This gem only calculates damage at 10 yards intervals upto 50 yards.
Therefore, if you are hitting from say 49 yards, it only activates the buff from 40 yards. One would think it would consider every single yard but in reality this is not the case.
Please make Zei’s to consider every yard instead of every 10 yards.
Also its secondary buff is pretty much useless considering there is something called CC immunity in this game. Make it more useful please (eg: every yard increases the area damage radius by 0.2-0.4 yards at maximum)
Having another capable voice over there would help the discussion remain constructive, so don’t be a stranger.
Re: your suggestion, I like your thoughts on the primary a lot. As for the secondary, I agree it’s bad, though my concern with your suggestion is that I can’t think of a single item in the game that affects Area Damage’s mechanics, so I don’t think the devs will go for that.
I’ll put your thoughts on the Primary into whatever ‘summary’ Free and I ultimately produce.
The distance for Zeis is rounded upwards to full 10 yards, not downwards. You get the full bonus already from 41 yards, so your suggestion would be a nerf to the gem.
(Video is in german, but I think you’ll get the idea)
To your second suggestion: I think the current bonus is quite useful for UE and other ranged DH-Builds. It would be another nerf for zeis, imho.
Watched your video. However, there is no clearcut way to gauge your distance in the game. I gave 49 yards as an example which could very well be 47 yards.
It is very likely that hit point radius around the character is effective when calculating the distance and there is no rounding upwards for this gem.
I use Zei’s in my seismic slam build for a long time and I did a lot if number crunching in d3planner. If it rounded up 15 yards damage to the Zei’s buff at 20 yards, I would get much higher DPS values at about 15 yards, but this is not the case. The damage peaks at about 18 yards and I dont see any rounding up going on from 10 to 15 yards or 20 to 30 or 30 to 40 yards.
Here is a link to the build, you can find the case studies from how many yards to slam from there. In this build, No Escape, Zei and bloodshed work together to max the damage.
It is something that definitely needs a developer look.
I can’t see how you created the damage graph in your guide. How did you get these numbers? And if it includes Zeis, I would say that it doesn’t work at all in your build.
My video however proves my point:
I get a 10yard bonus, when I stay directly on the target, 20yard bonus on the edge of a 16yard bubble, 40yards after a 35yards vault, and the full bonus after a few additional steps. It’s pretty obvious, I would say.
You can also double-check the distances using the well-known distance map like http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VrPobIF_7SY/T7qytzx6SRI/AAAAAAAAE8o/DlzFGo66vUc/s1600/D3_Distance_Map.jpg. My screen resolution is also given in the video.
They are the simulated DPS numbers obtained from d3planner. Probably something is wrong with it though as d3planner seems to not calculate Zeis buff accurately for the distance.
However, wording of the Zei’s suggest nothing about rounding upwards. Anyways, based on its wording I would think a dev. relook would be useful.
After watching the video, I strongly suspect Hebalon is correct. If the “rounding upward” were not occurring, then you would expect to see the same damage number without Zei’s equipped and when standing right next to the target (i.e. zero bonus when you’re not using the gem, and also zero bonus when you were 0-9 yards from the target). But, after equipping Zei’s, he sees an increase in damage even when standing inside the hitbox of the target.
This certainly suggests that the game is rounding upwards.
But what I do know is, that Zeis at Level 25 is way better than Zeis at Level 24. Not because of a little bit more damage, but because of the stun effect. When using it with UE, you definitely notice a much smoother gameplay through stunned Succubi, spear-throwers and other annoying enemies attacking the DH from afar. And it helps keeping melee attackers at distance.
The gem can probably not be used in group play to create perma-stun (or whatever the 0chars do in the Meta). But it is very useful for ranged builds like UE or N6M4, where the secondary effect is actually a great buff.
