Notes on Overpower Blood Necro

Necromancer
21

As a side note on other observations. There are some screen shots from other players around the Internet showing the teal overpower number and the orange overpower number being identical.

I have encountered this as well, but is not consistent. I observed a range of critical hits on my necro and recorded those in my notes. I have seen my overpower “crits” being (overpower half; the part from health) + (observed critical damage range). I have also seen the orange number be equal to normal overpower even hitting the same enemy type with Blood Surge where no enemy was in range for the nova (second hit).

I do attribute some of that to server calculation and math error on the feedback. Enemies can die so fast what what you get reported as damage numbers doesn’t match expectation.

I found this in another poster’s video where I slowed the speed. They assumed their Nova was hitting at the same damage of the Siphon. It wasn’t. The server was reporting a Siphon hit off screen at slight delay when the Nova explosion happened.

And more on math errors. Several builds are, what I presume, to be taking advantage of math errors yielding unintended results.

I mean, if you look at how critical damage scales from a character sheet value vs how overpower scales it is pretty clear the intent was that overpower generates the bigger number. In the current game it cannot do this. This is in large part because some effects are quite literally multiple the exact same variable over and over (this is what makes the Lightning Shred Druid work) before the loop escapes (at least that is what I suspect).

Overpower underperforms due to some really poor implementation of mechanics further compounded by fundamental math errors.

Eventually, if this ever fixed, then overpower could potentially be a decent choice. I sincerely doubt it will be the 10-50m hit of current Bone Spear, but Bone Spear is benefiting from a ton of errors across a number of sources.

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22

Gosh. This is all interesting. I was assuming that the dmg was: dmg dealt + overpower. I definitely see that there can be unexplained multipliers. I’ve been lvl’ng a blood necro and have had a ton of fun. I just got the toon to 53ish and I must say, it has been crazy strong. At least compared to my sorc. I know sorc is supposed to be among the kings for lvl’ng… but I’ll take necro. The initial HP draw on blood surge wipes an entire screen and beyond if you time the OP. Combine that with Sorc and it’s absolute destruction. Just the mobility…

I will say that after I unlocked my paragon board things got weird. As I lvl’d, the mechanics did seem to line up well with dmg+OP. Yeah, sometime the teal number was small, but it aligned with a small dmg dealt (initial blood draw). Now though, it seems off. I can sometimes get crazy OP rolls by playing the timing right with the passives and skill build up, but sometimes I swear the echo on blood surge steals my rathma charge. Anyhow, time will tell. Maybe some clarity today perhaps.

Edit: I just switched out my basic skill from Hemorrhage to Bone Splinters so I wouldn’t accidentally eat up a rathma charge. I think I just saw an OP proc on it for 97 dmg… my normal OP rolls around 7k with blood surge. Maybe it was 970dmg, but that’s not what I remember seeing. If so, I have no explanation for that crazy low number. Must have been 970

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23

So here is the kicker… It fundamentally is just that. Like, the Overpower tooltip in the game is not lying to people. The sum of (health + fortify) * overpower is part of the calculation. The skill that triggers the hit does in fact scale it (how much is the question).

However, there is also a good bit more going on that isn’t being stated. AND… The hilarious part about this is I am essentially doing more damage than I actually expect to be doing because I actually expect a smaller number given all of the generalized forum discussion.

We can also exemplify this in the OP’s original post. Their health + fortify multiplied by 18 (1 + 1718%) is 745k and some change. At their level their average damage listed on a power like Blood Lance is probably in a range of 14-20k depending on rank and other variables. Still, seems plausible.

745k + 14 or 20k doesn’t equal 1.5 million on a Blood Lance hit. Obviously, that number is not 500k either from a Blood Surge Siphon hit. And, since we know Blood Surge has a base coefficient at Rank 1 of 20% we can at least make a reasonable assumption that the Siphon is doing around 20% of X number (and this has at least been consistent in my observation).

If we also take into consideration enemy resistance modifies values to 80% of their total (not always true, but common enough), then we can easily figure what numbers could be the final total. That’s going to be over 2 million.

Just for giggles, let’s look at 3,000,000. What is 20% of that? It is 600,000. What is 80% of 600,000? That’s 480,000. That’s 20,000 less than the approximated number that the original poster used.

3,000,000 modified down to Blood Lance’s base coefficient is 2,100,000. That number reduced by the same enemy DR (i.e., .8) is going to show you 1,680,000.

Now obviously, the real game isn’t this simplistic, but this is where I started when exploring these values. And other players actually investing more ranks into Blood Lance and tailoring their build around have shown it hitting for 2 million to 2.5 million.

So, while this skill is not going to compete with Bone Spear so long as it compound multiplies with other things, it is still capable of doing far more than just “overpower number” + “normal damage”.

Another set of fun comparisons is to observe the siphon hit of Blood Surge vs Hemorrhage. They are VERY close in coefficient and you can get damage predictions in line with each other. However, Blood Lance does way more than I expect. Conversely, Blood Wave does considerably less on Overpower given its coefficient listed in the game (it should be much higher than observed values).

TL;DR: I don’t think it is worth thinking too hard about Overpower. It is a mostly inconsistent mess, but it essentially does add damage so it “works”. I fully expect this to get “fixed” at some point because in the current state of the game is significantly weaker than other alternatives. Hell, I would presume it is going to remain weaker even if they reduce some of the crazy exponential damage loops. So long as any legendary aspect can be a multiplier in the calculation before critical damage and vulnerability is applied, overpower is likely always going to remain a bit behind. I sometimes wonder if two entirely different teams designed these numbers.

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24

And hidden values aren’t uncommon so far in Diablo 4.

The Splintering Aspect for Bone Spear is an example of this.

On a ring, the top end value is 100% of the second paragraph.
On an amulet there is a phantom 12.5 (rounded down in the tooltip but definitely used in the calculation).
On a 2h weapon the value goes to 225%… Huh??? Yeah, there is another number in this equation either hidden in the coefficient or just omitted as an error somewhere or something else is just funky.

Damage resistance and resistance also essentially do what they say in the tooltip, but have a convoluted series of math that gets you the end result.

Like Resistance is half the value you normally see, it takes some things as multiplicative variables and applies them differently depending on source. For example, your gear resistance doesn’t add with your Paragon resistance. They are different sources and handled in different areas of the calculation. For general play this isn’t an issue, but really digging into makes you scratch your head on what the hell they were thinking here (its future content scaling, that’s got to be it, but at launch it doesn’t keep up).

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25

well… the an interesting note is that overpower affixes didn’t get reduced while all the other big dmg buckets did. So this is an effective buff to overpower? Unless all the introduced heart powers buff the dmg up and ignore OP. Too bad necro can’t carry a mace. Necro can do thorns, why not carry a mace? I want that extra OP dmg

26

I definitely noticed this impact. I logged in for a little bit to jump on my main character to unlock the map, and then swapped to my Blood Necro.

My Blood Lance tooltip damage was showing about a 100% increase in value. And yes, I was pretty shocked. I did change some gear around last night and figured that may have been it, and some of it clearly is due to the bucket changes.

However, I ran around for 15 minutes or so firing away with Blood Lance and noticed I was doing more damage (in line with tooltip) than my notes had. This in turn did increase some of my overpower damage. It was very clear that the weapon increases were higher in the calculation than there were previously (since my health didn’t change nor did my overpower %).

None of this is to suggest that Blood builds are now OMG meta or anything like that. Just that the damage bucket change did include a noticeable difference for my specific character, and it did also bump up my overpower damage as well.

Any improvements are welcome. :slight_smile:

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27

Would you mind sharing a planner of your d4 build? I’m curious

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Me too… :wink:

I haven’t saved anything, yet. I’m still considering what I think I may want in terms of total boards.

I will tell ya what I have been eyeing multiple times though:

Bloodbath
Blood Begets Blood
Scent of Death
Bone Graft

Glyph-wise, Blood Drinker, Dominate, Essence, Exploit, (One of: Control, Amplify, Sacrificial, etc…).

Yes, I have been planning to include both Essence and Exploit for a while. The reason for that is my normal hits still benefit well from Exploit.

Also, Blood tends to lend itself towards high actions per minute. So, while you cycle normal white hits as fast as possible, and as much as your essence can sustain, why not fish for crits? Why not take advantage of Corpse Tendrils vulnerability damage too?

I think with the Sacrifice Legendary, giving up skeletons for crit chance, and other gear you can hit 45-50% crit rate with perfect items. Why not try to get 1/2 of all hits to be critical damage? This also means that golem for crit damage may be useful vs the health options (and I am currently doing this; crit damage vs health).

The golem crit damage benefit is similar to the mage overpower one. It is a buff to your character sheet. Getting more critical damage is then magnified by sacrifice. And no, this is not attempting to compete with any other necro builds. It is simply one way to conceptualize trying to maximize my damage in a holistic manner without putting all of my eggs into the basket of overpower. One can also do that too, but that is not what I am currently trying to do.

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30

Very nice. I’m thinking similar. OP is just not enough dmg and we don’t have a way to make it occur more often. Seems we have go for all dmg. I haven’t did the math, but I’d find it hard to believe that focusing on OP compare to traditional dmg late game. The Rathma passive should reward us for cycling through faster. Maybe an aspect should augment.

Edit. I just looked at Barb stat sheet. Goodness they get insane OP/ stats in general

31

Is the crit from Grasping Veins aspect still working with Overpower after the patch?

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I don’t think this build would work well. I don’t see how you are generating fortify. Fortify doubles your overpower damage and increases your damage reduction and then doubles your overpower damage again with the fortify paragon board.

So it seems like you are missing out on a TON of damage and damage reduction.

The bone mages generate 20% fortify on death and the blood orb glyph gives 7% each orb. Finally the 8% each time a corpse is generated which they just buffed. That’s what I used to have 100% fortify at all times.

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The new aspect consume blood orbs when using blood lance = heal you and fortify you if you have the glyph about it.

Problem: lance launched from blood orbs are actually just blocked by monsters…

34

I currently have the glyph for fortify generation out of blood orbs so that isn’t an issue. Blood skills can also have a chance to generate fortify from skills, Blood Lance creates an orb after overpower, and Hemorrhage generates fortify. These things combined push towards an attack speed goal. Spam Blood skills in order to trigger the skill effect. Spam Hemorrhage (ideally at a faster attack speed from legendary power combinations) in order generate fortify natively and orbs when it triggers. This isn’t just hypothetical, it works.

The skeleton mage sacrifice currently gives me more direct Overpower% and in turn more damage in actual play than when using the minions.

Right now, my set up is amplifying the sacrifice via the skill nodes and gear. I am getting essentially double the Overpower% on my character sheet doing this than if I run mages at all.

So, that “TON of damage” isn’t really a ton of damage. It would be an increase in damage (by less than 15%) but I would have to instantly fortify to do it. With my current fortify, my Overpower hits are giving me 57% more damage than what you’re suggesting.

To be more clear on the above with some simple math:
Assume 3k health and 300% native overpower plus skeletons being used. We can assume they fortify almost instantly (this isn’t at all how it works, but argument’s sake).

(3k + 3k) * (1 + 300%; or “4”) = 24,000. Without fortify, this is 12,000.

What I am doing right now would net me close to 600% (in game it is higher than this but I am not logged in). No skeletons plus skill nodes for increase plus legendary.

Without fortify 3k * 7 (or 1 + 600%) = 21,000. As right here going by these numbers, the skeleton build with instant fortify would yield like 12.5% more damage.

With fortify 6k * 7 = 42,000. So, that is over 50% more effective with fortify than running the skeletons, but it may take longer to get there.

I’ve absolutely considered these things, and more to the point I’ve tried them for myself. That said, I am flexible in my approach and will change my build as I go. The blood necromancer is neither my first character nor is it even my first necromancer in this game.

35

The blood orbs alone are not enough, you need 15 of them to fortify assuming you have no fortify generation affixes. And you have to be full health to get the fortify. Even having 99.9999% health will prevent you from getting the fortify.

I’m betting for most fights your fortify never reaches 50% if that’s all you are using.

You should be using the 20% speed increase on hemorrhage not the fortify passive. The fortify passive it gives is a waste of time, it’s too small and the chance for 100% is also tiny. But hemorrhage lucky hit is actually not bad considering you can AoE it and cast it extremely fast. And casting it 20% faster will give more blood orbs and thus more fortify generation.

Also you may want to get more than one point into bloodmist as it lowers the cooldown. I’d suggest getting +4 on gear affix. Mine has a base cooldown of 9 seconds at level 76. It’s basically always ready to go without decrepify. Idk why people are so set on decrepify when you can infinimist without it and also be super tanky.

Maybe they watched some video with misinformation?

36

No lie, I immediately ran a t58 nm dungeon on my shadowmist necro and in the first screen had a butcher. I ended with 1 potion left when typically I would step on butcher like he paid for it. The biggest change is the impact to DR/dmg output, and if you swapped over to a build just to test it (without proper glyph levels or gear to execute) you SHOULD get thwomped. That’s the major change they made guys, get this and I’m sorry if it’s hard to hear but…

People need to actually play the game now. No longer can you just take a build from maxroll or icy that says, “requires xyz unique and level 75+ paragon to execute” - then look at your level 38 character and go “meh, it’ll work probs” and have it actually work regardless of situations. They released the game with too much damage and too many solutions to damage on the PVE end. It wasn’t supposed to take us 2 weeks to beat Echo of Lilith in ~90 seconds. New meta is brain meta.

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37

So it’s not like my gear was bad, I had literally saved and leveled up all the blood items as wanted to play a blood build originally. That Necro still struggled with butcher. I can say without a doubt if I ran bone spear, it would be no problem.

New meta has not changed at all. The same classes that were strong are still the strongest and still clearing Uber Lilith with similar times. They did nothing to help underperforming skills and only hurt them further with lower defenses.

38

I appreciate the attempt at “helping”, but you’re making too many assumptions to really do what you think you’re doing.

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39

100%.

I think the backlash to the patch was incredibly predictable. Some of the drama around it is a bit extreme, but at the same time I cannot fault people for it.

What did the development team think would happen? They launched the game with several outlier builds. These were known in closed beta. That knowledge trickled into the community.

So of course Bone Spear was going to be popular. I didn’t even need to log into the game to tell that Bone Spear could still hit in the millions. Despite the nerfs to certain aspects, Aspect of Grasping Veins is still a multiplier to the same multiplier. The fact they didn’t change this from x% to +% should be a godsend. You still get to increase power output exponentially it just isn’t orders of magnitude higher than it was. They didn’t touch the Ossified Essence aspect which is still a compound multiplier (and so the tooltip may be an error vs the value calculation).

Anyway, so of course when folks switch to other builds are they are going to be woefully disappointed. On one hand you have access to a build that can essentially consume the content they designed to last several months (i.e., all of season 1) within the first 2 weeks of the game’s launch or you could play… other builds closer to Earth struggling to fit into a design space originally planned.

Folks aren’t wrong for being mad or disappointed. Nothing I do in respect to my Shadow/Minion or Blood builds are going to touch Bone Spear due to compound multiplication. Shadow can work but that is due to how the Blighted Aspect work. That’s best on either an amulet or a 2h weapon depending on goal. Why does it work? It is because it is 180% (amulet) to 240% (2h weapon) multiplicative damage. Guess what Blood has to compare… “25%x to targets already lanced by Blood Lance”.

When discussing how Blood operates in comparison to literally any other build option in the class, know we are not even talking about builds in the same league of each other.

40

If only Untimely Death was multiplicative instead of additive. +60% bonus OP damage when you already have more than a thousand % damage (and only if you manage to heal enough for that), that’s ridiculously weak.
And still no crit damage increase on OP outside of Grasping Veins ?

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41

Agreed! As it currently exists, this aspect is pretty much garbage.

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