Better, stronger, faster tooltips

In looking at how to build out my sac necro, I was messing around with the various talent skill points, affixes and such and realized it can be frustrating. I’m sure you’ve already encountered this before - looking for some clarity.

Necromancer has the ability Sacrifice which shows physical, spell and intelligence as the tags. Skeletal Mages can also cast Sacrifice via the talent Underlings. When you press ALT while hovering on Underlings, no tooltip shows up. Thus, I’m assuming if you want to scale skeletal mage sac damage I need to focus on physical, spell and intelligence tags. (Note: in the summon volatile zombie tree, talent Grand Sacrifice does show the sacrifice tooltip on ALT + hover and it does appear to be identical to the spell in the book).

HOWEVER, since the mage is casting sac on my melee warriors, and mages are minions, do the calculations take into account minion damage? Minion Damage type? Minion Critical chance? Minion Crit multi?

If it does it feels very unintuitive to have it be the case while also not using the skill points I could allot to the Sacrifice skill tree. If it does not, than there is no indication that is the case since there is no ALT + HOVER tooltip.

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Yes

Also yes, but they do not use your specialized Sacrifice tree.

What are you trying to say here? What “case” are you talking about?

I referenced two cases:

  1. Minion/skeleton +damage +crit +crit multi DOES impact Sacrifice damage: not intuitive, does not use Sac skill tree
  2. Minion/skeleton +damage +crit +crit milti does NOT impact Sacrifice damage: not intuitive, no ALT+HOVER tooltip

To put it even more simply, my build requires affixes:

  • Increased Minion Health
  • Minion Health Regen

From there I am trying to determine which is actually better for skeletal mage sacrifice:

  • Spell Damage
  • Spell critical strike chance
  • Physical spell critical strike chance (acolyte idols)

OR

  • Minion Spell Damage
  • Minion critical strike chance
  • Minion critical strike multiplier

Mind you I am not focusing on the skeletal mage damage or survivability here - just the sacrifice damage. The more I focus on Minion affixes, the lower the sacrifice tooltip DPS. It seems counterintuitive if, as you suggest, minion affixes boost its damage.

Minions gain no benefit from these stats. Minions only benefit from stats that are specifically tagged as “minion”

The Sacrifice Tooltip DPS (of the skill) is not the DPS of your Skeletal Mages DPS, they are separate.

Your minions are the ones casting Sacrifice so, I’d argue that this is intuitive, with the caveat that its not clear anywhere that they do no use your specialized Sacrifice (though I haven’t looked at the game guide recently, it may have been updated, or I’d missed it there at some point).

It should be noted that DPS calculations are still a WIP, especially when it comes to Minion DPS, and that improvements are coming.

Agreed but I am not referring to any minion damage except the Sacrifice cast by the skeletal mage, which by my testing, is INCREASED when I put on those affixes. This is true for both training dummy DPS as well as tool tip DPS. Ugh.

I know I’m splitting hairs here but the words in this part of your response indicates ambiguity, not clarity, meaning there is something non-intuitive here. The game guide does not provide any clarity that I could find.

I truly hope it is addressed. All things being equal (i.e. no intermittent buffs or debuffs) when my skeleton warriors go hit something and my mages cast sac, there should be an HOVER+ALT tooltip over the Underlings talent that reflects that actual DPS of one skeleton warrior being sac’d.

That, sounds like a bug honestly.

You’re not incorrect, I just think its worthwhile to point to where the ambiguity is, rather than the entire thing. The ambiguity begins at the question “Do you minions cast your specialized versions of skills?” I think that we both agree that should be addressed.

That would be nice, I agree.

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What kind of sample size did you use to determine the damage on the training dummy was higher with player spell damage affixes? All non-DoT damage has a +/-25% variance so if you only used a relatively small sample you could well just have seen the normal +/-25% variance.

Since Skellie Mages are minions, they don’t have a tooltip for either themselves or their Sacrifice.

@Reimerh When are we going to get all the minion skills renamed so they don’t confuse people by having the same skill names as a player skill? I don’t think it’s much:

  • Skellie Mage/Sacrifice
  • Skeletons/Acid Flask (though that’s from a different class so unlikely to be an issue)
  • Skellie Mage/Hungering Souls
  • Bone Golem/Rip Blood
  • Summon Bear/Swipe
  • Summon Spriggan/Entangling Roots
  • Summon Spriggan/Vines (not a spell, but it’s the same as the Spriggan Form Vines & could be confusing)

Hi, could not find another place to ask for this but could you please add the stand alone client to Nvidia Now? Atm it is available only through Steam. Thx.

I knew there was a variance but I had no idea it was that large. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t within those bounds but I didn’t exactly sit there for hours, either. I need to go back, untalent a lot and re-run some more rigorous tests.

It might be difficult to see since it’ll be a number within a bunch of numbers (all your minions attacking the dummy).

Oh yeah, one mage, one skeleton warrior – pretty much all I did. Otherwise, it’s a huge mess of overlapping numbers. lol

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