Help me understand arcane math

Classes Mage
1

So, I really hate how Blizzard calculates spell modifiers, because I never how they actually do it.

Diablo franchise is infamous for this. But we are in WoW, and I’d like to understand which modifiers they use.

For this change:

  • Arcane Barrage damage reduced by 65%.

  • Arcane Barrage damage increase per Arcane Charge increased to 90% (was 30%).

How does the math work for this? I get they want the instant cast to be weak, so you can’t just keep spamming it, and they are shifting the damage to building up charges.

Does the math work out the same? Is it 90% per charge additive or multiplicative?

Can a math genius help me understand it?

Thank you.

2

I believe it is Additive, WoW for the most part has additive damage modifiers unlike Path of Exile (which I spend way too much time using math in)
Hopping on my mage:
Base damage = 11494
number of Charges Damage (1/2/3/4) = 16654 / 21124 / 25112 / 30663
With my damage bonus per charge (36% per charge currently) calculating per charge additively results in 28045.36 which the damage discrepancy is probably due to the cycling power buff.
Multiplicatively would be 39321

Now for the values (are they from patch notes because I’m not seeing 90% damage per charge right now in game?), assuming it still is additive the before damage for full barrage using 1000 base damage would be:

Old values:
2200 (additively)
or
2856 (multiplicatively)
New Values:
1295 (additively)
or
4561 (multiplicatively)

So basically if they are doing it additively then Arcane barrage would have gotten a massive nerf, otherwise massive buff.

Also thanks for asking this question, it was fun to play with (and try to actually make my words somewhat readable)

TLDR: I believe they are calculated additively and as such if these changes were to be put into the game Arcane barrage would be doing about half the damage.

2 Likes
3

Here is the article from WoWhead:

Just type in “Arcane Barrage” into the ctrl+f, because it is a lot of changes lol.

It looks like nerfs to arcane missiles too.

1 Like
4

Ahh that makes sense, and ouch that means there is a massive nerf to arcane barrage coming soon or at least in the Beta.
The Arcane missile change seems to be more of a normal balancing change.