Night Heralds will give drain life 40% of weapon damage. If I’ve understood it correctly, this will add 40% of all flat damage sources to drain life. First I didn’t think this would be enough for a focused build.
However I recalled the spectral shield 6% retal to attack /w drain essence, and drain essence dealing damage 3 times a second actually making the dps 6x3=18% retal damage per second. This would then also affect NH’s. Thinking about it as “120% weapon damage per second” (and improving, with cast speed) makes it sound more tempting.
The problem is then resists. If one deals 1000 fire damage against, say 20% fire resist (after RR applied). Then 500 damage twice against 20% resist, is much less than 1000 damage once right? I mean… many smaller hit, is noticeable weaker than a few strong hits (unless I’m mistaken). Because the enemy gets value out of their defenses multiple times. Same situation /w phys vs armor I guess in many games, where armor is usually stronger vs many hits, and exponentially weaker against single strong hits.
I’m just wondering if my assessment here is correct. And if anyone has any advice on how to best exploit NH wpn% being applied many times per second. The obvious is devotions with low CD. Not sure how to fundamentally build around the advantage of adding 40% wpn to DE. Maybe focusing on many different dots at the same time could be good for once?
1 / 0.3 ~ 3.333… times per second at 100% casting speed
Double that at 200% casting speed.
Not sure if hybrid would work because you need high separate %damage stat gathered for them
Nah, resistance reduces damage by % so it doesn’t matter if it’s applied in one hit / tick or few smaller ones. Sounds more like flat absorption / armor. This is from this multiplication property:
(X + Y) * Z = XZ + YZ
I don’t see what devotions with low CD has anything to do with NH weapon damage for DE. It’s not related. Devotions with some weapon damage deal this weapon damage, DE also deals some weapon damage thanks to NH’s modifier. DE having weapon damage doesn’t impact procced devotions damage. That’s about it. There’s no other relation. Some devotions provide a small amount of flat damage that will boost DH when it has % weapon damage but it will be a little effect since both bonuses and %weapon damage are small.
I don’t think there are many ways to benefit from Weapon damage to DE on this one-hander.
You can maybe use the second one plus amulet for total of 60% and you convert flat Aether / Vitality on i.e. Harbinger of Souls / Spectral Binding to Cold which benefits DE more the more %Weapon damage modifiers to DE you have.
Maybe it’s a bonus for Cold Spellbinder that has lot of flat Aether / Elemental / Vitality damage to convert.
partially applying Energy leech on gear from i.e. Arcane Spark
acdth - but it’s not needed since DE has plenty of it by default affecting the whole damage
In my opinion channeling skills such as DE don’t benefit from dots too much (apart making them Crit fast) because their very high tickrate boosts how many times per second non-dot damage is applied which makes it a huge % of the total damage dealt.
