All About Crushing Blow

[TylerEss]

I've been doing some research, and I have found that what DiabloII.net says about crushing blow is not accurate. I've been using a (hacked) Dagger with the following properties: 100% chance of Crushing Blow, Ignores Target's Defense, Prevent Monster Heal, Slows Target 100% (the last just to help with survivability). Every time I swing, I get the crushing blow animation. Prevent Monster Heal is just to allow accuracy in reading the monster HP graph. Weapon damage is base 1-4, so almost 100% of my damage is coming from Crushing Blow. Here is what I have found:

In Normal difficulty, Crushing Blow deals 25% of a normal monster's hit points. Two hits brings monsters down to just more than half of their original hitpoints. As the number of players increases (either by /players command or by joining a bigger game--I tried both, but not on the Realms), the % damage decreases-it looks like it's taking Monster HP/Number of Players/4. That is to say that crushing blow damage does NOT scale with monster HP in multiplayer games.

In Nightmare difficulty, Crushing blow is exactly the same as in Normal. 1 players Act 4/Nightmare monsters all fall in about 6 swings to the above hacked weapon. Damage still does not scale with more players. 8 players monsters take 30 hits or more.

In Hell difficulty, Crushing Blow is even worse. Some monsters take 25% damage, some seem to only take about 10%. I believe this is the result of Physical Damage Resistance. Damage still does NOT increase to make up for more players.

In short, Crushing Blow helps out in Hell difficulty, but it doesn't do as much as it should. It also becomes less useful as the number of players in your game increases. I think my CB Assassin build can still be revived, but it'll only work in solo games. :-(

[kingcourage]

The weaken of CB what your see in the hell maybe is just because of the physical damage reduction of monster :uhhuh: but I remember RTB had said that CB is not a damage, no leech life or mana work with it. :scratch:

I add my personal question , could CB also work with vengeance? :scratch:

humbly approaching the forums for the enlightening from yours, almighty Masters on the forums. :worship:

[Aerath]

Iirc, it is stated on the Arreat Summit that CB is not scaled for more players.

The Physical Resistance is not mentioned on there, but I suppose that's fairly logical...

On a sidenote : Even if a CB takes 10% of the HPs instead of 25%, in hell that still can be oodles of damage vs one of the big critters.

[royalesse]

IIRC Physical resistance only affects CB if it's positive so that would take into account the extra damage.

Other than that the 25% damage is taken from the health at the beginning of the attack then the regular damage is taken into account.

For instance in normal...
Say you have a Fallen with 40 hit points

Assuming the dagger does 5 hp
1st attack: does 10pts CB and 5 pts of dagger damage leaving 25 hp
2nd attack: 6pts CB and 5 pts damage leaving 14 hp
3rd attack: 3pts CB and 5 pts damage leaving 6 hp
4th attack: 1 CB and 5 pts damage killing the fallen

Now in NM if the fallen has 400 health:

1st attack: 100 CB and 5 pts damage leaving 295
2nd attack: 73 CB and 5 pts leaving 217
3rd attack: 54 CB and 5 pts leaving 158
4th attack: 39 CB and 5 pts leaving 114
etc...

So in both scaling the health for NM and Hell and scaling for Multiplayers you need to account for the weapon damage. In truth the only true test is to find out how much damage the first hit did. You can hit with the dagger once and then weapon switch to something that does 10 or 100 damage and count the swings to calculate pretty closely whether or not the CB is scaling. Counting attacks to kill doesn't do the calculation justice.

P.S. I didn't use 'game numbers' I used hypothetical numbers

[qhc]

When you talk about XX ppl in game, does that XX means the time that monster spawned, or the time u killing it? Or you just assume no ppl join/leave the game between the monster spawned/died.

[5zigen]

if you look at arreat summit it says everything about crushing blow

it says crushing blow dammage does not scale with players in game. thier example is "if an enemy has 2 times as many hps because of the players in the game, cb will do half as much, so 1/8 life meele, 1/16 ranged"

it also talks about how crushing blow is effected by phsycial resistance, so if an enemy is 50% physical resistant, you will do half as much CB dmg, meaning instead of 1/4 you do 1/8. This is why i suggest Atmas scarab for crushing blow.

note that Alot of creatures in hell difficulty have physical resistance around 50%, some have less and some have more.

[RTB]

ghc: At the time of spawning.

5zigen: 25 and 33% are the most common physical resists of monsters in hell.