up till now i havn’t really been number crunching the side affixes much so i’ve just been assuming that if it doesn’t state that it’s multiplicative, then it’s additive, but then i started noticing affixes that “increase minion crit rate by 100%” and it doesn’t say multiplicative (which would just double it) but clearly it is, as otherwise it means minions are garanteed to crit all the time, which is not the case.
noticing this has also made me wonder what other affixes MEAN 100% or if it’s just double the base, or some other factor…
thats all well and good until you have 3 wraith talents that give 15% increased damage/level, 15% increased damage/level (multiplicitive), and 15% increased damage/level and also you summon flame wraiths sometimes.
there are a few cases where it’s not fully clear but generally they use the same wording as path of exile, where “increased” is additive with other sources that use “increased” or “decreased” and “more” is multiplicative. this is also mentioned in the in-game guide, so it’s likely that they will correct instances where this isn’t the case.
so if you see “100% increased crit chance” that multiplies the base crit chance by 2. by default base crit chance is 5% so that gives you 10% chance to crit. by comparison, if you get a crit shrine, it gives you “+100% crit chance” which makes your chance to crit 100%.
i believe llama was mistaken in his description, because adding to base crit chance (which is what “+1% crit chance” mod does) acts as a multiplier. in the above example, if you have 5% base crit, and get +1% crit and 100% increased crit, it makes your chance to crit 12% ((5% + 1%) times 2) which would be the same as if you had 5% base crit, 100% increased crit chance, and 20% more crit chance.
the reason ARPGs have these different ways of increasing stats is to give different value to different skill points and affixes for different opportunity costs. an example of what happens when they don’t do that can be seen in the way wolcen’s skill system worked when it first released (and maybe still does? i haven’t kept up). virtually none of the skill points on the tree had multiplicative values, which meant that choices on the tree made little to no difference. due to the way their stat system worked, with each stat point giving you a %inc to your damage, a high level player would end up with, for example, 800% increased damage from stat points. at that point, picking a node that gives you 20% increased damage makes almost no difference to your actual damage output. even a 50% increase would be fairly meaningless. that is why the most powerful builds at that time all used one of the only sources of multiplicative damage in the game (a node in the skill tree for a certain skill that gave “more” damage for each ailment on an enemy) and spent points on the tree that gave them more ailments. they didn’t scale the damage from the ailments, they just used them to make that one skill deal massive hit damage.
having several ways of stacking multiplicative and additive modifiers is the way to ensure build diversity and gives devs a more surgical way of adjusting player power if they need to do so.
It may act like a multiplier & you are correct in that you could replace it with a suitably numbered more multiplier, but +1% added crit isn’t +20% more crit, even though they get to the same answer.
you’re right, it’s not exactly the same but it does act in the same way. adding to the base of a stat is always multiplicative with increases to that stat. that’s why in path of exile sources of base crit increase are fairly rare and/or have a high opportunity cost (like requiring ascendancy points, or a very rare affix on a high trade-value chest piece).
to expand on the example i used earlier, and to make it more closely resemble what a player would normally encounter: base 5% crit chance, various sources of “increased crit chance” (let’s say 35%, 50%, 100%, 15% to keep things even because i have an american education and can’t do math well and don’t feel like getting a calculator) that makes 200% increased because those sources are additive with each other. this translates to multiplying the base value by 3, so 15% crit chance. if you then get an item that has +5% crit chance, you now have 30% crit chance. that’s the same as 100% more crit chance. if you then added a modifier that said “50% more crit chance” it would be multiplicative with the “increased” sources as well as with the base chance (which has been increased to 10% by the +5% crit mod), which would result in 45% crit chance.
i’m not trying to lecture you here, so sorry if it comes off that way. i’m just trying to demonstrate how each of these modifiers is treated as a separate “clause” (for lack of a better term) in the equation, for the benefit of jojo and anyone else who’s confused by the use of these various ways of modifying the value and the terms that relate to them.
