I have been scratching my head on HOTA crits. On the same cast on HOTA you can see a wide range of damage figures. Some mobs get hit by 500k crits whilst another might be hit for a 20 mn crit.
The question is: Why such a large variance?
The hits are both crits as indicated by the color of the numbers. Both includes vulnerable so there is no divergence there. There is no way the weapon damage variance can lead to such a large difference. Even after factoring in the “Quake” portion of HOTA its still impossible to explain the vast difference in numbers.
Any clues?
You’re double dipping the multipliers with the quake portion.
there is another thread that explained damage scaling. some is additive (not really good) or multiplicative (really good) and each instance is added seperately.
basically, if you hit for 10k and you have 2 multipliers of 20% the first would raise it to 12000 and the second would raise it to 14400.
the 500k is your base hit of the hammer with all your damage modifiers. the quake if it’s at 100% is taking that 500k and then adding all those damage modifiers again back onto it at a higher starting point… so you can see why it varies wildly.
I’m probably not explaining it the best
here is the post explaining how damage works.
This Is Why Your Damage Sucks—A PSA on Damage Modifiers - PC General Discussion - Diablo IV Forums (blizzard.com)
there’s some video’s on youtube explaining the hota damage bug with the aspect if you want to look it up but the TLDR version is the quake is double dipping so you hould always try to hit away from enemies to they take quake not hammer damage right now.
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The above and vulnerability / crit DMG just make the experience odd. You ever notice how basics can be for a couple hundred then like 40k at times. The damage scaling/multipliers in this game is terrible.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Indeed if the quake portion affects the baseline damage and then you add in all the multipliers on top - the initial double dip could become a quadruple dip. Overall Barb is in a bad spot when it comes to damage, its like having an in-built fist of fate with the “100” “100” “50,000” numbers.
In addition the possibility that quake is getting unintended multipliers, the amount of conditionals for HotA barbs is crazy.
To max your damage, you would need vulnerable applied, to be fortified (glyph increases dam while fortified) , to be healthy (glyph gives huge damage while healthy), capped on fury (edge master), generated the 60% multiplier (limitless rage), 3 basic attacks for the 30% from expectant (basic attacks increase core skill by up to 30%), and then it has to crit as well. Could be even more conditionals if you’re running a ground stomp stun or increases stun damage build.
Then you factor in the weird quake (maybe bugged) interaction where you deal more damage hitting to the side of the target rather than directly on them.
You get all these conditionals together, you can hit for 15+ mil, missing some of them and you’re hitting for 800k.
Indeed - the damage calculations is unintuitive and varies way to wildly for my tastes. You would imagine that things written with an “X” is multiplicative and “+” to be additive. Then you look at Unbridled Rage which gives additive damage to core despite it being an “X”.
Historically it has been very difficult to balance multiplicative damage with D3 being a good example. They need to reduce the number of multipliers (perhaps by having all aspect multipliers added together) to prevent damage inflation from going out of control.