Could someone check my math and confirm? From what I can tell, a few points into damage penetration (on skill tree) at 10% penetration each, is very much worth it but after investing a few it certainly has diminishing returns.
My conclusion, always invest up to around 20% but more than that and it starts to not be worth it. Early on every 1% pen is basically a 1.4% MORE damage multiplier (10% pen = 14% more damage), but at 20% it becomes 1.2% MORE each and at 40% it becomes 1:1.
Not sure how to enter excel data or fancy information so I will copy paste below showing numbers. Keep in mind %MORE is relative to the previous investment in penetration and not a running total.
Damage
Pen
Resist
Total Dam
%more
100
0
30
70
0
100
10
30
80
14.28571429
100
20
30
90
12.5
100
30
30
100
11.11111111
100
40
30
110
10
100
50
30
120
9.090909091
100
60
30
130
8.333333333
100
70
30
140
7.692307692
100
80
30
150
7.142857143
100
90
30
160
6.666666667
100
100
30
170
6.25
100
110
30
180
5.882352941
100
120
30
190
5.555555556
100
130
30
200
5.263157895
100
140
30
210
5
Would love to hear other opinions on this. Especially when to strike a balance between crit multi and ele pen (two huge damage sources) and how much to shoot for of each. I’m thinking intuitively, max crit multi but first try to hit that 20% penetration figure.
Total damage calc is as follows: Damage*(1-((Resist-Penetration)/100))
% more damage calc is as follows: (Total Damage - Previous Total Damage)/Previous Total Damage*100
Your base assumption that the mobs have resistance is incorrect. Unless the mob says it has a resistance (some of the scorpions have resists) or if you take a resist modifier in the monolith.
If they do have resists then your maths is correct, otherwise the penetration is a straight more modifier.
Yes, the first 20% is the target range based on either gear or passive/skill stats with anything more than that per 100 damage you lose at a ~240% rate based on the non-resist values.
Because you’re comparing it to a lower base, but zero resists is a much more common occurrence. Personally, I’d do 9% (max t5 resist pen roll on an amulet), 30%, 40% (20 stacks of shred on a boss), 49% (max shred + pen).
Just want to note that the base value is irrelevant when comparing against the change in %MORE damage. If I put a base damage value of 100,000 in then all of the %MORE values will still be the exact same. Example below for the Zero resist scenario:
Damage
Pen
Resist
Total Dam
%more
100000
0
0
100000
0
100000
10
0
110000
10
100000
20
0
120000
9.090909091
100000
30
0
130000
8.333333333
100000
40
0
140000
7.692307692
100000
50
0
150000
7.142857143
100000
60
0
160000
6.666666667
100000
70
0
170000
6.25
100000
80
0
180000
5.882352941
100000
90
0
190000
5.555555556
100000
100
0
200000
5.263157895
100000
110
0
210000
5
100000
120
0
220000
4.761904762
100000
130
0
230000
4.545454545
100000
140
0
240000
4.347826087
Also of note is that if you already have a form of shred, reaching 40% pen, then adding more on your amulet might not be the best investment. Going from 40 to 50 pen gives you between 7 and 15% MORE damage (depending on resists). Take that into consideration before choosing it over a nice Crit Multi for example.
I agree completely. When deciding what affixes to go for, if you’re going to min-max you need to be aware of how much of the modifier you already have & whether it depends on anything else (crit chance, chance to apply an ailment).
Crit multi is an interesting example since it requires you have a decent crit chance first, and even then, it’s incremental value is halved due to the base crit multi being 2 (assuming you don’t have any other sources of crit multi). So that 29% crit multi amulet modifier is at best 14% more damage assuming you have 100% crit chance. For a 70% increased damage prefix to have the same incremental value, you’d need to have less than 500% total increased damage, which isn’t too difficult to have late-game.
Penetration/shred are “more” multipliers and worth getting if you can. But just like every other stat in the game (except the more damage multipliers in skill trees), theres diminishing returns.
Everything which adds up together has a kind of DR when looking at total increases to damage. It is the same behaviour for increase and more multipliers:
Penetration adds up → DR
Crit Multi adds up → DR
Increased Damage adds up → DR
Even skillponts spent into skill specific more multiplier have a DR: Looking at Draining Assault from Warpath you get 15% more damage per point spent. First increases your damage by 15% but second point pushes you from 1.15 * damage to 1.3 * damage which is “only” an additional increase of 13%.
In general you should spread your stats among as many different additive sources as possible. While all types of increase (physical, damage over time, melee, …) go into the same “more”-pool.
Edit: Wasn’t meant to be a reply to LLama8 but a general comment. Just still not used to this forum.
You clicked on reply to post (the reply button on the bottom right of the post), rather than reply to thread (the reply button further down next to bookmark/flag): https://imgur.com/buApTHY
What Oeller said. Stacking any additive damage is going to show diminishing percent increases. The amount of actual damage you’re getting is the same from 10% pen to 20% as it is from 0% to 10%, but because you’re starting at a higher baseline of damage (since you already have 10% pen), the % increase is just smaller.
