by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Hello, everyone! My Name is Dannie “Illiterate” Ray and I’ll be here every saturday explaining all things theorycrafting in an effort to allow everyone to better understand the finer aspects of Diablo 3. Lets hope you haven’t forgotten all the math you 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 let’s get into it.

Thus far, we have learned about the basic damage formula, how to calculate our DPS when we are spamming one skill, and how to build a simple rotation with a spender and a generator.

Last week, we followed Harcore Hero Mr. Fistalot on his quest to maximize his DPS output. Sadly, he was only using two skills and couldn’t stand the onslaught the forces of hell unleashed upon him.

This week, we will integrate the rest of our skills see how cooldown-based abilities affect our calculations.

RIP Mr. Fistalot

Cooldowns and Resource Costs

The most basic of cooldown-based skills are those that provide you with your main resource. Things like Threatening Shout, Air Ally, Provoke, Honored Guest, etc.

If you use these skills as soon as their cooldown is up, then it is easy to calculate how much resource they generate per second. Look at Provoke, it gives us 30 Wrath with a 20 second CD. We can easily tell it gives us 1.5 Wrath per second and we could add that to our passive Wrath regeneration.

Then again in real play you aren’t likely to hit it just as the CD is up. “Whether it’s human error, a full resource bar, or the need to adjust positioning; the CD is likely to be artificially inflated. The best way to deal with this is to see your actual play and try to determine a coefficient to adjust the raw data.

Lets say we only make use of 85% of Provoke due to the factors mentioned  above, then our regeneration amount would be 1.5*0.85= 1.28 Wrath per second.

Cooldowns and Damage

This wild barbarian with imaginary stats will help us out this week.

What about a hard hitting ability that is bound to a cooldown? Think about Battering Ram, 760% Fire Damage every 10 seconds. You could be tempted to just add 76% to your weapon damage on last weeks formula and be done with it, but things aren’t that easy.

You cannot use your other damage skills while you charge furiously at your enemies,  so that has to be considered.

First, we have to measure our animation time; to simplify things lets just say we have 1 attack per second and our animation time for Furious charge is that 1 second.

This Barbarian has 400.000 Sheet DPS and enough Fire Damage to take our Battering Ram to 900% Fire Damage.  That’s 3,600,000 Damage per Second.

Now lets say that using last week’s formula we came to the conclusion that our basic rotation of Cleave and HotA came to  a total of 580% weapon damage, that would lead to 2,320,000 Damage per Second.

So every 10 seconds we will have 3,600,00 DPS and the other 9 we will have 2,320,000 DPS.

(3,600,000*0.1)+(2,320,000*0.9) = 2.480.000 DPS.

2,480,000/2,320,000= 1,07 = 107%

So having Furious Charge would be a 7% increase to our DPS, but that’s without considering the fury generation discussed above. You can tell we are slowly moving away from basic and quickly reaching intermediate theorycrafting.

Cooldowns and Buffs

You picked the wrong guy to start a bar fight with.

In this category we can find the always cool and popular damage CD’s like Slam Dance, Wrath of the Berserker, Vengance, Champion of Akarat, etc.

These skills will drasticly alter your stats for a short period of time, the best way to go around them is to calculate their uptime. Then calculate your rotation both with and without this buff, and finally use the uptime as a coefficient to average the damage of both rotations.

Lets say we had a Barbarian, and after we factored in other cooldown-based resource generation and damage dealing; we ended up with  5,000,000 DPS for our simple rotation of Cleave and HotA.

Now lets say say we pop WoTB: Insanity and our numbers spike to 8,000,000 DPS.

That would be active 20 seconds out of 120, that’s a 16.7% uptime. Leaving us in normal form 83.3% of the time.

Our real DPS would then be (5,000,000*83.3%)+(8,000,000*16.7%) = 5,501,000 DPS

5,501/5,000= 1.10 = 110%.

Having Insanity in our bars and using it on CD gives this Barbarian a 10% overall increase in DPS.

But what if we include Cooldown Reduction?

Lets say we can get 20% CDR, that would take the CD from 120 to 96 and the uptime from 16,7% to 20,8%

Our real DPS would then be (5,000,000*79.2%)+(8,000,000*20.8%) = 5,624,000 DPS

5,624/5,501 = 1.02 = 102%

Adding 20% CDR would look  to be only a 2% increase to DPS, but the thing is that the CDR would also affect your resource generation and your other damage CDs. As you realize, you would have to refactor your previous damage calculations aswell.

Conclusions

As everything starts to come together, things start looking more complicated. Next week we will likely wrap up this DPS series as we integrate our our variables into a real-game example. To be even more helpful, I’ll do my best to provide you with a spreadsheet so you can input your own character values and see what YOUR real DPS is.