Many of us have been pushing for the increasing of base weapon damage in order to improve variety in end game weapons. I have put together the below numbers in order to analyse the effect of increasing this damage by varying amounts.
The first table shows raw average weapon damage. The runewords are perfectly rolled for damage, in non-superior berserker axes. The uniques are also perfectly rolled, and assumed to be wielded by a level 99 character in one hand. All weapons are ethereal where possible, and labelled as such.
Current
+30%
+40%
+50%
Grief
447
461
466
471
Eth BOTD
356
463
498
534
Eth Death
345
449
483
518
Phoenix
237
308
332
356
Last Wish
225
293
315
338
Doom
223
290
312
334
Eth Death Cleaver
270
351
379
406
The Grandfather
281
328
344
359
The GF with Ohm
303
357
375
393
The second table shows the damage as a percentage of Grief’s damage.
Eth BOTD
79.64%
100.43%
106.87%
113.38%
Eth Death
77.18%
97.40%
103.65%
109.98%
Phoenix
53.02%
66.81%
71.24%
75.58%
Last Wish
50.34%
63.56%
67.60%
71.76%
Doom
49.89%
62.91%
66.95%
70.91%
Eth Death Cleaver
60.40%
76.14%
81.33%
86.20%
The Grandfather
62.86%
71.15%
73.82%
76.22%
The GF with Ohm
67.79%
77.44%
80.47%
83.44%
From these numbers, I don’t believe the 30% or 40% columns bring the field close enough together, so I will discuss the 50% increase scenario. In this case, only 2 options manage to surpass Grief in raw average damage, however others get close enough that their other attributes could offer an acceptable trade off depending on the build. Furthermore, this is lot limited only to runewords, but also applies to high end unique, rare, and magic items.
What the second table really shows is the tightening of the range in top damage, with some of the lowest performers improving up to 43% relative to Grief.
The potential power-creep is limited to 19% - when going from current best Grief to the new best EBOTD. Given the state of melee, I don’t consider this to be a major concern – especially when considering the amount of variety it would bring.
TLDR: We should increase the base average weapon damage of all elite weapons by 50%.
And no matter what previous developers have stated, both Grief and Fortitude are bugged.
Fortitude was not intended to have the weapon’s enhanced damage, and grief should have added Max damage; it’s literally using a stat not intended to be used by player characters, which is why the damage doesn’t show up on the character screen.
I know you do modding, so please correct me if I’m wrong.
My understanding is that characters have a hard coded required number of skills per page, so adding a new one would require deleting an existing skill from each character.
This would further the skill point burden on melee classes. Under-performing builds like the Frenzy Barb already don’t have any points to spare.
Wouldn’t this passive just buff all weapons evenly, leaving the status quo that everyone uses Grief? Altering the base weapon damage allows on-weapon ED to boost higher and bring more variety, which is what I was aiming for primarily.
+50% base damage for Elite weapons is the number I’d also arrived at that seemed to finally level the playing field with Grief and bring things in line for melee damage. It feels like a simple, no-brainer step.
Also, even though they’re only transitional weapons, I’ve thought a 25% increase for Exceptional weapons would be nice too.
I also think a 25% increase for exceptional weapons would be good, but I haven’t run the numbers as extensively. The above is just a short list, but I think it demonstrates enough for the elite bases.
If that’s the case, I think they would have fixed it by now. They have nerfed over powered items in the past, notably a few uniques such as Arkaines Valor.
I will say that it’s interesting that the +340 to 400 damage that Grief offers is equivalent to about 1000% ED if used in a phase blade. That’s a little absurd and they probably should have nerfed it a lot time ago.
Grief literally has never worked in the character screen, which should be the reddest of flags, and is probably a case of these items being designed for the second expansion, which was cancelled in favor of Blizzard North’s version of Diablo 3 which also was cancelled, and the completed runewords were probably never actually properly vetted, and when introduced, the guys who made them were probably gone from the company, so it was assumed they worked as intended.
…
Many bugs with known sources and solutions – down to the lines of code in the different files – were never fixed in the base game, and many of them transitioned to D2R before getting fixed:
Claw Vipers adding melee damage to each poison tick when moving
Gloams adding mana drain mana damage to ranged attacks
Mana Burn mana damage being multiplied by 16 for mana burn monsters
Nightmare (only) Frost Nova and Corpse Explosion on death from Fire Enhanced Cold Enhanced monsters being triggered twice (one visible, one invisible)
Weapon swap glitch
Paladin Smite bypassing Attack Rating vs Defense check – which actually caused every attack to stack up RAM usage with every single attack and led to low RAM computers and long smiter sessions crashing the game during long game sessions
…
Devs called some of these intended, when they’re clearly not:
Gloams using melee mana drain mana damage as base for lightning damage instead of their actual ranged damage stat…
…claw vipers using their claw attack for every frame you move in their poison cloud – allowing a shield user to block them because they’re a physical melee attacks are obvious.
Grief is also similarily obvious:
It uses a damage modifier not intended for use on player items.
Like Claw Vipers phantoms melee attacking in the poison clouds, it’s obvious from a technical standpoint it should have worked differently.
For claw vipers:
They could have added physical damage over time like a fire patch and have had it still be physical if they intended for the Tomb Vipers to have physical damage strangling clouds, but did not, thus proving that it was unintended, beause there are obviously better solutions to reach a better outcome that works better.
(Standing still caused no damage to be taken from these clouds)
For Grief:
Have it use a working damage modifier intended for player items, like minimum damage and max damage.
Fortitude is similar, in that it’s rather obvious the armor wasn’t supposed to get the exact same damage as the weapon, because that is plain bad design; it’s the same damage as a level 26 Might and beats the bonuses from a level 26 barbarian Blade Mastery.
Imagine an item giving +26 levels to a mastery O-skill. That’s the level of power the armor brings with that mod alone. If it was intended, it was very bad design.
Since Grief is very often made in a PB (at least for PvM and it’s often outlawed in GM PvP anyway) would you consider adding the perfectly rolled Grief PB to the comparison? For some builds/skills the PB speed makes it tough to beat anyway, which brings me to my next thought:
Using the same base helps with IAS considerations, however BotD adds a nice 60 IAS and you included GF which is obviously not a BA, so I wonder if more should be done to capture that effect in terms of total damage output. It quickly gets complicated though since you’d likely need skills/class to map base weapon speed to FPA to get DPS.
For Last Wish, are you including the ED from Might in any way? This one is also tricky, b/c it would be off damage %ED. For other options you can likely say that off weapon ED will be “constant” since all options would have it anyway, and can be neglected, but in this case LW gets you that extra 200% ED when you’d be unlikely to have it with other options (or it opens up options)
Agreed.
This would be great! Do you think a more modest buff, say 25-30% would make sense for Exceptional items to help the progression for melee characters? Given that they are exceptional bases they wouldn’t effect power creep at all. Heck, since they naturally have lower base damage than elite, you could use the same 50% you’re proposing for Elite bases, which would keep the power ratio between Exceptional and Elite roughly equivalent to now.
The thing is, even with these bugs in place, melee still under performs. Even discarding the single or few target damage mechanics, it’s very clear as a melee player in higher player count games, while using Grief and Fort, that the damage starts to become frustratingly low, when many caster builds continue to 1 hit the screen even in P8. Some would argue (and I personally agree) that P8 games should be difficult enough to require 6-8 players working together to clear the content, and no builds should be 1 hitting any P8 monsters. But obviously nerfs are unpopular for those who have worked hard to optimize their builds, and the devs in general seem hesitant to do such things, so doing things that help bring melee up a smidge to close the gap, make sense.
So my concern is if you “fix” Grief and Fort “bugs” as you’ve mentioned, then you bring melee down even further, so you need some compensation buffs at the same time, such as the base damage proposed in this thread. Given the current amount of development for D2R, if they only change Grief and Fort for an initial pass, my fear is we’d be stuck in an overly nerfed state for an excessive amount of time. Plus as I said, even with Grief and Fort in the current state, melee aren’t over performing, and still wouldn’t be with this buff, so it likely makes sense to suggest this band-aid vs. a fixing of Grief interaction and Fort and then re-balancing things to ensure melee stays in at least as good of a place as they are now (which isn’t all that great tbh).
Plus given the development resources D2R seems to have at this point, relatively simple changes like this would seem to be a more likely scenario than a larger re-balance.
This would be an interesting idea and would accomplish something similar, you have more base damage for your ED multipliers to work with. Are there skill count limitations though, or as a non-assignable passive, does that not matter? I can see advantages here that devs could play around with the scaling for the bonus you get as you level, which may allow more precise tuning than just a global weapon base damage buff, but I also don’t know if devs have the time to do said tuning.
Curious about this as well.
He said you couldn’t put points to it, so I see it as something that would auto-scale as you level (like D3 attributes ), so the way I read his suggestion is it wouldn’t take additional skill points.
Very good point, part of the appeal of the base damage buff is that it improves RW and Uniques which offer nice %ED more than Grief flag damage.
So would caster classes then have to have a similar passive skill to equalize? or would ALL classes get it, but it just wouldn’t benefit casters much since it’s a physical flat damage applied to melee attacks? How would it effect ranged physical attacks?
Hi,
thanks for the effort, but it’s not really clear how you got your numbers and which attributes contributed in which base to your conclusion.
Different bases have different base speed, so just the raw damage is not the full damage calculation and if you compare runewords, there are multiple stats adding to damage, such as DS from Grief or Str from BOTD.
this topic has been ongoing since Grief was released and the conclusion always was that 50% base damage increase is barely enough to put runewords like ebotdba on par with grief pb.
So please add a little more information to your calculations and don’t forget to consider ias/ds/cb/etc to explain why you think that it would be a 20% powercreep, because it’s more likely in the below 5% region.
nice math ratios. seeing as only ethereal bases (and only some of them) are only barely able to compete with grief in terms of raw damage (and grief is cheaper and has ias so it wins in terms of dps for cost), and we know even how grief is now, melee is still a bit lacking, i would go further than 50%. grief is on the cheap side for most runewords, and it should reflect that by the power it gives. grief’s advantage is speed and itd. i’d say 60% or maybe even 70%, and then maybe fix any potential outliers (ie maybe phase blade is not increased as much since its a speed weapon).
claw vipers were accidentally flagged for their missile to do physical (p) instead of poison (idk what the abbreviation is, po? poi?). it wasnt that melee damage was added on. it was intended poison damage accidentally labeled as physical. i don’t know the technical reason behind why it was blockable, it may just be how most monster skill functions work and if its physical damage, players can block it. just a guess.
gloams don’t add the mana drain mana damage to their ranged attacks (which you wrote correctly after the fact, so guess u just wrote wrongly), instead, the game pulls the damage data for their ranged attacks from the wrong column. the damage for their ranged attacks are based on their mana damage and not the intended skill damage (which ends up being roughly 2x more than intended iirc)
mana burn damage was multipled by 255, not 16, and it wasnt just mana burn, it was all mana damage done by melee attacks
this wasn’t a nightmare only thing. the bug was that reactive damage effects proc’d each other. a monster with FE and CE would have two novas and two explosions on death. a monster with LE and CE would proc the death nova every time the LE bolts released on FHR. beetles that were FE and CE would proc the nova and explosion every time they were put into FHR. beetles that were LE and CE would proc the nova twice every time they were put into FHR.
most things don’t work in the character screen. there are only a handful of values on the character screen that are generally correct in most scenarios. i think its very intended, they just didn’t include its damage into the character screen when they added it as a stat (it came with LoD, wasn’t in teh game before then). it just happens to be overtuned and it erroneously applies to smite as well for the same reason, as smite deleted a section of the weapon damage calculation and substituted the shield damage calculation in, but this was everything UP TO the +dmg modifiers, which was added after, so they likely just forgot and it wasnt replaced by the shield damage calculation. MA sin did replace it, since +dmg and her came out with LoD, so her kicks don’t carry +dmg bc of that.
I said it in the other post topic I’ll say it here. Don’t just add 50% weapon damage to the column and call it a day.
Weapon identity needs to be taken into account. Flails and bardiches have an extremely high range in damage values. Sabres, war swords, and falchions require too high of stats to have the piddly damage numbers they have. Weapons that require high dex should have smaller ranges in weapon damage. Weapons with high strength low dex should have higher ranges but a bigger top end number. Thunder maul and ogre maul require so much strength they should absolutely max out base damage (255 I think). Etc. etc.
Sooo many bases are completely ignored. Even in normal a hand axe does 3-6 while a scepter does 6-11 and has very low strength required. Why would anyone ever equip a hand axe. Also elite bases should all max durability. Another reason PB is used is it doesn’t have dura. A berserker axe needs to be repaired almost every other run. It’s ridiculous. At 255 durability it takes an average of 50 runs per repair.
Still say it’s easier/better to just nerf Grief, and make the skills themselves not suck. Buffing weapons also buffs mercs. Nerfing Grief and buffing melee skills buffs melee.
One buffs melee without buffing every caster as well. Do we really need act 2 mercs doing like 30-40% more damage?
Best route of all would be to nerf grief… then just nerf aoe damage across the board, targeting the particularly OP ones hard. Way easier to change skills than it is millions of items in a database.
We really just don’t need the game to be any easier than it already is…
I always advocated to buff Elite versions of melee weapons and throwing weapons by 33%. Which seems like a golden % to me.
Also Exceptional versions by around 15-20%.
Along with 33% buff I would tone down Grief damage by around ±30 dmg. So it would weaken, but 33% weapon buff will almost balance it out to present damage numbers. But other weapons would be stronger.
If you go with a % increase in damage you can go ahead and buff the normal and exceptional weapons by the same amount as you buff the Elite. Normal weapons drop off in damage after act 2 and can use a buff: taking an axe that does 5-13 and making it 7-19 doesn’t make it OP, it’s still just a low end weapon.
As Grief is the only weapon that is used by end game melee, and only at that point are people saying melee is fine, clearly we need to bring other weapons up to the point of Grief. Whether you add a +X damage or +X% damage, it’s very much needed. Combine that with some AR love and I’ll be very happy to not roll a caster at the start of every ladder.
), so the way I read his suggestion is it wouldn’t take additional skill points.