[v1.7] 39k+ DPS with INFERNAL BLOW, +239% life, +6.8% regen, +145% armor, TRIPLE curses + blinds!

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nocebo wrote:

"36% physical damage ADDED as fire damage"

The corpse explosion is pure fire, there's no physical damage to take 36% of, and then add.

Like I said, simply for the damage it adds to the attack it made sense at the time of the original post, it just makes more sense now to use melee splash and multistrike.

We can add added fire into the above list though. Here's the calculation (we'll assume 20% quality again I guess, so 15% increased also):

(1 + 1.66 + (1 + 2.92 + 0.15 + 2*2.66*0.39)*1.8 ) * (1 + 0.3) = 17.8368

The extra 2 multiplied on there is because I had already factored out the 50% when I normalized it before.

That's a 41.2% DPS increase.

So it is almost as good as faster attacks. And of course if you get more (off-weapon) attack speed than what's in your build, (gloves, frenzy charges) faster attacks gets less good, so added fire could potentially be better than faster attacks in practice. Still not as good as melee physical or multistrike, so I still can't really see using it.

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magicrectangle wrote:

So it is almost as good as faster attacks. And of course if you get more (off-weapon) attack speed than what's in your build, (gloves, frenzy charges) faster attacks gets less good, so added fire could potentially be better than faster attacks in practice. Still not as good as melee physical or multistrike, so I still can't really see using it.

I am using both faster attacks AND melee physical AND added fire damage.

The reason added fire damage is a core pick for my build, is that all the damage gained through it, is fire damage.

We have more than 150% negative FIRE damage resistances to toss out, which gives extra 2.5 multiplier to the fire damage portion. Both the single hit and the AoE explosion gain the benefit from it directly. With the 125% damage efficiency.

And then on top of that we add the 2.5 multiplier from negative resistances on enemies, which skyrockets the value.

My original math is actually bit wrong on the build, since I've multiplied ALL the damage on Infernal Blow tooltip via the curses. It's actually only the FIRE damage that gets the massive increase.

But then again, more than 80% of the direct hit damage alone, is fire damage.


Current tooltip of Infernal Blow on L79

0.41s Attack Time

4057-6970 fire damage (full ~+150% damage from curses/EE)

775-1298 physical damage (no effect from curses/EE)

49-904 lightning damage (+25% damage from curses, since EE increases lightning resistance by 25% and elemental weakness reduced by ~50%)

206-378 cold damage (+50% damage from curses)

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nocebo wrote:

I am using both faster attacks AND melee physical AND added fire damage.

That's because you don't have melee splash or life leech. No melee splash obviously because it didn't exist, but no life leech? If you want to be married to a more defensive playstyle that's fine I guess, but life leech will ultimately allow you to be more aggressive, and thus kill faster anyway.

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The reason added fire damage is a core pick for my build, is that all the damage is pure fire damage.

We have more than 150% negative FIRE damage resistances to toss out, which gives extra 2.5 multiplier to the fire damage portion.

That's a fair point. More than negative 150% is a generalization since various monsters have different levels of resistance, and since you can't count on ele equilibrium having 100% uptime (and being in your favor 100% of the time on all targets), but still, you should be working with big negative resist numbers on most targets, so that is definitely in added fire damage's favor.

We can add a 100% multiplicative bonus to fire damage to account for negative resists to the formula (I think that's more realistic as an average than 150%) we get the following numbers:

Base = 21.8036
Multistrike = 32.0563 = 47.0% (lowered because of physical bias)
Faster Attacks = 30.8605 = 41.5% (no bias, no change)
Melee Physical = 33.3784 = 53.1% (very slightly lowered because of quality physical bias)
Increased AoE = 64.6% more guys hit in sufficiently large packs (no bias, no change)
Added Fire = 32.2157 = 47.8% (raised because of fire bias)

So, again remembering that this is guestimated based on an assumption of average fire resist conditions during play, multistrike drops to third place, and added fire moves to second:

Melee Physical > Added Fire > Multistrike > Faster attacks.

Increased AoE can still be potentially better (or worse) than all of them of course, depending on pack size / distribution.

Updated to v1.7. Added (more) correct DPS calculations.

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magicrectangle wrote:

No melee splash obviously because it didn't exist, but no life leech? If you want to be married to a more defensive playstyle that's fine I guess, but life leech will ultimately allow you to be more aggressive, and thus kill faster anyway.

It's massive damage drop. As said, on hardcore I'd run with it absolutely. But on softcore, I didn't feel I needed it. High resists, enough armor, potions (specially granite when needed), and rather high life regen seemed to be enough to feel tanky.

Wouldn't be so sure of the "faster killing" with life leech. :p

...can't deny it directly though, since I never tested it out. But I rarely had to run back to heal, some unique bosses excluded. Pretty sure I would have swapped to life leech, if survivability became an issue.

And I did run maps up to L74.

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magicrectangle wrote:

We can add a 100% multiplicative bonus to fire damage to account for negative resists to the formula (I think that's more realistic as an average than 150%)

Why?

Counting with the the actual percentage (currently @ -156% reists) seems to be the way to go to me. As curses cannot have partial effects.

After all, no matter what damage type you deal - enemies will always have mitigation.

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nocebo wrote:

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magicrectangle wrote:

We can add a 100% multiplicative bonus to fire damage to account for negative resists to the formula (I think that's more realistic as an average than 150%)

Why?

Counting with the the actual percentage (currently @ -156% reists) seems to be the way to go to me. As curses cannot have partial effects.

Because:

1) sometimes it will be 81% when equilibrium works against you (and it will, your arc totem only hits a few targets at a time)

2) enemies have elemental resists. They also have armor, so it is absolutely just a guesstimate, but fire resistant and elemental resistant monsters (which are plentiful) have a significant amount of fire resist.

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magicrectangle wrote:

1) sometimes it will be 81% when equilibrium works against you (and it will, your arc totem only hits a few targets at a time)

2) enemies have elemental resists. They also have armor, so it is absolutely just a guesstimate, but fire resistant and elemental resistant monsters (which are plentiful) have a significant amount of fire resist.

Still, you will be focusing killing the highest HP target around. Positioning spell totem with Arc properly, will make sure that it hits the main target each cast.

The reason you occasionally will hit vs increased resistances (81% in this case) is "too fast attack speed". Even with 20% quality faster casting, Arc does not cast fast enough. Adding chain as a support gem helps a bit, as it can chain back after you've landed your blow, but still before the Arc has re-cast next "pulse".

Enemies always have form of mitigation. I don't understand why you'd apply it on the fire damage by reducing the multiplier from 152% negative resistances to 100%, but at same time not doing similar reduces to other types of support gems. I mean, if you add physical damage - you'd have to consider the similar amount of armor as a form of defense.

Thus I'd just count with full values and point out that these values are vs 0% resistance or 0 armor targets. Although I expect EVERY single mob to have armor, but there might be some enemies with 0% resists.

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nocebo wrote:

Still, you will be focusing killing the highest HP target around. Positioning spell totem with Arc properly, will make sure that it hits the main target each cast.

You're still thinking in terms of not using melee splash, then. If you're not using melee splash you can plan to be doing most of your damage in line with the ele equilibrium from your totem. But again, I think when you try it out you'll find melee splash is well worth the loss of single target damage.

I think an LMP freezing pulse totem would probably be a better way to proc ele equilibrium with melee splash, letting you hit whole packs at once.

Honestly though, I'm much too lazy to do that. I'd rather just curse and then go hit stuff in the face.

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magicrectangle wrote:

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nocebo wrote:

Still, you will be focusing killing the highest HP target around. Positioning spell totem with Arc properly, will make sure that it hits the main target each cast.

You're still thinking in terms of not using melee splash, then. If you're not using melee splash you can plan to be doing most of your damage in line with the ele equilibrium from your totem.

The whole idea of the build has been the Infernal Blow -fire based explosion from killing the most durable target. That literally sweeps everything around it. Losing single target DPS isn't viable, since it's the only thing that really matters. Thus I am skipping melee splash as it lowers the single target DPS.

Elemental Equilibrium and the curses are there to increase the SINGLE target DPS. The fact that the weaker enemies get the curses/EE on them is just a bonus. They'd most probably still die, without the curses - from the highest HP target exploding.

And if we are fighting vs normal creeps only...

Let's presume we are fighting a huge pack of zombies - I typically just toss flammability and one-two shot the targets, depending the player amount in the party. This isn't enough to kill the rest of the pack as they have roughly same amount of hitpoints, but they lose roughly 40-70% of their health, depending of their fire resist, I suppose. Attack again and the next one explodes, either sweeping the whole pack or leaving them with very low hit points. Repeat once more (three attacks total) and the pack is gone.

It's not the normal enemies that slow your pace, it's the nasty special ones.