Most players are pretty used to the “X Poison damage over Y seconds” display and can intuitively discern the damage per second by dividing the former term by the latter mentally.
However: Why not improve this by changing the convention to simply be “X poison damage for Y seconds”?
i.e.
“Instead of 50 Poison damage over 5 seconds” the tool tip would display: “10 poison damage for 5 seconds”
Or for a more tangible example;
20 Poison Javelin (with 20 Plague Javelin synergy) would read: “217 poison damage for 46 seconds” giving a more realistic sense of the damage output then “10 000 poison damage over 46 seconds”
Is this a necessary change? No. But it would make the UI a little more intuitive.
Questions, comments, and concerns are welcome and encouraged.
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Wait. Correct me if I’m wrong but this changes from division to multiplication?
It makes more sense for my awful math brain to show total damage number and maybe time second. Or both.
ie
10k-12k/46s (217dps/46s)
I can’t figure out how to type it…see what math does to my feeble mind!?
Just show me the 10k-12k so I know I’m not shooting a squirt gun lol
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I think you’re trying to say “10 poison dps for 5 seconds”. Because charms/skills/gear may have different poison duration, it might make more sense to use the total x damage over y seconds.
Edit: actually more I think about it, it could work either way.
- X dps for Y seconds tells you the damage per second for the shortest duration by summing up the poison damage from skills/gear/charms
- X damage over Y seconds tells you the total damage for the longest duration by summing up the poison damage from skills/gear/charms
I think that’s easier to read and gives better information. Since most poisons add their poison rate together and average the duration (if I understand it correctly), seeing the actual poison damage per second (even if it’s calculated per frame) would give you better information at a glance.
Also, they should change how venom works. Just make it apply separately from any other poison source instead of butchering the poison duration. Or make it just average like everything else, but that would make it a lot stronger (apparently it already does that for pdagger and jav though).
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The argument is convention.
280 + 700 + 850 = ~1800 DPS is quick to comprehend.
(1800 / 6) + (7000 / 10) + (1700 / 2) = ~1800 DPS is not.
Especially when the way you would really have to do it is like this:
((1912 + 1665) / 2 / 6.4) + ((8177 + 6785) / 2 / 9.6) + ((1850 + 1679) / 2 / 2) = 1941 DPS
There’s no multiplication involved, lest you need to see the total damage, which I can’t see why you would need. But hey, maybe someone needs it for something, I don’t know.
I’m quite accustomed to math, as well as programming, so convention means a lot to me. In that sense I’m biased in favor of convention. But I can take it or leave it. I’d rather have them polish other things than do this. But, this can be on the bottom of their todo list if they want.
I think I confused myself, then was further confused by the long-hand version you wrote out there.
I think the point my brain was trying to make was:
If necro psn nova shows (10k-12k) in the little box on my character sheet, and is correct, my brain is happy with this.
It might take 10s or 100s for the thing to die, but it will die.
Because of how many groupings of numbers I’d have piece together in order to calculate exact poison damage, my brain can’t handle it. So I’d prefer just to see one total damage number and go on my merry way.
Is it right to ask for such? I dunno.
But I sucked at math and liked English & History better lol
Yeah the entire poison calculation is a bit funky in my opinion, If you had for example a skill which gives you 10,000 poison over 46 seconds and you use Venom you lose all of that damage, because no matter how much damage your skill does venom shortens your poison damage duration to 0.4 seconds meaning you only get 86.8 damage from that initial skill because you only do 86.8 poison damage per 0.4 seconds for that skill and you lose the rest of the damage that the skill has to offer
Not sure if it’s a bug or intentional but I would have been happy for the dev team to look into poison damage in general
just saw your post, you beat me to it haha
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as a poison necro, I would rather see my max duration damage on Psn, then my per second.
I never fully understood poision dmg calculation. For example:
10 pdmg over 2 seconds
+
5 pdmg over 1 second.
Would this mean that in the 1st second I have 10 pdmg, and in the 2nd second I have the remaining 5 pdmg?
Or in other words, does pdmg damage the mobs hard at the beginning, but is it getting weaker and weaker towards the end of the duration? Or the whole damage is flattened throughout the whole duration equally?
If i’m write, poison damage always convert to the lowest duration, so in your example, the 10 psn dmg over 2sec will be converted to 5psn dmg over 1 second, because the lowest duration in your example is 1second duration.
So, in your example, the total psn dmg will be 10pdmg over 1second.
Correct me if i’m wrong.
Then what happens in the 2nd second??? We can add another pdmg to that example to make it more obvious, for example 300 pdmg over 60 seconds. This can also translates to 5 pdmg over 1 second, but I dont really want to loose the remaining 59 seconds, unless the whole 300 pdmg is done in 1 second. But it would mean the partial damages are translated into the shortest duration and add up and are dealt during that shortest duration.
According to Guide:Calculating Poison Damage v1.10, by onderduiker - Diablo Wiki it adds rate and averages duration for most things. Venom is an exception that butchers almost all durations to .4 seconds. It’s more complicated using bit rate and frames, but it would add the pdps of 5 from each thing for 10 total and do it over a duration of 1.5 seconds in that example edit: for 15 total damage dealt over 1.5 seconds (though the numbers would probably be a bit different since it’s calculating it per frame and total frames rather than seconds).
Yea I hope they look at venom and change it. Although, according to the above link about poison damage, poison dagger is one of only a few skills that already works with venom without it butchering the duration. With poison dagger it actually maintains a higher duration and still adds in the venom poison rate.
However, Venom’s length does not override those of the skills Poison Dagger and Poison and Plague Javelins. Casting Venom can thus significantly increase the rate applied by these skills while not reducing length.
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it’s so hard to get confirmation about those things from the devs, I don’t think enough people know about it for the issue to actually reach them, hope they will fix it as well