I unequipped all my gear, then equipped Mythical Blood Orb of Ch’thon and turned on its toggle for 100% Elemental > Chaos conversion. Here’s my damage tooltip with a single point in TSS and no points in Frozen Core:
Then I specced 11 points into Frozen Core, enough for +99% Cold damage, within the skill line.
There are three possible outcomes here:
If within-skill-line +% damage to the pre-conversion type doesn’t apply to converted damage, the Chaos damage on my TSS should remain the same
If it applies, but stacks additively with global +% damage, the Chaos damage on my TSS tooltip should increase, but the increase should be significantly less than double (since I have a fair amount of global +% Chaos damage)
If it applies and stacks multiplicatively, the Chaos damage on my TSS tooltip should be almost exactly double the previous value (very slightly less because it’s +99% damage, not +100%)
Here’s the tooltip with the points in Frozen Core:
As you can see, it went up, but only by a little, not by double.
Just to double-check, I also did the same thing with Allagast’s Stormbinder, which has 100% skill-specific Cold > Aether conversion for TSS. This isn’t quite as clean a test, because it also adds flat Aether damage, so the +99% from Frozen Core wouldn’t result in precise doubling of the damage even if it did stack multiplicatively. However, we can still use this to double-check that skill-specific conversion works the same way as global conversion.
Here’s the tooltip with Allagast’s equipped and no Frozen Core:
Here it is with 11/12 Frozen Core:
Again, Aether damage goes up, but only by a tiny bit, consistent with additive stacking.
Conclusion: Percentage damage bonuses to the pre-conversion damage type from within a skill line apply to converted damage, and stack additively with global percentage damage bonuses.
I suspected it works as @A_S00 was kind to confirm that it does because I did this test myself in the past (thanks for sparing me the re-testing by the way). The problem is that it’s hard to explain simply in the guide using some example because it is a bit counter-intuitive and artificial. But the truth is that’s the only good solution from the balance perspective.
[Although the bonus is a bit too weak when you have thousands of %Damage.
I thought of changing it from %damage to i.e. 0% - 20% Total Damage multiplier]
around +200% when you have around +2000% is still around 10% total damage
It is pretty easy to test if this is multiplicative or additive btw https://www.grimtools.com/calc/lV7mK4ON
If Rending force was multiplicative this build would do x3,2 times damage compared to not having a single point there. But the dps increase is about 15% instead, meaning it is additive.
with Decay it’s more like 150% when having 3000% damage
(yeah checked one Vitality build - 3630% damage with average rolls (with Spirit and starting 100%)
so 18 points in Decay give 146 / 3630 ~ 4% damage increase in this case
I think the easiest way to explain this is probably to say that if a skill line includes a % damage bonus to a base damage type that gets converted, you simply add the % bonus from the skill line to the character’s global % damage bonus for the post-conversion damage type when calculating final damage.
For instance, if the example character has:
9 base Vitality damage on RE
+100% Vitality damage to RE from Decay
100% Vitality > Chaos conversion
+2000% global Chaos damage
…you just add the +100% Vitality damage from the skill line to the +2000% global Chaos damage for a total of +2100% damage, then apply that modifier to the 9 base damage for a final total of 198 Chaos damage.
Also don’t forget about adding a bonus magical damage from Spirit.
I’m mentioning it because while doing some tests you might have forgotten about it
and it can make some slight confusing difference while calculating.
Well, yes, I guess? I did test that in game now. Found me a Pack of Deadly Means with exactly 50% conversion, 93% acid damage, Murmur’s Kiss with 93% acid damage and got 300% magic damage out of spirit (well, 299.5% to be exact) just to balance out the numbers. Of course, I took into account +3 to RE on PoDM =)
On 50% conversion example we can see that both acid and vitality damages receive 4 and 3 damage respectively, i.e. ~25% of base skill damage (without 300% bonus from spirit), which is exactly right as lvl 6 Decay gives +50% vitality damage.
so
PARTIAL_CONVERTED_BASE_DAMAGE * FULL_DECAY_BONUS = BASE_DAMAGE * (CONVERTED_DECAY_BONUS)
and this last line is exactly your interpretation that I didn’t see at first and needed to ‘prove’ for myself to get it as above
Yep. I figured this out some time after I started to play the game over a year ago. I was wondering if Crushing Verdict increases damage on acid Judgment. Sure enough, investing 1 point did increase its damage very slightly, so additive nature of % damage on skill’s nodes was obvious.
Actually, I’m pretty sure by game mechanics those % damage bonuses indeed do convert, it’s just we don’t see any change in tooltips. Like, for example, piercing damage on Rending Force remains piercing despite us having full Justice set.
I think percentage reduction on DA do stack, only those that have the word reduced target didn’t. About leech if it’s from different source I believe it stack.
I thought since wayback machine didn’t have the snapshot prior to the thread deletion and google cache no longer have it too, the guide is lost. Turns out the guide is not totally lost, it can still be seen from archive.today.
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