(posting here since main post hit the 66k character limit)
Advanced Mechanics
Volcanic Stride is a secondary skill, which means that it is unaffected by modifiers to the main skill, Vire's Might. For example, Zarthuzellan's Archive has the modifier "500 Burn Damage over 2 seconds to Vire's Might". This effect only applies to enemies hit directly by Vire's Might, and will not work with Volcanic Stride. Similarly, conversion for secondary skills like Volcanic Stride cannot be achieved through local skill modifiers (e.g. "100% Physical damage converted to Fire damage to Vire's Might") and must be done through global modifiers instead.
Secondary skills can also trigger devotions attached to the main skill, but they do not inherit any increased proc chance that the main skill receives (if any). This means that Volcanic Stride can trigger Aetherfire, but only at a 15% chance each time it hits. Due to the unique behavior of Volcanic Stride however, the effective proc chance is significantly higher.
If you have points in Volcanic Stride, then for every meter traveled in Vire’s Might, a patch of fire is created at your current location. These patches have a radius of 2.2m and are similar to those created by Blackwater Cocktail, which tick once per second to inflict damage in an area. Like Blackwater Cocktail, the patches can also overlap to damage an enemy multiple times.
Consequently, the number of hits that a single tick of Volcanic Stride will deal depends on size of the target’s hitbox as well as the length of the fire trail. Assuming that the trail is long enough, a small target like the Training Dummy will usually be hit around 4-5 times, whereas larger enemies like Manifestation of Korvaak, the Eldritch Sun may be hit upwards of 6-7 times.
Since each hit has its own independent chance to trigger Aetherfire, we can calculate the effective proc chance as:
effective proc chance = 1 - (0.85 ^ N)
where N is the number of times Volcanic Stride hits an enemy. However, this is not accounting for the fact that Aetherfire also has no cooldown, and therefore can proc multiple times per Volcanic Stride tick. For that, we can calculate the proc frequency, which is the sum of the probability for each case multiplied by its value. Roughly speaking, this can be thought of as “Aetherfires per second”.
| Number of Hits | Proc Chance (x1) | Proc Chance (x2) | Proc Chance (x3) | Proc Chance (x4) | Proc Chance (x5) | Proc Chance (x6) | Effective Proc Chance | Proc Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 15% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 15% | 15% |
| 2 | 25.5% | 2.25% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 27.75% | 30% |
| 3 | 32.51% | 5.74% | 0.34% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 38.59% | 45% |
| 4 | 36.85% | 9.75% | 1.15% | 0.05% | 0% | 0% | 47.80% | 60% |
| 5 | 39.15% | 13.82% | 2.44% | 0.22% | 0.0076% | 0% | 55.63% | 75% |
| 6 | 39.93% | 17.62% | 4.15% | 0.55% | 0.039% | 0.0011% | 62.29% | 90% |
As ground effects, both Volcanic Stride and Aetherfire also share a quirk in that their first damage tick occurs not when they are created but one second later. Therefore, Volcanic Stride ticks three times in total despite having a 4s duration, and Aetherfire only ticks twice over a 3s duration.
If we assume that a single cast of Volcanic Stride hits a target 6 times per second, it will deal 4644 base Fire damage over its duration. We should also expect an average of 2.7 Aetherfire procs, which along with 55% Aether to Fire conversion, is another 1246 base Fire damage, or approximately 21% of the total damage (in theory). In practice, the damage is a bit lower since we are not including other sources of damage and Aetherfire is capped to 8 maximum instances at a time.
For a slightly more realistic approximation, let us assume that we can keep up 7 simultaneous instances of Volcanic Stride that hit 6 times per second while also maintaining the maximum 8 instances of Aetherfire. In that case, the combined Volcanic Stride trails will deal 10836 base Fire damage per second while Aetherfire will deal 1846 base Fire damage per second, or approximately 14.5% of the total damage. With only 2000% increased Fire damage, this translates to approximately 227.5k and 38.7k DPS, respectively.
