I have been testing the contagion talent in the Affliction tree primarily with Unstable Affliction since it is the key damaging currently. It reads “Increases the Critical strike damage dealt by Agony, Wither, and Unstable Affliction by (15% / 30%). This can be interpreted in two different ways. First it makes the multiplier for critical strikes 1.8 rather than the 1.5 baseline for these spells, after testing this was not correct. Second way to look at it is it only increases the critical strike portion of the damage by 30% (.5x.3=.15) increasing the multiplier to 1.65 rather than the 1.5. This seemed to be more in line when tested on the target dummy however in practice in arenas there was no noticeable increase in damage.
I personally was getting larger critical strikes without the talent when simply changing the Contagion talent to Cull the Weak which should have no effect with the spells buffed by contagion.
I ran 12 rounds of solo shuffle with Contagion and 12 without.
12 Rounds with Contagion I showed 121 critical strikes total with a range of 716K to 884K across all rounds combined. I had an avg. critical strike at 756k
12 Rounds without contagion I showed 127 critical strikes total with a range of 668k to 915k across all the rounds combined. I had an avg. critical strike at 727k
I am fully aware there are a lot of factors when it comes to damage and why it may hit one person harder than another however in most cases and in a variety of testing it should start to show statistically that there is a 15% higher damage with it, and I have been unable to see it with UA. Is this just me? Has anyone else tested or seen this? I am also aware that these are still fairly low counts to look at the statistics and can be harder to tease out the patterns.
After this I looked to Wither briefly and in the Hellcaller talent tree Mark of Pero’arn reads the same as contagion “Critical Strike damage dealt by Wither is increased by 25%” this when tested clearly made the multiplier add the .25 to the normal 1.5 making it 1.75 without Contagion. With Contagion it made it approximately 1.975.
This leads me to ask the question are we supposed to know how the spells will interact with out micro testing every talent especially those that read the same but interact differently? also is contagion working as intended with it only taking a small fraction on the critical strike damage, or should it be making the multiplier 1.8?