First off, I’m not 100% sure for each stat which affects overpower but from my testing, practically every damage percentage stats doesn’t affect overpower damage, aside from vulnerable damage and the actual overpower damage stat, which creates a major conundrum when it comes to different playstyle and how well they scale at endgame.
This is gonna be a long read so sit tight if you’re brave enough to keep reading and I am very sorry for making it this lengthy but I have to get into the details to truly explain the potential issue at hand. I will also be going at it from the Necromancer point of view since that’s the class I play within the paragon system.
Let’s get started…
The issue explained
Let’s take the most basic style of gameplay: Skill damage combined with critical hits and vulnerability.
You have a total of 3 multipliers being applied before any other multiplier shenanigans from paragon boards, aspects, skills, and what not.
- The additive damage of stats like Core damage, All damage, Typed damage (physical, cold, etc.), damage against stunned, etc.
- Vulnerable damage which functions as a multiplier due to its debuff nature
- Critical damage which functions as a multiplier because duh
So you have 3 numbers multiplying the damage of the ability (which is based off of the attack power provided by the weapon)
When comparing this to Overpower damage, we are looking at something a lot more complex. There is two parts to an overpower attack, the actual hit + the overpower damage.
The actual hit benefits from everything a build focused on critical benefit from, as outlined above, while the overpower damage only benefit from the following:
- Overpower damage
Only 1 number multiplying the damage of the overpower hit which is based off of the sum of the health and fortified health. For the sake of argument let’s pretend that the base damage provided by health to an overpower hit, before multipliers, scales at the same rate as attack power as you progress in level and gear.
Now, I do not know 100% every stat interaction with overpower, but after doing testing, the only stats I could find benefiting overpower is overpower damage. (Edit: Someone corrected me regarding vulnerable with overpower so I edited the post) Please correct me if I’m wrong here. Critical damage doesn’t benefit overpower damage on a critical hit. (Unsure if it’s intended or not for overpower damage to not benefit from critical damage, easily testable with Blood Mist and Rathma’s Vigor on a necro to see that it receives 0 benefit from critical damage)
The crux of the problem
When investing into overpower damage, you get the benefit of getting extra damage on a overpowered hit while simultaneously getting the negative effect of losing overall damage through investing heavily into overpower rather than other more conventional damage stats. This becomes extremely apparent once you get into the paragon board and spend your points towards overpower damage rather than increasing the damage of your actual hits.
Example of the issue
Using made up numbers, let me describe the problem with formulas, assuming 1 cast of an ability per second, no resource bottleneck, and no special modifiers outside of the actual stats:
Conventional build:
10 000 damage * 5 (sum of all damage increase from paragon/gear) * 2 (vulnerability multiplier) * 2.5 (averaged multiplier from critical strikes (critical damage * critical chance)) = 250 000 DPS
vs
Overpower build:
10 000 damage * 2.5 (sum of all damage increase from paragon/gear) * 2 (vulnerability multiplier) * 1.5 (averaged multiplier from critical strikes (critical damage * critical chance)) + 10 000 overpower damage * 6 (overpower damage multiplier) * 0.3 (ratio of regular hit to overpower hit) = 93 000 DPS
Obviously, the values above aren’t the actual theoritical values an end game build would have, but it serves the purpose of this demonstration.
With the heavy investment in overpower damage, a build using overpower is left with a lot less damage increases as well as less investment into critical hits and damage.
So even with the advantage of having extra damage to work with through the extra damage mechanic of overpower, it simply doesn’t have the same scaling potential because of its lower multipliers.
The 2 for 1 Pizza dilemma
You can skip this pizza section, this is just food for thoughts (literally) but also describe the issue from a real world perspective.
This is very reminescent of the clever way pizzerias make you spend more money for less pizza by offering you a “2 for 1” deal. Having 2 pizzas with a smaller radius to multiply with doesn’t give you as much surface as a larger pizza with a larger radius to multiply with.
Area is equal to π multiplied by the radius to the second power.
A 12-inch pizza is 113.04 square inches while a 18-inch pizza is about 254 square inches.
The way pizzeria tricks your brain is by selling you the 2 12-inch pizza for the same price as an 18-inch pizza.
This is how powerful multipliers are. The less is more paradox.
The mechanical advantage of Overpower
This however can be offset with clever manipulation of game mechanics through the use of multi-hits such as the Blood Surge aspect that echo the ability and doubles up on the overpower while ignoring the damage reduction from the aspect, or the triple hit blood wave from its respective aspect, or mechanically forcing an overpower on an ability that does a lot of smaller hits such as Rathma’s Vigor combined with Blood Mist. The Deathspeaker’s Pendant unique amulet is also a very good example of clever use of overpower, providing upwards to 14 hits (if stars align) of overpower damage on a single overpowered cast. These can serve as an extra multiplier on your overpower damage since overpower damage isn’t based on the actual ability damage but on your health + fortified health plus, correct me if I’m wrong here, a hidden increase/reduction depending on the ability triggering the overpower
You can see Deathspeaker’s Pendant in action here: https://i.imgur.com/seCXJL9.mp4
The question is… are those clever mechanics enough to offset the massive investment required for overpower? As it stands… I personally do not believe it actually does.
The game is fairly new still, damage simulations aren’t fully developped yet to really tell if the issue is there or not and which between conventional and overpower build would actually come on top, but from what we already know of end game builds, overpower doesn’t seem to be able to cut it despite the potential behind the mechanic, even with something as impressive as Deathspeaker’s Pendant.
Final thoughts
I do not have a solution to propose for this as I do not know whether it is actually a problem or not, yet.
I would like to say however that the main issue overpower builds are probably facing is the lack of scaling towards the ratio of regular hits to overpower hits. Regular builds do not face this problem since every aspect of their damage scales for them. For overpower builds you don’t get more overpowers at level 100 than you do at level 30 on a per-cast basis.
Perhaps changing how overpower build-up for abilities/skills to a number value that can be scaled through a stat would be a good compromise?
Taking Blood surge as an example, it could be made to provide 20 charges toward and overpowered blood surge and when at 100+ charges, consume 100 charges to force an overpower. A utility affix on gear providing X% increase to overpower build-up could increase the rate at which those charges are gained, so say you’d have 50% increase to overpower build-up, you would gain 30 charges instead of the base 20 charges.
Rathma’s vigor (or Druid’s pulverize) could grant X charge per second which would scale on this new overpower build-up affix.
Thank you for reading.