Flame Totem Mechanics questions

1. The flame totem fires projectiles over time. How does it deal the damage? Is there a certain number of hits per second (a la ball lightning; 1 hit per enemy every 200 ms)?

2. I am using dual Flame Totems with Sire of shards.



I also have these:



When I socket the totem with Controlled destruction and elemental focus into the +2 wand the dps goes up by 1K. But I would swear clear speed on trash and boss fights are easier SoS even though its dps is lower. My assumption is that the single stream, higher dps is avoidable and the SoS sets up an AOE that is, essentially, unavoidable.

Wolf

1. Try level 1 flame totem and you will notice it shoots individual balls of flame. Those are each a projectile that does damage individually like a normal projectile. Afaik, higher levels shoot more projectiles per cast, one after the other, so it looks like a stream of fire, but is really just individual projectiles. Think of it being like 'barrage'.

2. Nice observation.

Do you know what the rate of fire is? On the Wiki it says "fires a stream of flame at nearby enemies." I am trying to understand why it does as well as it does. Some skills dps numbers are not so strait forward and need a little interpretation.



My guess is the listed damage is per projectile. But how fast do the projectiles fire; how often do mobs get hit? Also, when the levels add an additional projectile, is that just an AOE increase or can mobs get hit an additional time, essentially doubling the damage? Probably not the latter.


Wolf

i think it just depends on the cast speed listed on the totem skill. it casts at 0.25 s without bonus cast speed

so for example if listed damage (on the gem) is 100 and cast speed is 0.25s, it will deal a total dps of 400.

i guess that monsters cant be damaged by more than 1 stream of fire so increasing the width of the stream is simply for clearspeed purposes

You have fire penetration linked in the SoS, don't underestimate this. It's a common mistake by less experienced players, it acts as a more multiplier against enemies with significant elemental resistance, something that bosses typically have. Try running an area twice with and without the fire pen in the SoS, and feel the difference in clearspeed.

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Grimmhammer wrote:

You have fire penetration linked in the SoS, don't underestimate this. It's a common mistake by less experienced players, it acts as a more multiplier against enemies with significant elemental resistance, something that bosses typically have. Try running an area twice with and without the fire pen in the SoS, and feel the difference in clearspeed.

Penetration is a bit strange to think about. Even though you deal less absolute damage when enemy Resistances go up, the differential (incremental?) bonus damage from Penetration goes way up. In other words, the more resistances enemies have, the more you want Penetration, even though you will still deal less damage than against a 0 resistance enemy.

Examples:
Base 100 damage, 50% penetration

Enemy has 0% resistances: you deal 100 before penetration, 150 after. 50% more damage (than not using penetration).

Enemy has 50% resistances: you deal 50 before penetration, 100 after. 100% more damage (than not using penetration).

Enemy has 75% resistances: you deal 25 damage before penetration, 75 after. 200% more damage (than not using penetration).

Tooltip assumes 0% enemy Resistances.

So as you can see penetration does not act like a more multiplier to your tooltip dps, but it acts as an increasingly better more multiplier to your decision-making DPS, i.e., when you compare two tooltips (which both falsely assume 0% res), penetration does in fact act as an increasingly better hidden more multiplier.

That is, in the above example, you could have two skills that both show 100 tooltip dps, but the one with penetration would deal somewhere from 30% more to 200% more damage than the one without penetration.