Three Difficulties

[clueso-2790]

@Mercury-1900

Let’s say you have 100 base damage and an enemy has 1000 health. It takes 10 hits to kill it. Now you have 20% increased damage and it takes you 9 hits to kill it (8 hits = 120 x 8 = 960, the 9th strike will kill it). But with 20% CS it would only take 8 hits to kill the enemy.

Your example only works because it’s in a range where rounding up or down 1 attack is a significant % of the comparison. Imagine a monster that requires hundreds of attacks to kill, eg the RG. Killing Blow might require 1 more or 1 less attack than the same increase of damage, but that’s hardly significant in that situation. Remember too that you are often overshooting the exact % needed to proc the Killing Blow. You can come up with examples where the killing blow is only doing 0.1% of the monsters HP in damage, resulting in no benefit.

But practically, over an entire rift, the mechanics work almost exactly the same. Dealing 10% damage from a proc, once per monster, is almost exactly the same as simply doing 10% more damage to that monster. It’s the same 10% out of 100%.

But 90% Culling Strike are not the same as 90% increased damage.
50% CS are not the same as 50% increased damage.
50% CS equates to 200% increased damage so to speak.

Same thing with damage reduction. Having 75% damage reduction compares to 300% increased damage.

I am not sure how to call it, but CS should have diminishing returns, or multible sources of CS should be multiplicative with each other, just like CDR, RCR and damage reduction.

@Mercury-1900

The Executioner is more effective against low and medium health targets

This is not quite correct. Whether you are shaving off 10% of 10 or 100 attacks, it’s the same 10% bonus. Killing 10 small enemies in a row gets approximately the same bonus with Killing Blows as Killing 1 enemy with 10x the health.

The context was CS vs BotS, not CS vs xx% increased damage.

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Furthermore, also remember that you can combine CS with CB.

Now compare CS+CB one the one side and CS+BotS on the other and you’ll see that the CS+CB combo is much more effective than CS+BotS, since CB is more effective while an enemies life is still high, while BotS gets more effective the longer a fight lasts (aka the lower an enemies life is), but that the time when BotS is the most effective gets cut off by CS, therefore making it less effective.

There is a synergy between CS+CB, while CS+BotS is basically the opposite of a synergy, because one cancels out the other, so to speak.