Damage Taken calculations and Server Ticks (seeking informations)

I did some extensive testing and number crunching a few days ago to improve my build and came to the conclusion that it should be operating on 5 Server Ticks, with a Server Tick Rate of 1/30s.

I'm currently working on a build as a Juggernaut, using Boneshatter as my primary skill. This skill comes with a powerful buff that is stackable called Trauma, but it also comes with a heavy downside. For the Trauma, each stack you gain x% more damage but also take a flat amount of physical damage each time you gain Trauma. Both stack additively.

The build I made allows me to accumulate an extreme amount of Trauma stacks up to a theoretical maximum of ~750. This is the point of where the downside of Trauma, the flat amount of physical damage taken gets so big that it would kill the character in a single self inflicted hit.

To test on how big of a Trauma stack I could accumulate I ran Maps with Totems and was fishing for "allies cannot die" Totems. Isolated a single monster, lured it to the Totem and started hammering.

In the first couple of tests I could reach Trauma stacks ranging anywhere from 340 to around 440. Due to this inconsistency I dropped all temporare Buffs and Guard skills like Immortal Call, Enduring Cry,(Vaal) Molten Shell, Berserk and started again.

Now I was consistently reaching ~340 Trauma Stacks, then the character would die.

I was baffled why my character would die with that “low” of a Trauma stack since in theory I could reach ~750.

The character also utilises the Unbreakable Notable from Juggernaut and the Divine Shield Keystone. Due to those and massive physical damage mitigation and damage taken reduction my character far out-regens the physical damage taken from Trauma at any point until it gets so big that it would die in a single self inflicted Trauma hit.

So I ran all numbers again and again with the same result, I should not die at that point which got me thinking till I remembered something Mark commented somewhere about Leech and Server Ticks. This got me into running more tests and crunching even more numbers.

Once I came to the assumption that the damage taken calculations operate on 5 server ticks, I made adjustments to the character’s eHP to reach certain thresholds. Once done I could reach a far higher stack of Trauma which I repeated several times until I ran out of options to increase the eHP.