I am quite new and was lucky enough to find scheaffers hammer just before turning level 70. It does 700% weapon damage in lightning.
It does indeed do multiple times the damage i do myself. This one feels so OP that i kind of stopped caring about my attack damage output and started focussing purely on pushing up this lightning damage and surviving with this hardcore toon.
However, what What exactly is weapon damage.?
Does everything that increases my sheet damage help weapon damage ? Battle rage ? Berserkers rage ?
When looking at all these items that do 500 - 1000% weapon damage aoe i get the feeling that my attack skills dont matter all that much anymore. Who cares if im whirlwinding or frenzying or whatever if i only do a fraction of the damage that everything gets near me anyway. Doesnt that make the game a bit of a joke. Or am i overlooking things here and are there factors that will greatly increase my damage output but not weapon damage (and thus not those effects ?)
Weapon damage is literally damage listed on your weapon. For example:
You'll notice that it isn't a single number, but a number range. Each time you cast a spell or do an attack a random number within that range is selected as your weapon damage. Why does the game then not make this number larger or more obvious? Because they assume you are stupid and can't figure out how attack speed works together with damage to create a Damage-per-Second number. But what the game actually uses to make
calculations is the Damage number I have highlighted in the picture above.
The thing that is labeled as "Damage" in your character detail sheet is a lie. That is not your damage. It is a meaningless number that tries to estimate how your other stats, like attack speed, crit chance, and crit damage, work together with your REAL damage number on your weapon. No where in the game in any calculation does it use the number listed in your character detail sheet.
I had just edited out my armor question. I didnt realise before that it is also for magic damage and thus it is identical to res all. (aint that an interesting design choise)
And i guess the answer to that last question then is "it gets even worse" lol.
Little use being fancy and using combining multiple skills if one of them does 25x dmg.
Oh well, D3 is kinda fun in a gimmicky way. I guess it wont ever live up to its predecessors though where you could at least have a little skill in the game. Fits the theme with heartstone and heroes of the storm. Blizzard went from the making the best games for the serious gamer to focussing on the casual. Good thing im trying to be casual with my gaming these days
Try using d3planner.com if you want to understand how various things affect your damage. Import your character via your battle tag, spend your paragon points, then turn on the buffs you want to use. Your skills will display the damage they will actually do in game, including breaking down everything affecting that damage and its source. It's a pretty nifty lil site.
While the information in here is correct, I want to add there (probably, I read about this but can't find an offical source) was initially a reason for different kinds of damage. From what I read, this was both the case in early D3 beta as well as ROS beta.
They wanted to add a special proc depending on the damage type: arcane would have a chance to charm, fire would (if I'm correct) do a bit of AOE damge (like area damage works), lightning had a chance to stun, cold a chance to slow/freeze, can't remember what holy and poison were intended to do. This is (no source, going from what I heard/read) the reason "cold weapons" in vanilla had lower damage ranges, and "black weapons" at some point were higher damage range.
Back in vanilla, the elemental damage types were also bad, because some items (like soj, zuni boots, stormcrow, trium virate, probably more) had +x% elemental damage. This did not work as it is now, but would add that damage to the "black" non-elemental part of your weapon.
However, I heard this was too hard to balance and got dumped completely. Still wanted to add this information, since there are rumors about another expansion getting announced "soon", and they might have another look at this concept and try to bring it back. While this is something pretty small, I think this might bring many changes by itself to how we play the game and build our char (DH go with iceblink gem to proc cull the weak and bott, imagine them rolling weapon damage to cold to proc it, now nobody cares about it).
Actually, "black" (physical) damage wasn't the highest, I believe fire was better (although Lightning had the widest range or something) The issue was that skills were created to only convert base item damage into the rune element ... except they also changed black damage as well. e.g. a Fire ability with +40% fire damage would scale 100 black damage up to 140, while 100 lightning damage would remain 100 lightning. There was some more funky scaling stuff going on where elemental damage missed out on some other multipliers, but that's the basic concept of it.
If they do something with weapon damage type in the expansion, I hope it's something along the likes of: * Weapons that roll +damage in a certain elemental school will now convert all their damage to this school. * Skills with the 'Storm' school will do damage in this specific school on your weapon. When dual wielding, Storm skills will alternate weapons, choosing the appropriate damage school each time.
* Certain legendaries, such as Maximus or Thunderfury, can no longer have their damage school rerolled to another, to retain their unique flavor.
Hello,
I am quite new and was lucky enough to find scheaffers hammer just before turning level 70. It does 700% weapon damage in lightning.
It does indeed do multiple times the damage i do myself. This one feels so OP that i kind of stopped caring about my attack damage output and started focussing purely on pushing up this lightning damage and surviving with this hardcore toon.
However, what What exactly is weapon damage.?
Does everything that increases my sheet damage help weapon damage ? Battle rage ? Berserkers rage ?
When looking at all these items that do 500 - 1000% weapon damage aoe i get the feeling that my attack skills dont matter all that much anymore. Who cares if im whirlwinding or frenzying or whatever if i only do a fraction of the damage that everything gets near me anyway. Doesnt that make the game a bit of a joke. Or am i overlooking things here and are there factors that will greatly increase my damage output but not weapon damage (and thus not those effects ?)
Weapon damage is literally damage listed on your weapon. For example:
You'll notice that it isn't a single number, but a number range. Each time you cast a spell or do an attack a random number within that range is selected as your weapon damage. Why does the game then not make this number larger or more obvious? Because they assume you are stupid and can't figure out how attack speed works together with damage to create a Damage-per-Second number. But what the game actually uses to make
calculations is the Damage number I have highlighted in the picture above.
The thing that is labeled as "Damage" in your character detail sheet is a lie. That is not your damage. It is a meaningless number that tries to estimate how your other stats, like attack speed, crit chance, and crit damage, work together with your REAL damage number on your weapon. No where in the game in any calculation does it use the number listed in your character detail sheet.
Thanx hldemi, so everything is included.
I had just edited out my armor question. I didnt realise before that it is also for magic damage and thus it is identical to res all. (aint that an interesting design choise)
And i guess the answer to that last question then is "it gets even worse" lol.
Little use being fancy and using combining multiple skills if one of them does 25x dmg.
Oh well, D3 is kinda fun in a gimmicky way. I guess it wont ever live up to its predecessors though where you could at least have a little skill in the game. Fits the theme with heartstone and heroes of the storm. Blizzard went from the making the best games for the serious gamer to focussing on the casual. Good thing im trying to be casual with my gaming these days
Try using d3planner.com if you want to understand how various things affect your damage. Import your character via your battle tag, spend your paragon points, then turn on the buffs you want to use. Your skills will display the damage they will actually do in game, including breaking down everything affecting that damage and its source. It's a pretty nifty lil site.
Yup, blackcurse explained it pretty well.
While the information in here is correct, I want to add there (probably, I read about this but can't find an offical source) was initially a reason for different kinds of damage. From what I read, this was both the case in early D3 beta as well as ROS beta.
They wanted to add a special proc depending on the damage type: arcane would have a chance to charm, fire would (if I'm correct) do a bit of AOE damge (like area damage works), lightning had a chance to stun, cold a chance to slow/freeze, can't remember what holy and poison were intended to do. This is (no source, going from what I heard/read) the reason "cold weapons" in vanilla had lower damage ranges, and "black weapons" at some point were higher damage range.
Back in vanilla, the elemental damage types were also bad, because some items (like soj, zuni boots, stormcrow, trium virate, probably more) had +x% elemental damage. This did not work as it is now, but would add that damage to the "black" non-elemental part of your weapon.
However, I heard this was too hard to balance and got dumped completely. Still wanted to add this information, since there are rumors about another expansion getting announced "soon", and they might have another look at this concept and try to bring it back. While this is something pretty small, I think this might bring many changes by itself to how we play the game and build our char (DH go with iceblink gem to proc cull the weak and bott, imagine them rolling weapon damage to cold to proc it, now nobody cares about it).
Actually, "black" (physical) damage wasn't the highest, I believe fire was better (although Lightning had the widest range or something) The issue was that skills were created to only convert base item damage into the rune element ... except they also changed black damage as well. e.g. a Fire ability with +40% fire damage would scale 100 black damage up to 140, while 100 lightning damage would remain 100 lightning. There was some more funky scaling stuff going on where elemental damage missed out on some other multipliers, but that's the basic concept of it.
If they do something with weapon damage type in the expansion, I hope it's something along the likes of:
* Weapons that roll +damage in a certain elemental school will now convert all their damage to this school.
* Skills with the 'Storm' school will do damage in this specific school on your weapon. When dual wielding, Storm skills will alternate weapons, choosing the appropriate damage school each time.
* Certain legendaries, such as Maximus or Thunderfury, can no longer have their damage school rerolled to another, to retain their unique flavor.