means it does less damage than explosive blast. (And has a smaller area of effect.)
All those extra ticks also mean big things for my 'chance on crit' effects. I have a 31% crit chance and have 28 arcane power on crit on my gear. This also uses the same pc ratio as life on hit. This means chain reaction, in the long run, will return 3*.111*.31*28 = 2.89 arcane power per enemy it hits. It costs 20 arcane power, so I can't spam this. Diamond shards gives .167*.31*28 = 1.45 arcane power, on average, per enemy it hits. Diamond shards is completely free. Wicked wind gives 28*.125*.31*28 = 30 arcane power, on average, per enemy it hits. It costs 35 arcane power. So against a single target I'll run myself out of arcane power by spamming wicked wind, but if you add in a second enemy I'll have infinite arcane power in a very short amount of time. In practice I find I have infinite arcane power all of the time except when something goes wrong. If the enemies get out of stunlock for an instant and blink away, or if I'm in a party and they knock the enemies out of my winds it can set me back. Or if I just hit the wrong buttons because I'm bad or my hand cramps up or something. I'm wondering if I can afford to drop the 8 arcane power on crit from my source and buy a more powerful one. I may test it out at some point. I know if I get more attack speed and crit I shouldn't need all 3 pieces, but I'm still pretty low on both values. The guides have recommended getting up to 36 ticks per wind as a baseline and I only have 28.
As far as cooldowns go, dividing each of the above numbers by 14 should give me the number of cooldown seconds shaved off per cast. Which means chain reaction should take off .2 seconds per cast per enemy, diamond shards should take off .1 seconds per cast per enemy, and wicked wind should cut 2.1 seconds per cast per enemy. My spells have cooldowns of 10.2 seconds (frost nova), 12.75 seconds (diamond shards), and 5.1 seconds (chain reaction). With full diminishing returns a monster will break out of frost nova in 1.05 seconds, which means I need to shave off 9.2 seconds from the cooldown every second in order to maintain stun lock. With only 2.187 attack speed this means every second spell needs to be worth 9 seconds of cooldown. Well, except I think diamond shards is off the GCD so I can just spam it when the cooldown refreshes. And by looking at the guide closer it claims explosive blast is also off the GCD, so I can spam it too. (I just mash all the buttons constantly!) This isn't enough reduction to stun lock one monster, which is definitely something I've noticed. I can keep a single elite mostly locked down but if he has teleport he'll often get away which is a big pain. Three enemies is absolute gold since a single wicked wind is then worth 6.3 seconds of reduction. Note the initial frost nova is a full 3 second stun so I have a ton of time to get winds up and ticking! Also reality is discrete, not continuous, so I don't get .1 second of reduction per diamond shard. Mostly I get nothing but sometimes I get a full second off.
Ok, fine, so I can see that getting some more crit chance will up my cooldown reduction more, and will give me more arcane power. Upping my attack speed will let me both cast more spells and get way more life, arcane power, and cooldown reduction. Dropping some arcane power on crit is probably a fine thing to do, especially if I get more attack speed or crit chance. But given that I can mostly stun lock stuff as is, and I can survive most single hits, how can I do more damage?
Sky pointed out that the item mod 'adds X% to {elemental} damage' works in ways I didn't expect. I have a Storm Crow hat with 'adds 8% to lightning damage' and my thinking was that it would increase any lightning damage I did by 8%. Storm armor does lightning damage so this seems like a small boost. Not so! It turns out it adds 8% extra damage (from your physical damage) to every attack you do! It won't even be lightning damage if the spell has a different damage type. So my wicked wind (which does arcane damage) will be getting a damage buff from the hat. As best I can tell I have 443 physical damage on my gear and 408 magical damage on my gear. This means about 52% of my damage is eligible for this bonus, which makes this stat on my hat a 4.16% damage boost. That's pretty hot! The issue here is most of the damage on my weapon is +fire damage, and that's by design of the weapon. Theoretically I could get a different weapon to make this mod better, but that would drastically reduce my attack speed and that just seems wrong. Stunlock first, kill things later!
One of the things I like to do to work out how good stats are is build a spreadsheet and then vary the numbers a little to see what the incremental worth of a stat is going to be. You have to build assumptions as far as what you expect your rotation to be, and I think I'm going to assume 2 wicked winds for every frost nova with the other two damage spells being spammed on average based on expected crits. I'm also going to assume 100ms between casts even when stuff is cooled down. I'm really not good enough to keep that up but it should at least give a decent relative ranking of the stats. I am considering using my gaming keyboard to macro all of the spammy spells onto one button to save my poor left hand which would probably help bring things more in line with this mythical expected value.
Man, I must say, some of these numbers in my sheet get pretty absurd. A WW+WW+FN rotation with 1 target does 175k DPS, but the mob gets to run around some. A WW+FN rotation with 3 targets does 237k DPS per target and locks them all down forever. If somehow you got 20 mobs to stand around me I'd be looking at doing 18M DPS per target! (Ok, that's right insane, since the sheet now assumes I can cast chain reaction 191 times in a little over a second. This probably means the way I'm dealing with cooldown reduction from crits is wonky for big numbers.) Not like 20 mobs would live very long regardless.
Anyway, here's the DPS gain for the WW+WW+FN case on a single dude:
100 Int = 10626
6% crit = 20007
50% crit damage = 27236
3 base attacks per second (maxxed chantodo) = 2322
9% attack speed = 13462
4% damage to elites = 7806
8% damage as elemental = 8113
33 min damage = 4080
I tried to use what seemed like the max possible roll for a stat on a secondary item like a ring. It turns out the stuff I've been trying to keep an eye for is the best stuff. Int does have the advantage of also being damage reduction. The %damage as elemental stuff is interesting for sure, but it doesn't look like something I need to be targeting. The problem is definitely with my weapon, as the same 8% damage as elemental would be worth around 23k if my weapon did purely physical damage. Chantodo maxxes out at a base of 1.65 attacks per second and has to come with fire damage. The fastest other weapon is 1.5 from a rare dagger. Daggers can't roll arcane power on crit, so there are two big problems to deal with if I switched weapons: needing more attack speed to maintain the same number of wicked wind ticks, and needing to keep arcane power on crit stats on my hat and offhand. It's not inconceivable (Triumvirate is a ludicrous offhand for that plan since it can add 18% to elemental damage) but not really in my budget right now. I can't afford great pieces for one gear set; there's no reason to go branching out into a second one.
It's also important to point out that the DPS numbers here are only for once a fight gets rolling and I have enough wicked winds spinning to grant enough arcane power to keep casting all this stuff. It actually makes me pretty terrible at fighting regular easy guys. But wow, when I'm able to teleport onto a group of champions and go to town on them does it ever feel good.
As far as where I should go with my gear, I think short term goals are going to be:
- Get enough attack speed to reach the next wicked wind tick breakpoint. That's an extra 8% on top of what I already have, but my offhand currently has none on it.
- Try subbing out one of my sources of arcane power on crit. Like, say, my offhand. It only has 8 while my other two have 10 each.
- Putting those two together, the Chantodo's Force offhand has a set bonus worth 130 int and 7% damage reduction from elites. It comes with damage, int, attack speed, max arcane power, crit chance, an irrelevant wizard spell modifier, and one random mod. I've been trying to buy one with the arcane power on crit random mod but they're all really expensive. It also rolls with a minimum of 8% attack speed, which seems just perfect for the first point. So I think looking for a cheap one with a garbage random mod instead of a perfect random mod could be fantastic.
- I don't have any bonus crit damage at all, and it looks like my best damage stat right now. So, investing in something that has it might make a lot of sense. Amulet/ring/gloves are the options for rare slots. Maybe I should try to make some of the crafted stamina gloves and see what comes out. All of my amulet/ring/gloves currently have attack speed and crit chance on them and two already have life on hit so I worry that finding one that keeps those stats while adding in crit damage will be very pricy. So maybe trying to get lucky on gloves really is right.
- I could still use some more defensive stats. I should look to see if I can trade int in some slots for defensive stats. 100 int is worth 10 resist all, which is good, but the max roll in a slot for resist all is 80. 80 is a lot more than 10 and it feels like int isn't as good an offensive stat as I'd been thinking it was so making some trades there may be both right and cost effective. If I craft gloves it'll definitely be vitality ones!
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