Trail of Cinders 1.0.5 Damage Changes and Buggy “Black Weapons”

In patch 1.0.5, we will be fixing a bug with Trail of Cinders that is causing the rune to deal five times more damage than intended. As a result of this fix, the amount of damage done by Trail of Cinders will be reduced from its current value (1500% weapon damage over 3 seconds) to 300% weapon damage over 3 seconds. While this bug was discovered very quickly after 1.0.4 released and is capable of being hotfixed, we didn’t want to move forward with the fix without giving players proper notice. We also know that players are having fun using Trail of Cinders in their builds, so — although this is an important issue we want to address — we’re opting to wait for the next client patch to make any adjustments.

We recognize that some builds which currently use Trail of Cinders will no longer be viable once this bug is fixed. Ultimately, we want to continue to provide players with more build options and ways to feel creative with their skill/gear selections, but not at the expense of going against our design goals or creating situations which can encourage players to limit themselves defensively.

Discipline-based skills were never intended to trump Hatred-based skills when it comes to dealing damage. Instead, Discipline should be something you build up and save to use defensively, or to provide utility in addition to dealing damage. Allowing Trail of Cinders to remain in its current form goes against this philosophy, and in addition creates risky scenarios for players (after all, if you’re incentivized to spend all your Discipline doing damage, it won’t be available when you need it to keep yourself alive with skills like Smoke Screen or Shadow Power).

We don’t yet have a date for when 1.0.5 will be released, but we’ll provide more information as the development process continues. We’ll also update this thread with a reminder once we’re close to releasing the patch.

Agree not a bug a bug is something that is doing something not as intended. It is dealing 1500% damage it is working as it was designed.
The fire on the ground deals damage 5 times a second, and we set a value for how much damage we wanted Trail of Cinders to do in that period of time. Unfortunately, that value was incorrectly added to the individual ticks. So, the amount of damage currently done by each of those 5 ticks is actually the total amount of damage it’s supposed to do over the entire second. That part is a bug.

We didn’t catch this during testing, which is absolutely our fault. There are still very good reasons for fixing this issue, and they’re outlined in the main post.

My understanding is, you wanted it to do 1500% weapon damage over 3 secs, but actually it was doing 5 times that = 7500% over 3 seconds? So if the initial goal was 1500%, why in the hell you guys throwing out numbers like 300%?

We originally wanted Trail of Cinders to deal 300% weapon damage over 3 seconds (or approximately 100% weapon damage each second). What ended up happening, is that — instead of the rune doing only 100% weapon damage each second — it now does 100% weapon damage each tick. The fire damage ticks 5 times each second, so 15 ticks for the entire duration of the spell. That’s 1500% weapon damage, or 5 times more damage than originally designed.

I know its early days for this game, but I hope that you will allow for some evolution in the characters you guys have made. I mean, why not allow for a switch in playstyle for those that choose it. Since the patch, I have been using TOC as an offensive and putting my char in danger as a result, but its way more fun than keeping my distance.

Please don’t set all your ideas in stone yet, there may be much better way to go about it… or at least give us the freedom to choose.

This is definitely feedback I will be relaying back to the developers. Thank you for sharing it.

So the bug is that it’s doing more damage per second that as intended? Why don’t you jut fix it and leave it at 1500% over 3 seconds? What’s the point of bringing it down to 300%?

It was never intended to deal 1500% weapon damage over 3 seconds (that’s the bug). The actual value we designed for Trail of Cinders in 1.0.4 was 300% weapon damage over 3 seconds.

whoa, whoa, whoa! you mean the patch notes you released were a lie?

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7029347/7029347#classes

this clearly states 1500%. that means if you didnt intend for it to be 1500% then it was completely untested AND no one checked the patch notes either.

do you have no quality control division? no testers? why the heck are you lieing to us?
The note was written based on incorrect information, yes (which due to the fact that we missed this issue during testing). We’ve already identified why we missed this issue originally and have improved our processes so that the same issue won’t happen again — both for in terms of testing changes and confirming information put into the patch notes.

Is it a bug that the toottip says 1500% as well?
The tooltip pulls from the actual game data. Since the rune is currently dealing 1500% weapon damage, the tooltip value reflects this.

There are still tooltips in game now that don’t accurately reflect the skill they are describing. So, your theory doesn’t work. And blizzard has said that there will be safeguards before. But they continue to fail with this beta product. And on top of that they pretty much tell us we’re all stupid by proclaiming it to be a bug instead of having a bit of integrity and telling the truth.
It actually depends on how the tooltip is set up, and from where its pulling its data. In the case of Trail of Cinders, the tooltip is displaying 1500% weapon damage over 3 seconds because that’s how much damage the rune is currently doing; the values in the tooltip are pulling that information directly from the game (i.e we didn’t manually update the tooltip in 1.0.4).

Regardless, if we just wanted to nerf Trail of Cinders, we’d just say that we were nerfing it. We’ve made similar announcements in the past. This particular change is the result of a bug fix, however; if we called it something other than a bug fix, then we’d be lying.

Since it is basically doing 100% damage per tick over 15 ticks… how about decreasing the damage by 5% every tick. This essentially would end up doing 975% (100 + 95 + 90, etc.) all the way down to 35% damage for the final tick.

Still too over-powered? Decrease it by 10% each time and you’ll end up with 550% over 2 seconds.

Just something to consider… a way to keep the skill from going back to unviable. People obviously love the new ToC, based on the outcry from the players here. Hopefully we can reach a middle-ground, somewhere between 300% and 1500%.

Thanks for sharing this suggestion. I’ll make sure it gets passed on.

So it turns out that any item that says that it “adds +x% to elemental damage” actually works by multiplying your non-elemental (“black”) weapon damage by 1.0X (so if you have +6% to poision, and you have a weapon with average 950 regular damage, you will get 106% times 950 = (950 regular + 57 poison) damage as your base weapon damage. Basically, if your weapon is all nonelemental damage, you will receive a +6% damage increase as poison damage.

MANY players are very curious as to whether this is how the modification is actuallly supposed to work. Because it is in fact, counter-intuitive for it to function in this way when its wording suggests that it should increase the amount of base poison damage by 6%, instead of adding a flat percent increase to your non-existant poison damage.

I want to know if this is going to be changed or if it is going to continue to function like this indefinitely, because if it is supposed to be this way, things like zunimassa’s boots and triumvirate (otherwise mediocre items) are the absolute best-in-slot items for certain classes.

Blue please enlighten us!!
The “+x% Elemental Damage” affix works by adding “x%” of your physical damage to your attack, in the form of the damage type listed.

So, really basic example:

Your physical damage is 100, and the item adds +3% Fire damage.
You gain 3 extra damage to your attacks as Fire damage.

Things this takes into account:

Rings, mojos, orbs (etc) that have an “X-Y” damage affix (e.g. “1-2 Damage”)
The base damage range of your weapon, before any elemental damage is added from the affix
+Min or +Max affixes on weapons

(Note: It doesn’t benefit from “+X-Y Elemental Damage” affixes on weapons.)

We realize the current wording for this affix can be confusing, and it’s something we’d like to make more clear in the future. If you have any suggestions for how this affix could be better worded, we’re definitely interested in your suggestions. Just keep in mind that space is limited in item tooltips, and that whatever we use would need to be translated into all of our supported languages.

Can you please explain why it is coded to add 2 * (x%) min damage instead of x% min + x% max?

Note: I have personally done the math and I can tell you, without doubt, that it currently adds 2 * (x%) min and ignores the max damage on your wep.

I’ve reached out to our developers, programmers, and QA about the current functionality. Once I have more information, I’ll respond back to the thread.

Thank you for pointing this out!