Does it actually benefit from lightning & lightning melee boosts?
This might be anecdotal and I wish there was a way to test this on the dummy but the damage after chosing the Rolling Thunder Node doesnt seem to change Flame Reave damage noticably even though I have a lot of lightning and lightning melee boosts (Electromancy idols etc). Anyone else feeling this?
Visual Animation Doesnt Change
When chosing the Rolling Thunder node in Flame Reave, the animation stays as a rolling wall of flame. Considering the other effects like Flame Aura (Crackling Aura) change to show the appropriate lightning effect, maybe this is a bug/forgotten update?
Not sure exactly what you mean, but the mouseover on the Flame Reave icon in the main Skills & Specialisations menu does show lightning:
no idea, but it doesnt feel like I am getting the about 150% boost that I have from my idols & ammy specifically for lightning. honestly dont think the node made any difference but I have no way to tell for sure other than the damage on the dummy doesnt seem to have changed.
% Lightning definitely increases the damage if you take rolling thunder node. It’s harder to notice since the base damage is not converted to lightning.
Its so painful to swap skill nodes (at lvl19/20) purely for testing that I am loathe to try and go through some sort of testing cycle. I have tried a “naked” char without gear, with and without the ammy/idols and I cant really see what I would preceive to be 150% increased damage… Doing the math to work out how much actual damage the 150% translates into is not my cup of tea…
Ok… Did some VERY minor testing firing flame reave at the dummy and logged it. I realise that this number of tests might not be enough to make deductions from. I am not a mathematical person so I may be misunderstanding the figures. Crits may also be skewing the figures some.
Can someone with more maths & understanding of the game tell me if what the numbers are showing is as intended for the Rolling Thunder node?
It shows that a 77% increase from idols is only a 7% difference over no grear.
It shows that a 65% Plus 9% penetration from ammy is 18% difference over no gear (to me that says penetration is better than % increase by far)
It shows that there is only about 2.7% difference in damage combining the ammy & idols vs just the ammy alone - this seems very odd to me as I would have expected somewhere closer to the 7% that the idols were doing on their own.
I do realise that this is indicating that Rolling Thunder is increasing damage, but it seems like it may not be worth it vs keeping it fire and using fire boosts if it as FoE says, is not affecting base damage.
IIRC, Flame Reave has a base (fire) damage of 15, which isn’t converted but all of the damage from your weapon plus any other flat damage should be converted.
After @FoE comment re the base damage, I tried another test using the same process.
no gear, +9 melee lightning from idols of Sparks only. I got a 25% increase in damage over no gear just from the base melee damage.
Add the ammy so 9 melee plus 9% penetration and 65% increase and I got over 40% more damage than no gear…
without a good way to test it (idol space), I assume from this, that I will see a more noticeable improvemen with the electromancy idols % increase provided the lightning base damage is kept (e.g. on a weapon).
So, from this I am going to deduce that its the base damage conversion (or lack thereof) that confused me as I wrongly assumed that it would convert the skill entirely to lightning and was therefore expecting a more noticeable damage improvement based on my % increases…
moral of the story… base damage of 0 x any % increase is still 0 total damage.
