by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Hello everyone! My Name is Dannie “Integrity” Ray and I’ll be here every Saturday explaining all things theorycrafting so you can better understand your characters and the game you love, lets hope you haven’t forgotten all the math you’ve learned in school because we will finally have a chance to put it to good use.

Today we are going to take another look at Damage in Diablo 3, where does it come from? How is it calculated? How can we maximize our damage output? How can I figure out what the best possible build for me is?

All of those questions have one thing in common, and  that is that they are a lot easier to answer once you know how Damage Calculations Work, so lets get into it.

Note: Remember that percentages are actually a division by 100, 500% and plain 5 are the same thing. By the same logic One Hundred Percent equals one

What is a Simple Rotation?

On the First and Second edition of this series, we looked at a bare bones version of the Damage Formula that taught us how to calculate the actual DPS we can do while spamming a single skill. But as you know via personal experience there’s more to Diablo than just mishing one button, you have 6 skills equipped at any given time and they all interact with each other and in some fashion add up to your total DPS. All of these can have a resource cost or generation and they might also have a cooldown attached.

A simple rotation would be an order in which you activate your skills that is able to sustain its own resource cost over time so it can be repeated infinitely. Casting Frenzy 5 times to generate 20 Fury and then spending it on Hammer of the Ancients would be a very simple rotation.

With that being said, this week we will take a more in-depth look at resource management, we will consider zero cooldown skills that either generate or spend your primary resource and we will build a Simple Rotation out of it also considering passive resource regeneration.

Resources and Attacks per Second:

If you open your character sheet, you’ll notice the stat “Attacks per Second” down on the offensive tab. This stat is super important for this analysis as it will help tell us how much resource we generate per second.

This is all going to be easier if we use a real-game example, so from now on we are going to be Mr. Fistalot a male Level 70 Monk that will attack at at a rate of 2 attacks per second and will also boast 5 passive spirit regen per second. Our basic rotation will consist of Way of Thousand Fists – Hand of Lightning and Wave of Light – Pillar of the Ancients.

Meet Mr. Fistalot, he’s Hardcore.

Generating Resource:

We use WoTF as a Resource Generator which generates 12 spirit per attack, at 2 ApS Mr. Fistalot generates 24 spirit per second just by using his primary attack, if we add our 5 passive spirit regen the we generate 29 spirit per second.  

Spending Resource:

We use WoL as a Resource Spender, which spends 75 spirit per attack, at 2 ApS Mr. Fistalot spends 150 spirit per second when he uses his secondary attack, if we substract the 5 spirit that we regenerated  then we spend 145 spirit per second.

How much do we use each Skill?

We need 145 spirit to cast a second of WoL’s, we generate 29 spirits each second of casting WoTF. We then need 145/29= 5 seconds of generators for a single second of the spenders.

That means that of every 6 seconds I’m attacking, 5 are spent on WoTF and just 1 in WoL.

Percentage wise that’s 16.7% WoL and 83.3% WoTF.

So what’s our actual DPS?

Remember last week’s formula? Well, now you calculate your WoL single skill damage and get the 16.7% of that. Then you get the 83.3% of WoTF’s single skill damage and add both of them together.

Need an example of how to do it? Don’t worry, DannieRay23 and Mr. Fistalot are here to help

I haven’t told you much about Mr. Fistalot yet, he isn’t very well geared sadly but he’s what we have to work with.

He has 20% Critical Chance, 150% Critical Hit Damage, +20% to Lightning Damage and 15% Wave of Light Damage. He has no Resource Cost Reduction. He gets 10% damage from Combination Strike and has 0% Extra Damage to Elites.

His average Base Weapon Damage is just 1600 amplifed by 6000 Dexterity.

With that throughout background check on our friendly Monk we can now jump into the formula.

Calculating Factors:

Yay, Mr. Fistalot is getting some loot.

Our Base Damage Factor is 1600.

The Main Stat Factor is 60.

Crit Factor is 1.3 = (20%*150%)+100%.

Damage Increased by Skills Factor is 1.1 = 100%+10%

The Speed Factor is 2 attacks per second.

So lets Calculate our Sheet DPS:

1600*60*1.3*1.1*2 = 274,560 Sheet DPS.

Now all we need is the Skill Weapon Damage Factor, and of course that one varies per skill.

Way of the Thousand Fists Damage:

Hands of Lightning is a pretty particular skill, it normally does 192% WD, but the second attack does 429% WD. Here’s where we look at our rotation and it said 5 WoTF per WoL, since WoL will reset our counter we will have a first, a second, a third, another first and another second, then we use WoL and reset the counter.

That’s 3 attacks for 192% and 2 for 429%, this comes out to an average damage of 287% Damage as Lightning, be we have 20% extra Lightning damage so we apply that 1.2 factor for a total of 344% Weapon Damage.

274,560*344% = 944,486 DPS while casting Way of the Thousand Fists.

But we only cast WoTF 83.3% of the time, so:

944,486 * 83.3% = 786,757 DPS contributed to our rotation.

Wave of Light Damage:

Wave of Light does a total of 1,520% WD as Lightning, we have 1.2 Lightning Damage Factor and 1.15 Wave of Light Factor though so it becomes 2,097.6% Weapon damage.

274,560* 2,097.6% =  5,759,170 DPS while casting Wave of Light.

But we only cast WoL 16.7% of the time, so:

5,759,170*16.7% = 961,781 DPS contributed to our rotation.

Total DPS:

Our Total DPS is now  961,781+786,757= 1,748,538 Total DPS.

Looking at it Differenty:

We’ve looked at the associative and commutative properties of multiplication before, maybe we can put them to good use so we can have a better grasp of what our Damage Rotation is.

Way of Thousand Fists did 344% Weapon Damage and Wave of Light did 2,097.6% Weapon damage .

We cast WoTF 83.3% of the time and WoL the remaining 16.7%, then:

(344%*.833)+(2,097.6%*.167)= 636.85% Weapon Damage.

274,560 Sheet DPS* 636.85% Weapon Damage = 1,748,538 Total DPS.

As you realize, all we did was multiplicate in a different order. This way we know the exact Weapon Damage value of our Rotation, in this case 636.85%. Knowing this number will be very useful next week, when we start discussing Cooldown Based abilities.

Conclusions:

Wait a second, what are Mr. Fistalot’s other 4 skills? How do they contribute to the rotation?

Those questions will be answered next week here at BlizzPro on the next edition of Basic Theorycrafting where we will look at Cooldown Skills and where do they fit in our ever expanding set of formulas.