Confused about damage increases

I have 2 questions.

1. When a helm enchantment says a skill receives 40% more damage is this equivalent of adding 40% spell damage in general?

2. When I am playing a totem crit build which damage increase would be more beneficial - crit multiplier, spell damage or totem damage? Totem damage and spell damage in particular are the same, right?

1. There is no helmet enchant that says 'more damage', they're increases. It is assumed that those bonuses work as a generic 'increased damage' bonus applied only to that skill, which means it applies to all types of damage it does and any aftereffects like ignite, poison or bleed. I've done some testing with similar conditional modifiers and it should work that way, though I admittedly never try it with an actual helm enchant.

2. Most of the time, totem damage is also a generic increase that works if you do the damage through a totem, so it will apply to anything, spell damage bonus is are more restrictive. You can't compare damage and crit multi increases without knowing how much exactly you got of either.

All increased/reduced% are summed together as a single multiplier regardless of source(gear,passives,helm enchants etc)

More/less% are always seperate multipliers

with exception of local modifiers in gear (increased phys% on weapons, increased Armour% on Armour) which only apply to said equipment and not your character


If you are using a totem that casts spells, they are practically the same.

So %increased damage to skill is equal to %spell damage? 40% of one = 40% of the other?

I currently have 85% critical strike chance with 655% critical strike multiplier. Is there some way to find out if multiplier or spell damage will give me more at this point? I am asking because of dagger affixes and if its worth it to seek ~30% crit multi affix.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Is there some way to find out if multiplier or spell damage will give me more at this point?

Sure, take off your amulet, check your damage, then try on an amulet with 10% crit multi followed by the one with 10% inc spell damage.

I miss Diablo 3 where you can easily check what the DPS increase/decrease would be without even needing to buy the item.