Diablo 3 Area Dmg Free Nuke Test

If you have a 1.0 AS staff that does 20-30 damage with 20 intelligence (and you have no other int), that means that each hit will roll a random number between 20 and 30 and then that number will be multiplied by 1.2 (remember, each point of int is 1 damage).

Effective Damage Range: The effective damage range of that weapon for a Witch Doctor or Wizard is actually 24-36.

Your Damage stat in the character sheet factors this in and spits out an average DPS stat accounting for all modifiers: in this case, youd see a damage stat of 30.

Of course, the damage stat is just a guide: whenever you use a skill, it grabs a random number from the damage range and then applies all bonuses and modifiers-- the Damage stat has very little correlation to the size of a single hit If you had a different 1.0 AS weapon that had a damage range of 25-37 but no Int, it would do more damage because the base DPS is more than 20 higher.

This is also why those 1-2 damage rings are so good in early Normal mode.

A normal one-hander blue before level 20 is gonna rock something like 18 DPS (example:17.5DPS 10-17 damage range 1.3AS Axe).

If youre using that axe and you slap on a pair of 1-2 damage rings, it goes to 12-21 damage or 21.45 DPS, albeit with higher variance than before.

Those crappy little rings are worth 22 intelligence in this scheme This system is also why you such strange outliers in terms of DPS.

Ceremonial Knives always seem like theyve got insane DPS, right Well, they do, but they also have stupid high variance.

A white level 24 Ceremonial Knife has a damage range of 10-37; a comparable level 22 mace has a damage range of 18-32, meaning that hits will be much more consistent.

Witch Doctors with Knives probably notice that sometimes a Firebat will one-shot foes and sometimes itll half-health them-- its thanks to the variance.

In general, high variance is fine on fast, cheap attacks, and awful on slow, expensive ones.

There are only two things that get tricky for the average player: 1 ) Flat damage stats will always add identical total damage to your weapon damage, but the DPS added depends on the weapon speed.

Adding 10 damage to a 1.50 dagger will add 15 DPS because that 10 damage is applied 1.5 times per second, whereas a 1.00 staff would only gain 10 DPS, despite both weapons gaining exactly 10 weapon damage.

Spell damage wont be changed however since it is calculated using weapon damage not DPS.

The weapon damage that spells use to calculate X of weapon damage is not using your DPS but your actual damage per hit.

If you have two weapons like the two mentioned above and both have exactly 90 DPS, but at 1.50 and 1.00 speeds respectively.

For 2 the tradeoff comes down to your Arcane Power pool and cooldowns.

Diablo 3 Area Dmg Free Nuke Test

There technically wouldnt be any difference between the two weapons in a straight resource-free, cooldown-free nuke test.

Or you may prefer faster casts to proc any number of things such as AP regen on hit.

Its all preference.

Personally I prefer the slower the better, biggest bang for the buck.

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