I’m 30 hours into Grim Dawn and I love it, but there is definitely room for improvement, especially when it comes to modifiers and modifier descriptions.
For instance, what constitutes an “attack”? Is it:
only physical weapon hits,
inclusive of weapon skills,
does it also affect spells?
Use case: does life steal also work on spells?
Another bit of room for improvement would be “global” versus “local” item modifiers.
Does +11 lightning on a weapon add 11 lightning to a spell? Does chaos damage from Solael’s Witchfire also add on spells?
Makes sense. Then again you either had to make sense of that yourself or learned about it through research during 1 of your two higher level playthroughs.
So what about Callidors Tempest? It jas a weapon dmg % modifier - would flat damage be added? (at full pop)? Would life leech apply? (At full pop?)
These things should be explicitly declared, it would make for better gameplay and more entertaining theorycrafting.
Another example would be bonus to percentage damages. You need to add together the stat bonus and then the specific bonis to get to the final number. IE for vitality bonus youd need to add the spirit viality as well as any explicit vitality bonuses from skills and bonuses. The only way I made sense of the math was with grim calc, the values in the game inside the masteries sheets are net.
I fully agree. Skills could be explained better to ease new players into the game mechanics.
Maybe a kind of interactive documentation would help where the different mechanics are explained while outfitting a dummy character with different items. That may be a bit too much effort for what is gained though.
All the flat modifiers (added + “X element” damage) goes to your “basic” attack damage.
Callidor’s Tempest takes a percentage of that basic attack damage and adds it to the total damage of the skill.
So yes, flat damage is added (a part of it at least) to CT.
Life leech works only for that “% weapon damage” of CT.
Like this:
Lets say that your total basic damage is 100
Lets say that Callidor’s does a 50% of your weapon damage.
And lets say that you have a 10% Life Leech.
So, you get that CT adds 50 damage from your basic attack damage. Your leech then will aply to those 50 damage. So you’ll get 5hp back.
P.s: It is ok to get confused by the somewhat lack of clarity in the tooltip. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang on it.
And if you haven’t yet, check the game guide on lthe top of the page. Ia reaally good to get the basics.