Overpower Max Health Scaling Ambiguity and Grandfather Crit Dmg for my HoTA 1 Shot Build

Barbarian
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I’m trying to optimize a build to get the highest single HoTA hits from my understanding of what was said, very ambiguously in my opinion, by a dev here:

"Overpower:

Overpower attacks now always deal up to x50% increased damage, based on your  current life percentage.
Overpower attacks gain +2% damage per 1% of your Base Life you have in Fortify.
Overpower attacks gain +2% damage per 1% of your Base Life that you have in bonus life above your Base Life."

It is frustrating that that devs don’t just post a formula or algo for the damage calc. There are interpretations of this where there would be thresholds where “Max Health” bonuses would give more damage than “Overpower Damage” bonuses relative to how much Overpower Damage and Health you already have. At what point is the ambiguous +2% added in the calculation? Is it affected by Overpower multipliers or added on after?

I really don’t know what stats I need to be prioritizing and all of the guides out there that I have seen do not address this. Optimal gearing gets even more opaque when when you factor in The Grandfather which to my understanding would make Crit Damage a higher priority stat and perhaps even better than Overpower Damage depending on the HoTA playstyle and the amount of Health a player has. In the character stats page it seems to more than double your Crit Dmg stat and in testing it seems like it also doubles the x50 multiplier of crits themselves.

Does anyone have experience with this or know of an actual formula somewhere? I really don’t want to have to get a spreadsheet and spend tens of hours trying different stat combos and getting a large enough sample size to deduce the formula!

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At 100% Health, Overpower modifier is 1.5x damage. At 50% Health, you Overpower modifier is 1.25x, or effectively half as effective.

The formulas for Overpower’s bonus additive damage is below. Both of these get added together. At level 100, your Base HP is about 7,950 I believe. At around 25,000 Max HP with Fortify up, you gain around x1,000 additive damage to your Overpowers. This is outside any Paragon, Willpower, Skills etc.

2*(Max Life/Base Life)100
2((Max Life - Base Life)/Base Life) * 100

These get added together for your additive damage. It is pretty convoluted and quite dumb. Overpowers now work with Vulnerability and Crit though which means you absolutely want to get all 3 Buckets if you can.

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Thank you so much for the explanation!

Based on your formula, comparing 42 Overpower damage on ring vs 837 Max Life stat:

Assuming you can reliably maintain fortify, it seems like Max Life stats are always marginally worse than Overpower Damage under ideal circumstances until you are north of 30k hp and then it just seems like Max Life stats are a superior roll instead Overpower Damage because you get a higher hp pool and close or even higher additive damage?

Also as far as buckets go and the recent changes, am I correct in understanding that assuming 100% vuln uptime and 100% crit chance that Crit Damage and Vuln Damage are both equivalent stats and you should just pick the higher number on gear?

And finally because you seem to know your stuff, do you happen to know if Ring of Red Furor multiplies your Crit Damage additive damage as well as the crit multiplier like The Grandfather seems to?

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Most Overpower Damage is in fact additive with the exception of some things like the Passive Skill Brute Force which is multiplicative Overpower Damage. If you were doing the calculation between Max HP and its Overpower additive contribution vs the Overpower affix (also additive), Overpower should contribute more additive damage to Overpower.

Max HP however has a lot of benefits, namely it adds a ton of EHP the higher your Max HP is. This makes Fortify more effective but also makes your Overpower modifier higher in a weird way. Assuming the same damage mitigation between 20 and 30k HP, you hit 50% effectiveness on your Overpowers once you dip to 15k HP and 10K HP with the 20K HP pool. This gives you more range. It also makes things like Imbiber or Damage While Healthy have more effectiveness.

Rarely are you faced with making the choice between Max HP or Overpower Affixes but my personal opinion is it is almost never worth it to take Overpower additive damage, especially as a Barbarian - you want Damage While Berserking (multiplicative). I would always take Max HP as your Overpower scaling is going to mostly come from Paragon, Brute Force, and passively your HP/Fortify.

If you look at the coefficients for damage buckets, Vulnerability is 20% or 1.2x, Critical Strike is 50% or 1.5x, and Overpower is UP TO 1.5x (that is at max HP). Vulnerability can be reliably kept up so that you always have that damage bonus. Critical Strike Damage requires Critical Strike Chance to be effective. At a 50% CHC, Critical Strike is essentially 1.25x averaged out. (This does not take into account things that guarantee Critical Strikes like Terror/Butcher’s Cleaver combo).

Overpower not only fluctuates in its damage potential because of your Current HP, but outside of the natural 3% Chance, you will need to Weapon Swap, Critically Strike 4 times with Bash, and/or wait the designated amount of time to gain Overpower. You cannot spam Overpowers, although you can take multiple sources to gain those guaranteed Overpowers from different sources. Most Barbarians will take 2 as it greatly increases the effectiveness of Overpower.

While Overpower Crits on Vulnerable targets will produce by far the highest numbers, you have to have a rotation to guarantee high HP nukes with all the conditions up. This is most like an opening attack on enemies. As it stands right now, damage is so far out of whack this is an effective strategy even for Uber bosses as you can 1 shot them. If scaling were different, Overpower would be less desireable (but you still should not overlook it).

Red Ring of Furor is multiplicative. Guaranteed Crits and synergy with Grandfather is exceptionally strong. It is a very good ring for HoTA.

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