IV. CLOSE-UP: UNDERSTANDING PET DAMAGE
Our build’s primary damage dealers are those pesky swarmlings from Primal Instinct that can spawn up to 6 at once. If you already play a pet build, you’re probably thinking: “I also use Primal Instinct and my character sheet shows even higher +% pet damage, but my swarmlings don’t hit for anywhere near 40k+. What gives?”
The answer: +% pet damage on the character sheet is not a reliable indicator of overall pet damage. Understanding all the variables that go into pet damage (in addition to +% pet damage) can be tricky since there’s no in-game pet DPS calculator to compare changes between different setups. Therefore, using our build’s swarmlings as an example, I’ve created the Max Pet Damage Calculator. This spreadsheet estimates your pet’s expected maximum damage against a defenseless opponent (no armor or resistance) and assuming maximum crit rolls; obviously your actual in-game damage will be lower, especially against Ultimate enemy defenses and DA. You should expect to reach 60-80% of the calculated max damage with all procs active, depending on your target and actual crit rolls. Damage significantly higher than the calculated maximum is possible in multiplayer and/or Crucible.
[ul][li]This is NOT a full DPS calculator, since it doesn’t factor in factors such attack speed, OA vs DA, etc. The goal of this tool is to allow direct apples-to-apples comparisons of expected results between different skill/devotion/item setups.[/li]
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To follow along with this article, you can access the spreadsheet here: http://goo.gl/0QgGNY. Feel free to download the spreadsheet and modify it for your own build.
Here’s what the spreadsheet looks like:
As shown above, we divide the damage process into 4 separate sections:[ol]
[li]Base Damage[/li]
[li]Damage Multiplier[/li]
[li]Resist Reduction[/li]
[li]Crit Multiplier and Offensive Ability[/li]
[/ol]
1. BASE DAMAGE
Base damage is where many summoners start off on the wrong foot, because they assume it’s just about the pet. However, anyone familiar with weapon-based builds already understands that there’s far more to weapon DPS than the weapon’s base damage alone. Likewise, much of the base damage for pets doesn’t come from the pet itself, but instead from added flat damage. This can be either auras (group buffs with radius of effect, such as Flame Touched) or flat pet damage modifiers (direct pet damage bonus without radius restrictions, such as Burning Weapons).
Here are some points to consider when it comes to base damage:
- For mastery pets, how many skill points you invest into each pet is only the starting point (first column) for base damage. Any optimized pet build will expand significantly beyond this.
- For the vast majority of pet builds, investing into flat damage buffs to enhance ALL pets will provide better returns than investing into single pets from masteries. (Depending on the build, primal spirit can be an exception.) Early investment into mastery pets is still useful for leveling.
- Stacking flat damage will add a lot more damage types to each pet. Since pets enjoy high +% total damage multipliers, this isn’t a problem.
- Use Grimtools to find the base damage of mastery pets, item pets, and flat damage buffs. The in-game tooltips do NOT provide base damage information: tooltip damage is already scaled up by damage multiplier, and pet tooltips ignore flat damage buffs/modifiers entirely.
- Pets that do not have % weapon damage attacks will not benefit from additional flat damage. These include the raven (Summon Familiar), rift scourge (Blightshard Amulet), and voidfiends (Will of Bysmiel).
Note that our build’s swarmlings already deal most of their initial base damage as fire, and that a large portion of our flat damage added to all pets is fire as well. Adding flat damage increased our swarmlings’ base damage by +68%; even more dramatically, we’ve also increased the base damage of our hellhound by +1010%. This is a far more effective method to increase hellhound base damage than investing more skill points!
Keep in mind that gains from each section are multiplicative, not additive. This means that improving performance in each of the 4 sections can have a huge snowball effect as they pile atop each other.
2. DAMAGE MULTIPLIER
We can divide pet damage multipliers into total damage (listed on pet character sheet as “Damage”) and individual damage (NOT listed on pet character sheet). Starting with total damage, we observe that:
- Pets are effective at using all damage types, thanks to their high total damage multipliers.
- Procs and active abilities are hugely important. For our build, our procs/abilities actually provide more total damage bonuses than the static base bonuses from items/devotions/skills.
- Conversely, pet builds lose a lot of damage if they don’t remain highly active in combat to keep all procs going. “Lazy” = lost DPS.
- CDR is extremely helpful for pet builds to maintain devotion procs and skill effects.
- The sum of base pet damage multiplier plus all active +% total damage effects gives us the character sheet pet damage multiplier, listed as +973% for our build.
(For Hungering Void, I’ve added its chaos bonus to its total damage to save myself a column; this chaos bonus will not show up on the pet character sheet in-game.)
Now let’s consider the individual damage multipliers NOT listed as part of the pet character sheet:
- As with flat damage, individual multipliers can come from auras (radius) or pet damage modifiers (no radius).
- Auras generally come from mastery skills, while pet damage modifiers generally come from items and devotions.
- Individual bonuses can be quite large, especially from auras with heavy skill investment. Most of the bonuses we use increase specific damage type(s) by over +100%.
- Most of our build’s individual damage multipliers are for fire, which is consistent with most of our base damage from Section 1 being fire as well.
- Having additional base damage types, such as flat chaos damage from Hellfire, allows us to also benefit from those individual multiplier bonuses.
- Depending on your build, individual damage multipliers can be just as important or even more important than the +% total pet damage listed on your character sheet.
As an example, our build has a base damage of 497 (from Section 1) and a character sheet multiplier of +973%, so you’d expect a total damage of 5333 after multipliers. Instead, our actual total damage is 8353 – a 57% improvement over the character sheet damage multiplier! This shows that it’s often far more efficient to add some individual multipliers instead of continuing to stack total pet damage into diminishing returns.
3. RESIST REDUCTION
Resist reduction (RR) is straightforward and works the same as for any other build. The key improvement here is that having stacked our damage toward fire in Sections 1 and 2, we’re now well-positioned to further increase our damage by weighing RR heavily toward fire as well. As highlighted in the blue above. this has a multiplicative effect on the resulting after-RR damage. Contrast this against the “traditional” summoner RR setup of Manticore + CoF + Vuln intended to cover a balanced variety of pet damage types:
The “traditional” RR setup used by most other pet builds would have increased our RR-damage from 8353 to 12700 (52% increase). However, our actual fire-heavy RR setup increases our RR-damage much higher to 16529 (98% increase). In other words, our RR setup is twice as effective as other pet builds because our damage stacking allowed us to focus on fire RR.
4. CRIT MULTIPLIER AND OFFENSIVE ABILITY
Crit multiplier is the last factor of pet damage. For a quick primer on critical hits, refer to the Game Guide. Base critical hits can roll anywhere between 1.10 to 1.50 depending on your PTH, but your pets’ additional crit multiplier bonus will be added to all critical hits regardless of the base multiplier rolled.
Our build’s crit bonuses are evenly divided between permanent and proc/active bonuses. This means that just as with +% total damage procs from Section 2, we’re also required to stay active in maintaining our procs/abilities to maximize crit damage.
Our max crit of 3.32 is extremely high even for a pet build (and goes even higher in multiplayer or Crucible). In comparison, the Pokemon build using all recommended equipment only reaches a max crit multiplier of 2.25 (using pet crit bonuses from Shepherd’s Call, Beastcaller’s set bonus, Bysmiel’s Domination, and 3x Mogdrogen’s Blessing). Because of our higher OA, we also roll higher crit rolls when we do crit, whereas the Pokemon build rarely hits the top crit multipliers. This means that on average, our crits are roughly 50% stronger than the Pokemon build, in addition to being more frequent.
Crit damage is intimately tied to offensive ability (OA). Higher OA allows for both more frequent and higher-rolled crits, and having a high crit multiplier is useless without an equally high OA to make sure that crits will land as often as possible. Fortunately, our swarmlings boast an effective OA of 3754, which is high enough to reach max crit rolls (PTH>135) against some enemies. The OA worksheet illustrates how this is achieved by stacking 3 different types of bonuses: flat OA buffs, +% pet OA, and flat DA debuffs. Because pet crit multipliers are generally much higher than player crit multipliers, the general rule of thumb is that +% pet OA is the most valuable stat on pet items – far more important than +% total pet damage!
SUMMARY
Let’s use another example from our build, this time using the hellhound.
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Pet tooltips and other in-game displays (such as character sheet for pet damage) do not present a complete and accurate picture of pet damage. This makes comparisons difficult when tweaking one’s build.
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On a per-hit basis, pet damage is determined by base damage, damage multiplier, resist reduction, and crit multiplier. We can use the Max Pet Damage Calculator to estimate the max damage on a defenseless target.
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This estimate is far more consistent with observed in-game damage than any in-game tooltip or other displays, as the above dummy damage shows. (Warning: it takes very high OA to hit the max crit multiplier.)
You can access the spreadsheet here: http://goo.gl/0QgGNY. Feel free to download the spreadsheet and modify it for your own build. Have fun!