The Magician's Tower

Could someone who is more in the know explain how spell damage works beyond the obvious of it adds spell damage. Specifically I mean, at what point is this mod 3 added to our nuke? (Base amount? After Focus? Pre Crit? ect.) Is there any rough rule of thumb as +1 spell damage = X DPS? This has been what I've been modeling my gear choices after (as I've seen many of you comment) and I would like to have a little more information... well just cuz I'm curious like that ha. Thank you in advance.

I am not really sure exactly how spell DMG works. So this will be mostly guesswork on my part.

I believe Spell DMG (a long with the bard song that adds in DMG to nukes) get added in at the end of the nuke line. I am fairly positive this is how it works, otherwise we would see higher DMG gains from adding in more raw amounts of SD.

As to the DMG it actually adds, you can not really equate it to DPS. At least not how your describing it. If you take 700 Spell DMG, well that will be much easier to equate into a raw DPS number. Its like every 2 points of SD, you will see a DMG increase on your nukes. Or something funky of that sort, iirc you do not see a gain from just adding one point unless there are barriers you can break (like heroic int, when you hit a set amount you increase your mana regen ect).

To put it into a little better terms for DPS. Our Of Many nukes maxes at 5, Spear-Spear-Rain (I am unsure if every Rain gets the SD added, but fairly certain it does based on Of Many getting all 5) is another 5. So essentially with 700 Spell DMG your adding 7k DMG per weave. If Rain only counts as one, then your adding 5600 DMG per weave. That simply adds up to a respectable amount of DMG/DPS.

Spell DMG does not work on Gargs because the nuke is far too low of DMG.

My 2cp, feel free to correct if someone has a better understanding.

I am not sure if it is one to one, i thought is was based off a formula that took in account spell cast time and recast timer, supposedly spelldmg*(cast + recast)/7. So for every 100 spell damage, spears get 193 damage, bolts get 128 damage, of many line gets 139, fickle gets 96 for reference (think that math is right).

Spell damage is hitting every wave of rain as well.

I forgot about that formula.

However it is slightly different. (Base Cast time + Recast)/7 * SD. You also can't use that same 193 either. Like you can't do 2*193 and get the total for 200 Spell DMG. Need to recalculate the amount as your Spell DMG changes.

So if you have 700 Spell DMG and your Casting our Spear. 2+9=11/7=1.571428571428571*700= 1100 DMG added to Spears. 980 for Of Many.

Awesome guys, great info! Thanks for taking the time to go over that with me, it makes more sense now. A little more complicated than I thought it would be, but I get it. I need to work on getting more SD if 700 is the number you stopped on haha.

Thanks again.

So, a "kind-of" related question.... does Clairvoyance actually work? Does it ever return mana? And if so, then I assume there is no chat message that is printed, because I've never seen a message that would indicate clairvoyance kicked in.

Tat

Piemastaj wrote:I forgot about that formula.

However it is slightly different. (Base Cast time + Recast)/7 * SD. You also can't use that same 193 either. Like you can't do 2*193 and get the total for 200 Spell DMG. Need to recalculate the amount as your Spell DMG changes.

So if you have 700 Spell DMG and your Casting our Spear. 2+9=11/7=1.571428571428571*700= 1100 DMG added to Spears. 980 for Of Many.

Base cast time of Spear is 3.5 though. Is there a penalty for having a better foci, I didn't think there was.

Looks like i messed up my math on the Spear is all. The formula you wrote is the same as mine you just swapped around the order. You will get the same result either way. And actually you can just multiple it by two if I didn't mess up the math on spear in first case. I eliminated a few decimal places but you will see it is spot on if I kept them in there.
3.5+9=12.5/7=1.785714285*100= 178.571 (the math if i did it right for spear) for 100 spell dam
3.5+9=12.5/7=1.785714285*700= 1250 for 700 dam
178.571*7= 1249.997 dam

I am going to play the lack of sleep card. 2 seconds makes 0 sense /boggle.

Yeah I based that off of your math, would make sense that it does work which is what struck me as odd why it didn't.

Either way that is the formula u would use to calculate things out.

Clairvoyance is still considered broken I believe. AFAIK the only way you can really test if its working is by having like 2000 points of it. If it is working its supposed to basically save a portion of mana (based on your points) based on the cost of the spell. Like I said though, fairly certain it does not work.

I was playing with my Spell damage the other day, swapping in a 30 spell dmg piece, then swapping out. Using rains ( since theyre not subject to focus, and give hard numbers)

Adding 30 Spell Dmg increased my Base dmg by like 75 ( non-crit) and 250 Crit. Tested it on the 92, and 99 rain,and they were both the same,70 something non crit, around 250 crit.

Going with all the best Spell damage gear and augs, you may improve your Spell-dmg by about 100 at the cost of some hp's ( Int/spelldmg gear vs. Hitpoint gear ). This might increase your spell dps something like 2%, and your total dps( since pets contribute a significant fraction ) even less.

By comparison, Just being prepared, and using your clicky fire orb, can add like 4%... Having your rk III's adds like 6-7%. & Not dieing to ae's/ae ramp ( belly casters ) adds 100%, which is why I don't care about spell damage, and geared with 100% priority to Max HP's.

I'm not going as far as to say I don't care about SD, however I don't get all the SD I can at the expense of everything else. I try to have a balanced approach to gearing. Getting an extra 5 SD at the expense on 5 HInt isn't worth it to me, but if it were 5 SD for 1 Hint, or maybe even 2 Hint, I'd think about it.

When I'm getting anything, those are the 2 stats I look at 1st though. HInt and SD. Focus is also important and everything else is kinda secondary.