Cruelty

The wording on this gem is very confusing. I'm searching reddit (nothing but speculation except damage calculation) since there's nothing here and all I see are questions, like:

Because this has a threshold like an ailment, you need to hit it for a certain amount of it's health to get the bonus. More damage with hit, more dot bonus.

Is the dot bonus only applied to the monster you hit even though you have a timer that can be refreshed so I have the buff from the initial hit? So If I hit a white trash thing, get max buff amount, then go on to attack bosses? But if I use the same skill to attack a boss, would the bonus be recalculated before the dot is applied from it's previous threshold? If so, then it's on a hit by hit basis, so why have a timer?

I watched the showcase. It isn't explained there either, but there's more info than in the patch notes and on the skill gem. I get the impression that perhaps it takes the highest hit you do to whatever, say, white trash mob, get max 50% bonus, and it stays maxed out until it either depletes and is refreshed? But when is it refreshed? Is it like burning? Hit white, get max buff for 5 seconds, hit boss, max buff stays on for 5 seconds. At the end of five seconds, the 50% buff wears off and it goes to the next highest buff calculation if there wasn't anything hit to grant a 50% bonus, so boss is hit, now bonus is 10% (because dot skills don't hit very hard).

Or is it some other mechanic entirely?

Is the cruelty buff affected by the support gems it's linked to? If so, what would the tags be? Spell only? What about damage over time?

There's no wiki entry on this.

Why would anyone use this really? It is bad against bosses, which is what you want to do the most damage against. I forget the number, but in order to get the max bonus, you need to do a 2.3M hit against Sirus. What dot skill can possibly do that? Maybe your new reap skill, but what else? And you get good bonuses on what, blue, and yellow monsters, but who cares,? You're already plowing through that stuff on a high dps build.

Please lets keep speculation out of this. I'd prefer a dev response

Tried this gem on DoT based Exsanguinate, that obviously are not skill for boss killing, and this feels good. For clearing it's provide a slightly bigger bonus than controlled destruction.

Later I decide to try a different setup, using Reap as 6-link and Exsanguinate as 5-link in Hungry loop. But before I started, I noticed that cruelty buff works only for supported skill...

Why?

This support gem provide a buff, that shown on buff panel in line with other buffs. Buff from this support calculated from hit part of damage, but boost DoT part. Hit was hard - DoT will painful. But scale both part of damage is hard, because of how exactly damage multipliers, skill tree, jewels and tags worked, and Interacted with each other.

For example: area damage. This boost hit part of Reap damage, but not DoT part. Some points on skill tree, as well as jewel mods, has a DoT multipliers that boost DoT part a lot, but do nothing with hit damage part. You can't practically scale both part effectively at the same time.

Aslo we have things such as Arcane surge that work globaly, and also shown on buff panel in line with others. You even don't need to hit enemy to get Arcan surge - just spend some mana and done: you have global buff for all your spells for few seconds.

Why buff that require hard hit for max benefits is local?

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Cruelty makes all skills supported by Cruelty Support deal up to 50% more damage over time, based on the amount of damage in the hit which grants it

For me this is very poorly worded and I struggeled really hard to understand what "based on the amount of damage in the hit which grants it" meant and even in my native language (German) it didn't help at all to understand it.

Thus I'd suggest changing the wording to something like this:

"Cruelty makes all skills supported by Cruelty Support deal up to 50% more damage over time, based on the amount of damage dealt to an enemy."

Additionally it would be very great to have exact numbers on when we hit the threshold to gain maximum DoT that it can offer.

Hello folks.

I leveled this support gem while doing a pure phys EQ bleed build with Ascendant (Gladiator + Raider).

First to note is you can check if the buff (and more dot damage) is active by either looking at the red cruelty symbol or by opening your bleed skills panel in the character sheet.

Based on GGG information the buff gets the full potential when you're doing around 3.2% of the targets max life, which should happen frequently on trash mobs.
From my tests vs low HP monsters i can confirm this.


This buff (once triggered) makes your supported skill do (up to) 50% more dot damage. Only the supported skill but works on all enemies and not only on the enemy you triggered the buff.

But now why i think this support gem is redundant in comparison to the good old Melee Pys DMG support. At least when you're running a skill where most dmg comes from dots.

Both give around 50% more ailment dmg but with Melee Phys DMG at all times without an HP threshold (probably not gonna proc consistently or at all at high hp bosses) or a short duration of 4 seconds.

Added a small gallery to show this skill in action. Tested in A9 BA to proc the 50% more dot damgage easly since all mobs there have low HP.

https://imgur.com/a/T9ssLMD

Btw the MPD gem is only level 13, so dot damage should be approx the same.

Edit: as with all bleed/slam (+ which use warcries) the tooltip dps is a troll as the real dot dps is way higher. In my case around 30 times on non-moving / stationary targets.

Does the buff increase bleed damage from non dot physical attack skills like frenzy for example (assuming i have %chance to bleed from another source)

Does Cruelty work with minions? I know there is nothing on the gem saying that it doesn't but sometimes these type of things can be a bit wonky.

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Xhibbi wrote:

Does Cruelty work with minions? I know there is nothing on the gem saying that it doesn't but sometimes these type of things can be a bit wonky.

They get the more damage with hits part, but i also want to know if they get the Cruelty buff

Does cruelty reset when you hit harder , like bleed ?

And if I have another skill that have cruelty , will it proc the higher dps of DoT ?

Ex : split arrow and puncture.