I cannot figure out WHY this is such a great gem. The top Leaderboard players all use it and my own characters improve when I use it. But it only increases the value of each succeeding hit by .01%. If I hit one monster, then hit another, and then return to the first monster, does it continue increasing from where it had left off? Researching various articles, it appears that this is not a multiplying increase but only an additive increase. Can someone give me a simple explanation? Thank you.
The big reason is the secondary effect. That 25% extra damage against RGs is very significant.
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It increases damage taken by enemies from the player, increasing with each successful attack made by the character, stacking infinitely. It has a small internal cooldown tied to attack speed. Each attack made by the character will always apply only one stack of Bane of the Stricken, to one enemy, no matter how many enemies are struck. This makes Bane of the Stricken mostly only useful when attacking a single, solitary enemy, such as a Rift Guardian.
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Yup, most important point is that you need to hit first example huge pack with yellow elite = hit first that, even when you change target and that elite is close it will keep stacks and no one else didn’t get stacks. Also it is additive with itself, so let’s say you have 2% bonus and 50 stacks = monsters take 100% additional damage which is multiplicative with other stats like set bonus, trapped, skill damage…
I hope that was good explanation…
It’s mostly for the Rift Guardian in high GRs with a build that doesn’t have great single target DPS. It keeps stacking on the RG as you continue attacking. Over a period of several minutes, it becomes a huge multiplier in your damage vs. the RG. It’s mostly only useful once the RG fight starts taking more than a few minutes though.
It can bring what would be a 10+ minute RG kill without the gem down to something way more reasonable like 2-3 minutes.
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While this helps, this isn’t the reason it’s a good gem. In fact, this gem only becomes useful for the boss when it starts taking several minutes to kill. Only after longer battles with the same target, do stricken stacks become significant.
If you’re running speed GRs and the boss goes down in less than 30 seconds; you should consider using a different gem (e.g. Bane of the Powerful).
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Thank you for your replies. I understand it better now.
Use a hammerdin for an example. Use a gem with some ranks for an example. It may be 0.01% per rank, but what is 0.01 x 50/60/75… and add that to the base damage increase per hit.
Now, how many hammers and other stuff do you think hit a mob/boss in a really high difficulty. You start seeing double and triple damage fairly quick.
without that gem, in case you dont know in a really high gr, you can take more time killing the rift guardian than killing the rift itself
Gem level plays a big part in it’s usefulness. For instance, at level 100 the damage bonus is 1.8%, so 10 hits would make this 18%, and it only takes a few seconds to get that. “Bane of the Powerful” gives gives a “flat” bonus of 35% against elites, for a time determined by gem level. Against Rift Guardians, “Bane of the Stricken” (level 75) would exceed that with 7 hits, and continue to increase without a time limit.
Not sure about any internal cool down though.
Bane of the Powerful does provide a 20% bonus against everything, so it may be more useful in some cases, depending on difficulty.
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Last I recall, the internal cooldown (ICD) is tied to the ability’s attacks per second (APS). I think it was ICD = 0.9/APS where APS includes skill buffs like how Yang’s Recurve multiplies attack speed of Multishot by 1.5.
Do pets stack stricken as well? For example each hydra head stacks it or each hydra or only player direct damage? Because if I can do 11 stacks per second (theoretically speaking) from the 10 heads hitting the RG and me hitting it with arcane torrent for example, then it becomes quite amazing. If not… it’s meh?
Pets should apply Stricken stacks just like any attack. Keep in mind that the gem’s ICD still applies as well. I doubt you can gain like 11 stacks per second. I suspect that in the case of Hydra the ICD is calculated based on the attack speed of one head.
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Very much like this.
The thing is that Stricken stacks are applied to the first random target hit in the frame it is off cooldown, no matter if it was your pet or yourself that struck something. The biggest issue is that pets tend to attack multiple targets at once so the stack can go anywhere, and since you can only have one active at a time it becomes very random when fighting larger groups.
You can apply stacks to multiple targets, but only the target that last recieved a stack is “active” and takes the increased damage. However with the high attack speed and many attacks, getting beyond even a gem like Bane of the Trapped is quite feasible in many scenarios, for a lot of builds.
I can’t speak for Wizards, but as a DH I want to say that neither Companion (Wolf, Boar, …) nor Sentry do apply Stricken stacks. Both profit from applied stacks, but they don’t add stacks by themselves.
I would guess it’s the same for Hydra as well.
Oh yeah, the exact mechanics of Stricken … a sealed book for most players 
. About this discussion whether it’s 0.9/aps or 1/aps and/or whether “aps” means sheet-APS or actual-APS (differences are about breakpoints and internal frame counts per attack and stuff): I did some tests (a few years ago), and according to my results it’s 1/actualAPS.
Idea behind this setp: If stacks could be applied faster than 1/APS (like 0.9/APS), then the additional rockets from Vengeance should have added at least a few stacks - but the damage is still in sync at the end. (But such a deep analysis is irrelevant in most cases)
@Topic: Stricken should be used when the fight against the RG lasts longer than 2-4 minutes. This is often the case for builds that heavily rely on AD, even in lower GR without hard pushing . In most DH builds Sticken is not that useful for most players - unless the start pushing the leaderboards and gear around AD with lot of pulling monsters on “good maps”.
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This means that stricken is not good at all for hydra wiz pretty much. Since frost hydra attacks in a cone hitting multiple enemies at once so you have no idea which mob in density has the stricken stacks (before getting to RG) and if you only apply 1 stack per second irrelevant of number of heads attacking same target (one target like RG) then it’s meh.
This is from 2015 or before, right? I notice you’ve got keystone fragments in your inventory. I know Stricken has undergone some changes over the years…
JustinFan gave me this formula for Stricken ICD, apparently determined by a team testing in China:
60F * 0.9 / Attack-speed-total / (1 + movement speed increase);
Attack-speed-total:
- WW: 4 * sheet aps
- Charge: 2* sheet aps
- Frenzy: (1 + Bastion buff)* oath 1.5 * sheet aps (it is on d3planner GitHub
Examples here are just for Barb skills, but you get the point. Anyway, I agree with you that in most cases a deep analysis is unnecessary.
This game… this crazy game!
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No, its from june 2017 - it’s old, but not that old. This is my testing character with some legacy items in the inventory, like legacy-legacy Nats, jewelry with +min damage and some other stuff I keep just for nostalgia (like my self-found 2-socket Manticore). 
Thats the first time I see the constant of 60 Frames in this calculation, and movement speed. This constant may explain the diffference to my results, if the base attack speed of the used skill is not exactly 60 frames (afaik some skills differs from that). Thanks for that!
But anyway: The overall result stays the same: Stricken is very useful during the fight against the RG, and of little to moderate usefulness during the GR itself.
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