[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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SpidaFly wrote:

Anyone try the IR variant? I decided to give it a go, spent the regrets to reshaping tree... and suddenly found myself struggling in places I never struggled before. Felt very rippy to me. I sold some gear and specced right back.


... but... I just HAD to try. *g*

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demonkiller12 wrote:

could u possibly make a leveling guide with the 2.1 version please

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Have you done atziri yet? Would you recommend just the spell totem/wither and CA, or would you try and fit essence drain as well?

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mezmery wrote:

what is most effective way to color 6l bow bbbrgg

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Serleth wrote:

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mezmery wrote:

what is most effective way to color 6l bow bbbrgg

Vorici Chrome Calc

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Serleth wrote:

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dHsn wrote:

I used to play a PA build before this new patch and after a quick update about the changes on the tree and new gems I came here to see the work you did with the tree and I have a question: Why did you take more DoT nodes than chaos damage nodes?

I'm not an expert on PA builds and my question is meant to gather info about this matter in order to improve my knowledge.

CA is one of the simpler examples about how increased damage modifiers work. It gets more complex than this for other skills, and I'll provide a short example of that as well.

For CA, we know that Damage Over Time, Chaos Damage, Area Damage and Projectile Damage all increase the cloud damage. If you didn't well, now you do.

So what happens with increased damage modifiers is that they all add together before applying to the relevant portion of damage. Like I said, with CA, it's simple. There's only one damage type that's being modified.

The (simple) formula for damage modification is this:

Final DPS = [(Base Damage) * (100% + Increased Damage Modifiers)] * (100% + Multiplicative Damage Modifiers)

In the above formula, the 100% is basically there to just say "we're not looking to get 10% of our damage, we're looking to get 100% of our damage PLUS the increased damage."

Another way of expressing that is 1 + (Increased Damage Modifiers / 100).


For the purposes of this example, I'll keep it extremely simple.

Let's say we have:

* Base Damage of 200
* 10% increased DoT
* 20% increased Proj damage
* 30% increased Chaos damage

So we plug it in and it looks like this

FDPS = 200 * (100% + 10 + 20 + 30) * (100% [since we're not adding any multiplicative damage])
FDPS = 200 * (1 + [10+20+30/100]) * 1
FDPS = 200 * 1.6 * 1
FDPS = 320

Now let's change the values on those increased modifiers to:

* 20% increased DoT
* 10% increased Chaos damage
* 30% increased Proj damage.

FDPS = 200 * (100% + 20 + 10 + 30) * (100%)
FDPS - 200 * (1 + [20 + 10 + 30]/100) * 1
FDPS = 200 * 1.6 * 1
FDPS = 320

Notice how the final damage doesn't change.

So for CA, it's completely irrelevant which damage type you have more of because they all scale the damage equally, and because of the way the calculation is done (all increased modifiers adding together with each other before applying to the damage).


Let's take a look at a more complicated example: Fireball with flat added lightning damage.

* Fireball Base Damage = 200
* Flat added lightning = 50
* Increased spell damage = 10%
* Increased fire damage = 20%
* Increased elemental damage = 20%

So the problem here is that the increased fire damage will scale the fireball damage, but NOT the added lightning damage. Meanwhile, because we're dealing pure elemental damage (and not using say, added chaos), both the spell damage and generic elemental damage will apply to both the fireball and the flat added lightning. But again, fire will not touch the added lightning.

I'll break it down into two separate calculations here to make it more readily apparent

Fireball DPS = 200 * (1 + [10 + 20 + 20]/100)
= 200 * 1.5
= 300

Flat Lightning = 50 * (1 + [10 + 20]/100)
= 50 * 1.3
= 65

Net DPS = 365

But what if we have flat added fire instead?

Flat Fire = 50 * (1 + [10 + 20 + 20]/100)
= 50 * 1.5
= 75

Net DPS = 300 + 75 = 375.


Or what about 50 flat added chaos?

Flat Chaos = 50 * (1 + [10]/100)
= 50 * 1.1
= 55


Notice how in the flat lightning damage, the fire did not apply, and for the flat chaos damage, only the spell damage applied.


So it's very important to consider your damage sources when you are trying to scale your skills, and sometimes it is more complicated to understand.

A prime example of this consideration at work is Glacial Cascade: physical damage increases will only scale the physical portion of the skill; cold will only scale cold. So every GC build you see takes "spell damage," because it scales both the physical and cold.


And with CA, you would look at the skill and think it's fairly obvious DoT, Chaos and Area damage scale the cloud but a lot of people trip up and think projectile damage will not. But you have to remember, the projectile is in fact what deals the damage, because it explodes with the ground and then leaves the chaos cloud behind.


Sorry for the essay but I hope this makes it clear.

TL;DR increased damage modifiers add together before applying to the damage so no particular damage type takes priority for CA.