I know its probably too early to do this in Beta, but has anyone started doing the math on the stats?
E.g. STR/DEX/INT/ATT/VIT - how do these compare with their matching boosts vs affixes on items & skill tree nodes?
Example - Its easy to check Attunement boosting elemental protection by 5 points, but how much is “improves skills that rely on innate magic” when compared to gear affixes and more specific boosts in the skill trees… A simpler way of putting it would be to ask “Is it better to add Attunement stat to gear or add damage to a skill that uses Attunement”.
And ditto for all the other stats and their matching skills/spells etc.
As the game matures, these kinds of things become more fixed and therefor more obvious but I was wondering if the more mathematically inclined of us have started testing this yet? and if so, are they willing to share the results to lesser mortals?
i haven’t done the math but i have recently started to think more about this aspect of gearing. when i first played the game, coming from years of experience with PoE, i automatically assumed i should stack the stat that matched with my skills.
when i started crafting gear for my builds i quickly realized that it was not as simple to stack high stat values as i had expected. given that most skills only get 4% inc damage per point of the relevant stat, i moved away from putting stats on gear and only took what i could from the skill trees, considering it a moderate but not extremely important contribution to my damage.
what i’ve learned recently that caused me to start rethinking this is some posts by @Llama8 where he pointed out that ailments will receive the increased damage from the stat related to the skill that applied the ailment. i had also not played a ward-focused build until recently, which led me to realize that Int plays a significant role in ward retention. in fact it seems to be the single best source of ward retention in the game.
that being said, i still think that stats mostly provide marginal increases for builds that don’t use ailments or ward. i would also like some hard numbers on the benefits of putting stats on gear vs relevant affixes. or rather, i would like for someone to do the math and give me an easy to read chart, because me no do math good. me use word good. word, yes. math, no.
Exactly why I asked the question… I had about 1300h in PoE before I decided to call it quits and I have realised that I subconciously started stacking stats in this game in preference to more specific boosts/affixes - at one stage I think I stacked vit & str into their late 20’s without really understanding the effects (or affects - correct me wordsmith).
Then I tried out @boardman21 builds and realised that he virtually ignores them on some builds (e.g. Sentinel Plague VK) which made me start to question their impact on the characters and wonder if anyone had done the math yet.
I habent done the math but my statedgy is if its only for skill damage i dont use it. If the skill gets a double bonus (damage plus ailmemt damage) I stsrt pondering it and the say necro where for int minions get more life more damage I get more ward and more ward retention then its a no brainer. I go by how many bonuses i recieve for that stat from different sources. If the answers 1 I don’t stack it 2 mayne a little 3 or more then definitely
So let’s say for my Lich, he uses both skele minions, aura of decay for minion poison and my own, harvest to apply ailments and get life for each point of Int, and reaper…
All these benefit from Int. Skeles get dmg/health, harvest gets Melee dmg and health on hit, reaper form and aura of decay get 4% dmg each point, plus the ward retention (which this build is focused around)…
So, if I want to make my hybrid work, I better stack Int rapidly because I get in fact 6 benefits from it, right?
The only concern is that it doesn’t improve my own ailments damage (because harvest gets Melee Necrotic instead), and the other ailment chances are from passives and gear.
While most of the stats tooltip is fluff, every stat provides a defensive benefit (Int gives % ward retention, Str gives % armour, Dex gives dodge, etc), but the rest of the tooltip is fluff. Skills get a damage bonus from their attributes (hover over the skill to find out which), in most cases it’s 4% increased, but some also get a % buff from Dex & some get a flat damage increase from Dex as well (eg, Shatter Strike which gets +1 cold damage & +4% melee damage from Dex as well as +4% cold damage & Freeze multi from Int).
Then as Boardman says, the Acolyte’s minions get flat health per Int which is very important.
Even ailments only get 4% per the relevant stat, so I don’t really get why people will think that the stat bonus is good for ailments but “bad” (or not worth investing) for skills, it’s the same bonus. I guess if you’re going for hit damage from the skill and ailment damage then that might be more useful, but I’d argue that the damage bonus for skills is just as relevant for skills as it is for ailments, possibly more so since skills do more base damage than ailments to be buffed by the stat.
Unless you’re going for a pet or ward build, I probably wouldn’t go nuts for the relevant attributes.
Edit: That said, you’ll probably always get more damage from a damage affix than from an attribute affix. Even a t7 affix roll will only give +44% increased damage. But the attributes also give defensive benefits as well. And as we know, this game is about surviving, not going balls to the wall on DPS.
Yes, any ailments proc’d by Harvest will get +4% increased damage per point of Dex, but any poison from Aura of Decay will get the 4% per point of Int. It’s an interesting question though, what benefits, if any, does Int provide to ailments proc’d by Harvest? Do they get +1 damage?
If you’re just talking pure damage, spell & void damage are equivalent (it doesn’t matter which you go with, just get the biggest numbers), attunement will give a (much) smaller number but will also give a defensive benefit.
