Clervis
08-03-2007, 16:06
In advance, I apologize for being long winded. Feel free to skip down to the cold hard statistics I compiled. A few weeks back I fought the Ubers for the first time. Now prior to this I had read everywhere that the main thing to remember for the ubers is CB CB CB. Then when I took on UberMeph for the first time I realized that it wasn't a long drawn out battle. In fact, it was quite brief.
Ever since that I have thought that Crushing Blow was overrated and not entirely necessary. Then yesterday I read a post asking which was the best Zealot weapon, EthDeath Ettin or Grief PB. Previously when I had calculated which dealt more damage (assuming you make the 80 ias available for the ettin) it turned out that the EthDeathEttin only does about 3% more damage. http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?t=531880 So they were basically even in damage and the trophy belonged to the one that could prove to have the most useful other mods. Since DS was already factored into the damage (Death's 536 ave. dam. & Grief's 520 ), the main proponents of the two options were Grief's ITD and Death's CB and necessary 80 ias.
It's easy to see ITD's benefit; however, as you probably know, accounting for Crushing Blow in damage calculations in absurdly difficult. So, I set out to make a basis to judge the effectiveness of CB.
I figured the best way to accomplish this was to assume a ideally equipped Zealot. Since 80 ias requires some major gear sacrifices I decided to go with EthDeathZerk requiring 60 ias. It does roughly 1% less damage than GriefPB. The chosen gear was: [B]Grief/DeathBA, Guillame's, Gore's, Highlord's, Fort, Exile. (15ias in Guillame's, 20 ias gloves, and Nesferatu's Coil are needed to reach 80ias for Death) At clvl 90 this gives Grief: 50 CB, 83 DS...and Death's setup: 100 CB, 108 DS. (That's an 8% penalty for gratuity so Grief now does 9% more damage than Death).
Note: EthDeathWS does 23% less damage than Grief or -31% after DS penalty, but it only requires 40ias (Highlord's, 20ias Gloves)
Anyway after a very lengthy amount of time I calculated the benefit of CB based on how many hits it takes to kill an enemy. As you know, Crushing Blow takes 1/4 life on normal monsters and 1/8 life on bosses, champs, etc. For the sake of simplicity I assumed 50% crushing blow on a normal monster is equivalent to 100% on a boss, since the numbers are the same on average and it helps with comparing these to setups. What I did was calculate if you can kill a monster in X hits without CB then how fast will it die with CB and I determined a numerical advantage from that. Here is a summary of my figures:
4>>2.87 +39% means:
If it take 4 hits to kill a monster you will kill him in 2.87 hits on average with CB yielding 39% more damage on average.
Death(100%) vs. normal monsters
2>>1.5 +33%
3>>2 +50%
4>>2.87 +39%
5>>3 +67%
10>>5 +100%
15>>6 +150%
You see that if you kill a monster in 10 hits w/o CB, you will kill him in 5 hits w/ 100% CB.
Grief(50%) vs. normal monsters OR Death(100%) vs. bosses
2>>1.75 +14%
3>>2.45 +22%
4>>3.05 +31%
5>>4 +25%
10>>6.18 +61%
15>>8 +85%
You see that the numbers generally scale up the more hits you take for obvious reasons, also, remember that many bosses can take much more than 15 hits to kill so the benefit would most likely be more than +85%.
Grief(50%) vs. bosses
2>>1.87 +6%
3>>2.72 +10%
4>>3.52 +14%
5>>4.25 +17%
10>>7.94 +26%
15>>10.64 +41%
So this basically all depends on how fast you kill enemies. Of course, if you are killing everybody in 1 hit, CB does nothing, but the more hits it takes you, the more benefit CB becomes. I used this Grief set-up(50%) for some testing in Single Player to determine how long it takes to kill enemies. I hunted in the World Stone Keep 2 on varying player levels targeting an array of monsters you can consider to be high-medium-low levels of hit points.
Players 8
Souls: 15-18 hits
Snakes: 3
Zombies: 10-13
Players 6
Souls: 12-15 hits
Snakes: 2-3
Zombies: 7-9
Players 4
Souls: 8-11 hits
Snakes: 2
Zombies: 5-7
Players 1
Souls: 3-5 hits
Snakes: 1
Zombies: 2
This shows that in one player games the benefit of CB is going to be around 33%-50% for Death and 14-22%% for Grief for regular monster. However, bosses, coincidentally are going to take 2-3 times more hits meaning that Death will benefit by 40-50% and Grief by 17-20%. So, although the benefit per hit goes down from normal to boss the overall benefit makes it quite even.
So from this we can deduce the benefit of CB based solely on the numbers of players in a game.
Players 1
Death +45%
Grief +18%
Players 4
Death +73%
Grief +43%
Players 6
Death +150%
Grief +85%
Players 8
Death +230%
Grief +115%
That shows that in a full game a Death wielder owes more than 2/3 of his damage to CB. Moreover, in Players 1 Death gets 27% more bonus than Grief minus its 9% damage defiency it still does 18% more damage than Grief. But you need to correct these respectively:
Players 1
Death does 12% more than Grief
Players 4
Death does 10% more than Grief
Players 6
Death does 23% more than Grief
Players 8
Death does 40% more than Grief
Now keep in mind that this is in the World Stone Keep and that the easier you get the more CB becomes less effective and the more Grief improves. So in Normal difficulty where everything is one hit Grief is 9% more efficient, as it is in any place where it kills in one hit. But the more hits it takes the more it Death gains and it can gain fast. Additionally, note that CB takes out damage before your regular physical damage. So even one hit kills could have benefited from CB.
So all of this was in response to one question: Which is better Grief or Death?
I hope this shows that Eth Death Zerker on average in challenging situations can deal 12-40% more damage than Grief PB which should still more than cancel out the benefit of ITD. They are both still amazing weapons but as far as sheer ferocity goes, Eth Death Zerker is marginally better.
If you have any questions on how I calculated this or anything else just ask, I also have the spreadsheet I used if you prefer. I hope I didn't mess up any of the math, but in calculations this vast there is bound to be a small mistake or two in addition to the basic rounding error that might have occured.
Ever since that I have thought that Crushing Blow was overrated and not entirely necessary. Then yesterday I read a post asking which was the best Zealot weapon, EthDeath Ettin or Grief PB. Previously when I had calculated which dealt more damage (assuming you make the 80 ias available for the ettin) it turned out that the EthDeathEttin only does about 3% more damage. http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?t=531880 So they were basically even in damage and the trophy belonged to the one that could prove to have the most useful other mods. Since DS was already factored into the damage (Death's 536 ave. dam. & Grief's 520 ), the main proponents of the two options were Grief's ITD and Death's CB and necessary 80 ias.
It's easy to see ITD's benefit; however, as you probably know, accounting for Crushing Blow in damage calculations in absurdly difficult. So, I set out to make a basis to judge the effectiveness of CB.
I figured the best way to accomplish this was to assume a ideally equipped Zealot. Since 80 ias requires some major gear sacrifices I decided to go with EthDeathZerk requiring 60 ias. It does roughly 1% less damage than GriefPB. The chosen gear was: [B]Grief/DeathBA, Guillame's, Gore's, Highlord's, Fort, Exile. (15ias in Guillame's, 20 ias gloves, and Nesferatu's Coil are needed to reach 80ias for Death) At clvl 90 this gives Grief: 50 CB, 83 DS...and Death's setup: 100 CB, 108 DS. (That's an 8% penalty for gratuity so Grief now does 9% more damage than Death).
Note: EthDeathWS does 23% less damage than Grief or -31% after DS penalty, but it only requires 40ias (Highlord's, 20ias Gloves)
Anyway after a very lengthy amount of time I calculated the benefit of CB based on how many hits it takes to kill an enemy. As you know, Crushing Blow takes 1/4 life on normal monsters and 1/8 life on bosses, champs, etc. For the sake of simplicity I assumed 50% crushing blow on a normal monster is equivalent to 100% on a boss, since the numbers are the same on average and it helps with comparing these to setups. What I did was calculate if you can kill a monster in X hits without CB then how fast will it die with CB and I determined a numerical advantage from that. Here is a summary of my figures:
4>>2.87 +39% means:
If it take 4 hits to kill a monster you will kill him in 2.87 hits on average with CB yielding 39% more damage on average.
Death(100%) vs. normal monsters
2>>1.5 +33%
3>>2 +50%
4>>2.87 +39%
5>>3 +67%
10>>5 +100%
15>>6 +150%
You see that if you kill a monster in 10 hits w/o CB, you will kill him in 5 hits w/ 100% CB.
Grief(50%) vs. normal monsters OR Death(100%) vs. bosses
2>>1.75 +14%
3>>2.45 +22%
4>>3.05 +31%
5>>4 +25%
10>>6.18 +61%
15>>8 +85%
You see that the numbers generally scale up the more hits you take for obvious reasons, also, remember that many bosses can take much more than 15 hits to kill so the benefit would most likely be more than +85%.
Grief(50%) vs. bosses
2>>1.87 +6%
3>>2.72 +10%
4>>3.52 +14%
5>>4.25 +17%
10>>7.94 +26%
15>>10.64 +41%
So this basically all depends on how fast you kill enemies. Of course, if you are killing everybody in 1 hit, CB does nothing, but the more hits it takes you, the more benefit CB becomes. I used this Grief set-up(50%) for some testing in Single Player to determine how long it takes to kill enemies. I hunted in the World Stone Keep 2 on varying player levels targeting an array of monsters you can consider to be high-medium-low levels of hit points.
Players 8
Souls: 15-18 hits
Snakes: 3
Zombies: 10-13
Players 6
Souls: 12-15 hits
Snakes: 2-3
Zombies: 7-9
Players 4
Souls: 8-11 hits
Snakes: 2
Zombies: 5-7
Players 1
Souls: 3-5 hits
Snakes: 1
Zombies: 2
This shows that in one player games the benefit of CB is going to be around 33%-50% for Death and 14-22%% for Grief for regular monster. However, bosses, coincidentally are going to take 2-3 times more hits meaning that Death will benefit by 40-50% and Grief by 17-20%. So, although the benefit per hit goes down from normal to boss the overall benefit makes it quite even.
So from this we can deduce the benefit of CB based solely on the numbers of players in a game.
Players 1
Death +45%
Grief +18%
Players 4
Death +73%
Grief +43%
Players 6
Death +150%
Grief +85%
Players 8
Death +230%
Grief +115%
That shows that in a full game a Death wielder owes more than 2/3 of his damage to CB. Moreover, in Players 1 Death gets 27% more bonus than Grief minus its 9% damage defiency it still does 18% more damage than Grief. But you need to correct these respectively:
Players 1
Death does 12% more than Grief
Players 4
Death does 10% more than Grief
Players 6
Death does 23% more than Grief
Players 8
Death does 40% more than Grief
Now keep in mind that this is in the World Stone Keep and that the easier you get the more CB becomes less effective and the more Grief improves. So in Normal difficulty where everything is one hit Grief is 9% more efficient, as it is in any place where it kills in one hit. But the more hits it takes the more it Death gains and it can gain fast. Additionally, note that CB takes out damage before your regular physical damage. So even one hit kills could have benefited from CB.
So all of this was in response to one question: Which is better Grief or Death?
I hope this shows that Eth Death Zerker on average in challenging situations can deal 12-40% more damage than Grief PB which should still more than cancel out the benefit of ITD. They are both still amazing weapons but as far as sheer ferocity goes, Eth Death Zerker is marginally better.
If you have any questions on how I calculated this or anything else just ask, I also have the spreadsheet I used if you prefer. I hope I didn't mess up any of the math, but in calculations this vast there is bound to be a small mistake or two in addition to the basic rounding error that might have occured.