Double Dipping - and why it is so powerful

Most of the time when you look at a support gem, passive, or piece of equipment, it's obvious how much it will help you.

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Egs: If you get 40% increased burning damage, you might expect to do 40% more damage with burning attacks (or less, because 'increased' gives diminishing returns).

If you get 70% more weapon elemental damage, you'd expect to do 70% more elemental damage with your weapons.

If you reduce the enemy's resistance by 30%, you might expect to do around 30% more damage to them (depending on their staring resistance of course).

If you get 20-30 additional fire damage, you'd expect to do 20-30 more fire damage per hit.

etc etc....
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However, some skills can get much, much more powerful than you'd expect. They do this by 'double dipping'.
(I've put this in feedback since it's feedback about game balance. But the main point of this thread is for people to understand how it works, and draw their own conclusions - not for me to give my opinion.)

Here are some examples, starting off with the one everyone's heard about:

Example 1: Cleave (vs Sweep)

If you just look at the numbers on these skills, they seem pretty similar. Both have 70% damage effectiveness, and attack in an area. Cleave hits with both weapons when dual-wielding, which would mean you'd get twice as much damage as with a 1-hand weapon, but that's OK because it also has "40% reduced physical weapon damage while dual-wielding." So it's balanced, right?

Wrong. First off, it's only 'decreased', not 'less'. But more importantly, it's only physical damage. Elemental damage is the part you can 'double dip' on best.
For the poor person using sweep or 1-hand cleave, every time they get a flat elemental damage boost (eg: from wrath or anger, or from sadima's touch etc...), it boosts your damage by that much. So if you get 20-30 additional fire damage per hit (after the 70% modifier), you deal 20-30 more fire damage per hit. No-brainer.
However, for someone using dual-wielding; if they get 20-30 additional fire damage, it adds that to each weapon. Since they hit with both weapons, it actually gives 40-60 additional fire damage.
So, cleave, basically, cleave does twice as much elemental damage with 2 weapons as with one. To equal this power, someone with only 1 weapon would need to have a whopping 140% damage effectiveness. This is higher than most single-target skills! So it's actually better to use cleave dual-wielded against single targets than it is to use any skill except heavy strike.

Conclusion: When using lots of elemental bonus damage, dual-wield cleave double-dips on all of it, doubling the damage output to the equivalent of 140% damage effectiveness (instead of 70%).
'Double-Dip' Rating: Elemental Cleave has a double-dip rating of 2x more than you'd expect.

Example 2: Ignite and elemental resistances

When you use an elemental curse to reduce the enemy's fire resistance by 50%, you'd expect to do 50% more damage to them with fire, right?

Wrong. The amount of ignite damage you take is dependent on the initial amount of fire damage you took, *after* accounting for their elemental resistance. Then, when you burn, you take even more damage from having a low elemental resistance.

What you'd expect: If you use a combination of reductions to reduce an enemy's fire resistance by 100% (with flammability and elemental weakness curses, or using ele equilibrium), it would go from 100% to 200%. So what you'd expect is for the damage you deal to double. That's how it works for other skills, anyway.

What actually happens: Let's imagine you would normally deal 100 fire damage to an enemy. With their resistance lowered to -100%, now deal 200 damage. All good so far. However, lets imagine you ignite them. Since they took 200 damage initially, then they are ignited for 200 and take 200 fire damage per second from burning. However, because their elemental resistance is -100%, they actually take 400 damage per second. That's quadruple, not double!

Conclusion: As you can see, Ignite 'double-dips' on elemental resistances, doubling the burning dps you'd expect.
Double-Dip Rating: Ignite has a double-dip rating of 2x more than you'd expect, with elemental resistance.
(Note, the exact numbers for burning dps should be divided by 3, since burning only deals 1/3 of the damage per second. But it's still double what you'd expect.)


Example 3: Shock and elemental proliferation

Being shocked increases the damage you take by 40%. So you'd expect, after being shocked once, to take 40% more damage. You'd have to be shocked three times before it rose to 120%, which is hard to reliably without a long shock duration. Right?

Wrong. With elemental proliferation, if you shock a group of enemies once, they all share their shocks with each other. So for one shock, you instantly maximise the stack to 3. So for an attack of 100 damage, you'd now deal 120 extra damage, instead of 40.

Conclusion: elemental proliferation means you can get triple the bonus damage you expected to do (or, the same bonus damage in 1/3 the time), meaning it makes shocking 3x as effective. In terms of raw damage output, you deal 57% more damage than you thought you would.
'Double-dip' rating: elemental proliferation has a rating of 3x more effectiveness than you'd expect with shock.
Shock with ele proliferation has a double dip rating of 1.57x more damage than you'd expect.

Example 4: Shock and ignite
And gets even better. Did you know that shock increases damage you take from damage over time as well?
Imagine you're shocked 3 times, so take 120% more damage. Like above, this means a fire hit of 100 will actually deal 220 damage. So this means you get ignited for 220 dps. But, hey, you're shocked! So you take 120% more burning damage too. That's 484 burning dps.

Conclusion: Shock works the same as ele resistances for making ignite more effective.
Double-Dip rating: ignite has a double-dip rating of 2x more dps than you'd expect with shock.

Putting it all together

Surely, doing twice as much damage as you'd expect is enough for you! But if not, here's how you can put them all together to magnify the effect.

Here's an example setup - Use quality arc with quality added lightning damage, and elemental proliferation, on a totem (also use static blows). This will mean the enemies get shocked really quickly, and when they do, instantly go up to 3 shocks.
Then, use elemental curses (or elemental equilibirum, from the arc) to bring the enemy's resistance to 200% (it's possible to get higher, but 200% is pretty easy to achieve with two curses).

Then, use fire trap on the enemy. (With a decent chance to ignite, you should ignite often too.) By now, you probably expect it to be insane, but anyway...

Here's what you might (naively) expect: Shock increases dps by 2.2x, lowered resistances double the dps, so overall a 100 dmg attack should deal 100 x 2 x 1.4 = 440 dps.

Here's what actually happens: Shock increases the damage 2.2x, and also increases burning damage by the same amount. Elemental resistances apply twice too, so effectively quadruple the burning dps too. So all up, a 100 damage attack deals 440 damage initially, and then you multiply that by 4.4 as well to find that it does 1936 burning dps from the ignite. That's 4.4x more damage than you might expect!

So here's what, by now, you probably expect:
Conclusion: Fire trap (or another igniting skill), combined with shock on ele proliferation, and elemental resistances, deals 4.4x more burning dps than you'd expect.
Right?

For Fire trap; nope, still wrong. Because fire trap also leaves a patch of burning ground, which is also affected by shock and elemental resistances, and stacks with the burning from ignite.

I know, right?

Double-dip rating: Fireball (with shock and ele curses) has a double-dip rating of 4.4x more damage than you might expect.
Fire trap with shock and ele curses has a double-dip rating of <error, too high, you've broken it>.

(Note, the exact numbers for burning dps should be divided by 3, since burning only deals 1/3 of the damage per second. But this also affects what you'd expect, too. So the end result is still 4.4 times what you'd expect.)

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Thoughts? Comments? Did I make any calculation errors?

Also, post your examples of crazy double-dipping here too.

I personally expect the double dipping of elemental dmg on cleave to be fixed at some point. Mainly because the stat states adds 4-47 lightning dmg, and not adds xx dmg per weapon.

If anyone is interested, this is what I would do to 'fix' the above 'problems':

I want to point out one of Ele-cleave's biggest boosts.

Elemental Damage VS Physical Damage.

You can get 3 different types of Elemental damage adding mods on a weapon. One for each type of elemental damage.

Whereas, you can only get 1 physical damage adding mod on a weapon. This makes a huge difference.

I think elemental damage mods should be nerfed accordingly.

There are three types of physical damage mod you can get too (including, like, 150% increased physical damage). Stacking all three of them gives insane physical dps.

Cleave is sort of a bug they did not account for. They put the reduced damage in to keep cleaves dps down, knwong it attacked with both wepaons at once. But they forgot about the ele dmg.

As for burning damage, yes, it is very powerful. Not too many skills have a big enough initial hit to be powerful for burning.

Shock stacks, you seem to be slightly wrong here. Ele prolif spreads it to nearby enemies. That means if you hit one enemy, and shock them, every enemy within range has 1 shock stack. Not 3 like you assume, 1

If you hit 3 enemies and shock all 3, yes, it would splash. Thats the entire point of ele prolif.

You also missed that ele prolif works best with burning damage (better than shock), as it means the HIGHEST burn damage is spread to everyone in range, and since all fire skills do have variable fire damage, this is very powerful

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Real_Wolf wrote:

Shock stacks, you seem to be slightly wrong here. Ele prolif spreads it to nearby enemies. That means if you hit one enemy, and shock them, every enemy within range has 1 shock stack. Not 3 like you assume, 1

Really? Oh, ok. Yeah I was totally wrong then.

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You also missed that ele prolif works best with burning damage (better than shock), as it means the HIGHEST burn damage is spread to everyone in range, and since all fire skills do have variable fire damage, this is very powerful

This isn't double-dipping, though. It's just what ele prolif does.

I'm beginning to suspect that elemental damage was intended to be more powerful. Possibly not on this scale but in general as I'm yet to see much of any incentive to go straight physical damage, especially as it's generally much more difficult to achieve and isn't exactly supported very well.

But if this is actually the case then GGG needs to emphasize that through in game information. They already have the three skill gems and used elements as part of the game's over all look and image so it would easily fit.

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CirePadela wrote:

I'm beginning to suspect that elemental damage was intended to be more powerful. Possibly not on this scale but in general as I'm yet to see much of any incentive to go straight physical damage, especially as it's generally much more difficult to achieve and isn't exactly supported very well.

But if this is actually the case then GGG needs to emphasize that through in game information. They already have the three skill gems and used elements as part of the game's over all look and image so it would easily fit.

physical dmg is the best dmg in the game. Its just a pain to gear for.

Elemental dmg is higher, but you end up losing a lot ti enemy resists. Even a max level curse cant bring enemy res down all the way.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

physical dmg is the best dmg in the game. Its just a pain to gear for.

Elemental dmg is higher, but you end up losing a lot ti enemy resists. Even a max level curse cant bring enemy res down all the way.

This. Like ES vs life, numbers alone are misinforming. Taking into account armour formula and that it seems that mobs have low armour values, physical damage is pretty much 'true' damage. That's not the case with ele damage.