I am curreently running a Barrage Rogue and I am confused on a couple things.
Weapon mastery: Does the bonus damage type help the overall damage. IE: if running a Ranged Rogue, do I get the bonuses to the melee weapon types I have equipped or is that only if you are using a skill that uses a melee weapon?
Daggers vs Swords: Since I run a barrage build, I figured that using daggers would be better than swords for overall damage because of the “close enemy dmg%” vs crit damage. I have seen on the forums where close enemy damage is basically useless for a ranged rogue. Wouldn’t close damage % just be a base multiplier for crit damage? Can someone explain this? I am ALWAYS close to elites or bosses. Why would this be a dead stat for me?
Can’t help with #1 but #2 is because close damage is additive with every other conditional damage affix and CHD is pretty much 1 of the 2 best multiplicative offensive stats in the game along with vulnerable.
Weapon Mastery bonuses kick in based on the weapon(s) that you’re dealing damage with in that moment.
vs close enemies isn’t a dead stat, it’s just that critical strike is generally calculates out to be better due it being its own damage multiplier, as opposed to vs close enemies which combines with all other additive stats.
You basically have these, UGH I hate this term, buckets: Weapon Damage, everything conditional, CHD, and vulnerable. Conditional includes stats like close damage,+core skill damage, damage with barrier active, damage to enemies affected by X skill, etc etc ad nauseum. Pretty simple when you look at it like that, not trying to say it is great or completely makes sense but that is where we are at. Since CHD and Vulnerable are in there own multiplicative buckets it is pretty much always going to be the better stat to have on gear. You still want to have stats in the conditional bucket but never instead of crit/vuln on your gear.
Let’s assume the damage formula for a particular attack is like below:
total_damage = 10 x 10 x 5
If you have enough resources (skill points, aspects, paragon, affixes, etc…) to add another 5 into one of the above 3 numbers (they are the bonus multipliers), which will yield the maximum total damage?
Adding the 5 to either 1st & 2nd both yield:
(10 + 5) x 10 x 5 = 750 total damage
However, adding the 5 to the 3rd multiplier will yield:
10 x 10 x (5+5) = 1000 total damage
From this you can see that, if you have some damage bonus that will add the same amount to each multiplier, you can maximize the total damage by allocating that resource to the smallest/weakest multiplier, and this rule is also generally true outside of this particular example.
The problem with “Damage to Close” is that it is ADDED to a multiplier that is ALREADY very high. That multiplier sums all the other junk-food affixes like “Damage to trapped” and “Damage to chilled” etc…
It is not to say these junk-food affixes does not increase damage, but builds usually get like over 600% in that multiplier already, contrast that with the around 300% Vulnerability or Critical Damage (These 2 are their OWN multipliers in the damage formula), an additional 30% of Close Damage is equivalent to just 15%…
base_dam x crit_dam x vuln x junkfood = total_damage
(base_dam)100 x 3.00 x 3.00 x 6.00 = 5400 ← before allocating 30%
100 x 3.00 x 3.00 x 6.30 = 5670 ← allocate 30% to junkfood bucket
100 x 3.15 x 3.00 x 6.00 = 5670 ← allocate 15% to crit_dam bucket
100 x 3.30 x 3.00 x 6.00 = 5940 ← allocate 30% to crit_dam bucket
100 x 3.15 x 3.15 x 6.00 = 5953.5 ← allocate 15% to BOTH crit_dam & vuln buckets
Wow thank you guys. That is one helluva summation of info. I will look heavy into replacing my daggers with swords and with the correct affixes. You guys are the best. Thanks to all who replied!
Is there a list of all the “junk food” multipliers and the better multipliers?
If it isn’t CHD, crit chance, weapon damage, vulnerable, attack speed, or +class skill rank (important to remember +skill rank is NOT same as +core skill damage, +core skill goes in “junk food” while +skill rank simply adds rank to skills) then it is going to be “junk food”. I am sure you can use Google to find the huge list of all the affixes in that bucket but remembering the few things that are NOT in it is going to be much, much easier.
Add main stat (dexterity) to the smaller “non junk food” list as well.
To complicate things a bit, some multiplicative stats are better than others. For example crit damage is relatively easy to stack so pound for pound, vulnerable damage is generally better.
At the moment I have around 262% Critical Strike Damage and 41.9% Critical Strike Chance in town static with no modifiers on. I know my CS will go up in battle as will CSD. My Vuln is only 38.1% in town. But nothing else buffs this. Im going to assume that since Vuln is in its own bucket that I need to focus on this more than the other two?
Again thank you guys for explaining this to me. I found the list on google for junk food. Wow… lol
If you’re combo point go daggers for faster generation. Your vulnerable damage is low I’d look into adding more into that bucket for sure. And attack speed is your friend,you want super fast attacks.60/70% is a good number to aim for crit chance buffed.
My attack speed is only 15% currently. I usually add a 16% pot to help with higher end NM dungeons and makes a big difference. How much crit chance is good for a Barrage build? I could change quite a bit on my gear but I’m focusing on crit.
Always remember that you have to add the base to damage multipliers.
Having 300% vulnerable damage means you do 1+300% = 4 times the normal damage when enemies are vulnerable.
The correct calculation is 100 x (1+300%) x (1+300%) x (1+600%) = 11200
Yes, while this is true, I intentionally left out the (1+ _ ) because it’s already a wall of text, and considering many people had left school far behind them, adding the (1+ _ ) into each term will instantly make it look more complicated than it needs to be to get the idea across. Brains will get chain-cc’ed by the constant (1 + n) (1 + n) which conjures memories of algebraic horror and brain-freeze with each (1 + n)…
But yeah, you always start out with 100% in each of the multipliers, and then %bonuses are added onto this 100%.
On another note, before today, because I thought the general rule is to always best to “allocate resource to the smallest/weakest multiplier”, AND I could also understand the damage formula to have an infinite trail of (x 1.0) multipliers resulting in the same Total damage… Therefore, I would say if you have the option to open up another multiplier (eg. choice between [+]10% or 10%), “GO FOR THE 10%!!”…
But then if spreading out my total bonus of say 1000 is really the best bet, surely having a 999 terms of 1.001 x 1.001 x 1.001… will yield the best damage, right? Nooooo! Today I brute-forced it using excel… And it works out the best base number is 2.71828 regardless whether you have 100, 500, 1000 or 50 to spend…
I think I deserve an in-game title/achievement for re-discovering the Euler’s number ‘e’ through playing Diablo now.
I’m not sure what is the real world implication yet, but it seems at some point it might be better to try to reach for 271.82% (a.k.a 171.82% bonus) in each term in your damage formula first instead of opening up another bucket (which is counter-intuitive as hell even as I type this).
