With the new weapon gems

Wizard
1

Does having a base % weapon damage increase beat out all the other damage buffs? (like crit/ elemental damage) I’m thinking that just based on the math, the more you can increase the weapon damage, the more it cascaded into every other damage skill, simply because everything is based off of your weapon damage.

I ran into a situation where I switched from one weapon gem with 15% ED to one with 8% crit in that spot, and my sheet damage went up, but the base weapon damage dropped. So the game is saying, you’re doing more damage even though your base weapon damage has gone down.

2

As you’ve seen here, weapon damage range is important but not everything. Everything scales off your weapon damage, but everything is also buffed by your crit chance/crit damage. In this case, it looks like an additional 8% CHC more than makes up the loss of the damage range.

The most reliable way to tell, assuming you are comparing two shards with the same level 3 powers, is to look at your elemental dps in your expanded sheet.

In this case, since you are comparing two shards without elemental damage, looking at your sheet damage is also fine, since your % elemental won’t vary between the two shards.

Generally in most situations 15% damage should beat 8% crit, but the difference will be fairly small. And in your case, it seems the 8% crit actually wins. It can vary depending on the base damage of your weapon compared to your source and jewelry. The 15% damage only applies to your weapon damage range, then your source and jewelry are added on top of that. If you have a non-ancient weapon, an ancient source, and an ancient ring with a damage range roll, 15% damage on the weapon has less value. Similarly, if you are missing crit chance rolls on your gear, crit chance on the shard could have a bit of extra value.

Something else to consider is that the flat damage roll (270-300?) and the crit damage roll (130-150) are also variable. If the 15% damage one rolled minimum values for flat damage and CHD but the 8% crit one rolled near max values for flat damage and CHD, that could make a difference.

Using the one with the highest sheet elemental damage is the way to go. There’s a few cases where you might not want to do this, e.g. don’t take the attack speed one if your build doesn’t scale with attack speed, don’t take the CHC one if you are using Remnant of Pain in a build that applies CC regularly as additional CHC has no value when you have 100% crit against frozen/stunned enemies. But if your build doesn’t fall into those scenarios, just go with whatever gives you the highest sheet elemental damage.

3

Good reply. And I would agree with everything you said, but something feels off about it. I’m trying to figure out the best way to maximize damage from Firebird 6 piece procs and as I’m sitting at 50% crit (without the added 8%), it seems that a higher base damage on my weapon (primal Deathwish with 10% ED roll on it) coupled with another 15% ED from the gem in it would give me more consistent dps output even though the sheet dps says it’s higher with the crit gem instead.

It feels like the damage buff you get from IAS on gear, even if you don’t benefit from IAS. I guess I’m wondering if anyone knows the math behind it factoring crit/ crit damage/ weapon damage, so I can pop in the numbers and get a more realistic value.

4

Your effective crit multiplier is:

CHC/100*(1 + CHD/100) + (1 - CHC/100)*1 = 1 + CHC/100*CHD/100

(i.e. the probability you crit times the damage bonus when you crit plus the probability you don’t crit times your baseline damage of 1, then just simplify to an easier form)

For damage range, just add up all the values of damage you have, and multiply the weapon portion by the % damage on your weapon. The shard % damage adds to the % damage roll on your weapon.

total damage = (weapon damage + shard flat damage) * (1 + weapon % damage / 100 + shard % damage / 100) + source damage + jewelry damage

To get your effective damage factor, holding everything else constant (e.g. mainstat, set/gear/skill/gem multipliers), just multiply those two things together and see what gives you the higher number.

So for example, with 64 CHC/500 CHD baseline (max rolls in all slots and a 150 CHD shard without Witching Hour), a primal wand (193+1560 min, 357+1940 max) with 10% damage, and a primal source (485 min, 600 max), you’d have:

15% damage shard:

((193 + 357 + 1560 + 1940 + 300)*(1+0.1+0.15) + (485+600))/2*(1+0.64*5) = 13697.25

10% chc shard:

((193 + 357 + 1560 + 1940 + 300)*(1+0.1) + (485+600))/2*(1+0.74*5) = 13794.5

In this situation, 10% chc has a slight edge (but 8% chc would be worse). Which is best will vary depending on your damage range rolls and crit values on your current gear. The difference should be pretty small.

You could also just import your profile into https://maxroll.gg/d3planner, that might make answering these sorts of questions easier.

5

or not… seems the shards broke maxroll. lol. But like you pointed out, it looks like the 15% flat damage is better then an 8% crit chance, regardless of what the sheet damage looks like.( all other things being equal)… But thanks for the math, I will pop in the numbers and take a look… I’m just glad that my instincts seems to be on point.

6

You can’t import the shards, but you should be able to enter them manually.

7

not sure how… I don’t think it will let you add multiple % damage modifiers to a weapon outside of the fixed range.

8

It depends on what you build needs the most of. For many builds adding more CHC maybe be best, or more attack speed, or more CDR, or RCR etc.

If you build is all about building up to a single massive blow, then maybe piling on the raw damage is best.

As with all of these things, the best overall average damage across all skills comes from appropriately balancing out all the contributing factors.

9

Well, I don’t know of any builds who don’t want as much of everything as they can get. As for my build specifically, it’s all about attacking as much as possible as fast as possible without having to stop channeling. So Explosive Blast wizard with Deathwish and getting EB to come off CD as fast as possible.

Currently, I have my EB triggering every 1/4 of a second in density as it’s my only CD, and I have no resource issues as EB is the only thing that costs me resources.