Damage effectiveness on spells needs tweaking

With the release of the Herald series and Apep's Rage, I decided to investigate the net damage effectiveness of spells and how some spells scale much better off of flat damage than other spells.

http://i.imgur.com/hBrks80.png


I made a very simplified way to demonstrate how damage effectiveness is completely unbalanced and unfair. The following assumptions were made:
-If the spell is projectile, GMP is used (exceptions: Ball lightning and Spark)
-If the spell is AOE, L20 Conc Effect is used (exception: Ball Lightning)
-Firestorm will hit 1 to 6 times per cast, Glacial cascade will hit 2 to 3 times per cast.
-Crit multiplier is ignored. This eliminates a ton of variables. I could run through the calculations with crit chance and multipliers taken into account, but the differences present in the chart are obvious enough as it is.

I may have made a mistake here and there, I was trying to get this done fast since I have a class to get to in a few minutes.

Edit: I derped on Arc, max hits is indeed 3.

The results weren't surprising, really.

The highest net damage effectiveness spells:
1. Incinerate had a broken amount of damage effectiveness (up to 1250% of the added base damage per second) due to its projectile capabilities, its extremely fast cast speed, and its innate damage multiplier. Even if Incinerate's damage effectiveness were nerfed back to 20%, it would still be on par with most other crit spells. (This is a cue to GGG to start considering an incinerate nerf)
2. Fireball and AB had insane damage effectiveness by merit of being both AOE and projectile. However, both of these are hard-pressed to compete in practicality against Incinerate due to Incinerate's pierce nature.
3. Glacial Cascade applies the added damage up to 477% per second by merit of its multi-hit properties (we should really think of its damage effectiveness as 240% instead of 80% at this point) as well as its AOE modifier. This is ignoring the fact that GC is often built for crit, which further boosts its net DE.

The lowest net DE spells:
1. Arc. No surprise here. Not only does it lack either a projectile or an AOE modifier, it has a completely unnecessary 50% DE modifier to boot. The only additional modifier it can utilize is its chain, which allows it to hit a single target twice given 3 or more enemies.
2. Frost Wall, Lightning Warp. These are utility spells though, so nothing to say here.
3. Discharge had a low net DE, but it does have the highest crit chance.

I think that GGG should rethink spell DEs and balance them out.

Just going to make a note in here and say that arc max hits is 3 not 1.(melee range)

And i don't even wanna think of arc's damage potential if they buffed it :O, are you taking into account status ailments btw?

Peace,

-Boem-

Incinerate doesn't really need a nerf. If you want to lower the damage effectiveness but boost the base damage of the skill, sure. But as-is it's a balanced skill. I think GC was also made with the intention of added damage being strong for it, due to the nature of the multi-hit. But again, if the DE were lowered and base damage increased, fine! Otherwise, it doesn't exactly need a nerf.

Incinerate doesn't crit, freeze, shock, ignite, and has a ramp-up time - its DE is fine all things considered.

Other spells might need (more) buffs, but every buff ends up making CoC even stronger and CoC builds already do millions of dps.

Three dragons

This item alone makes all spell related discussions way more interesting

Take added lightning (quality) and any fire spell. Firestorm with even 1% DE added lightning quality is FAR more potent with 3dragons


Same applies for lightning and cold spells doing stuff these were not planned for.

I think that 3dragons is one of the most balance-throwing-off item ever released..

Shock is besides the point here, otherwise we'd consider other multipliers like resists and whatnot.


@Boem, you are right. I derped on that one.

@Holo, Incinerate has stupidly strong scaling with Added Chaos Damage and Herald of Ice. It's one of the exclusive spells that suffers diminishing returns after the 6th link instead of the 5th. I want to say that the scaling is a little too strong for its own good. I've been running Arc and Incinerate side-by-side and I can say that my HoI does almost nothing on Arc, but on Incinerate it's even worth using a Tabula for that ACD + HoI combo.

Sorry your graph isn't that well labelled. Is the min % and max% the actual DE that is being applied, or....

Also from what we see here some spells are good with added damage, some aren't. That seems fine to me, the ones that aren't have other benefits to their spell type.

Really need to look at total damage output WITH the DE calculated in for adding damage. Because that will show you some things. For example arc and discharge are two of the strongest builds if built right in terms of damage output

There is also uncounted factors like FP De being based on range, etc

"

KuteKitteh wrote:

Shock is besides the point here, otherwise we'd consider other multipliers like resists and whatnot.

then i think you should

support gem is a whole package - not only the 'flat' dmg increase. shock, ignite or % dmg are all parts of the package and these need to be covered in a serious analysis

firestorm' DE is low. but added lightning (quality) is - imo - one of the best dmg supports for it despite low DE