10-13-2005, 12:01 AM
savaughn,Oct 12 2005, 03:34 PM Wrote:Actually, I you were dead to rights the first time, at least as far as every piece of +damage gear I've ever used or tested on my mage, warlock, druid, etc.
This is actually one of the most consistent pieces of WoW. There's some interesting logic behind how +damage is applied to channeled spells, DoT's/HoT's, and stuff like Moonfire and Immolate where there's an initial damage hit followed by a DoT. The general rule is that the entire amount gets applied, generally subdivided by the individual damage ticks. That said, I think there's still a few spells out there that are bugged in this regard.
You had this question earlier:
People who know better than me say that spell ranks which are learned below lvl 20 get a sharply reduced benefit from +Dam/+Heal. Spell ranks learned above lvl 20 are said to always gain the full effect.
So, this is actually a misunderstanding. Lets take shadowbolt as an example. Shadowbolt has a 3s cast, meaning it gets 3/3.5 or 86% of your +damage gear. As other folks have mentioned, this does not change if you have Bane reducing the casting time to 2.5s. The base timer is all that counts.
Okay dammit I'm going to take my priest and cast Lesser Heal Rank 1 on myself and find out the truth (at least for that one spell at that one rank cast on self :) )
Lesser Heal (Rank 1) should get 43% of spellpower bonus (1.5 sec cast time). If so this might be a great way to keep healing when practically out of mana, since Lesser Heal (Rank 1) only costs 35 mana. I have a feeling it won't work too well.
Quote:Now, when +damage gear was first looked at, people noticed that Rank 3 Shadowbolt does not get the 86% of the bonus damage. Rank 3 only gets 80%. Similarly, Rank 2 only gets 63%. This has nothing to do with the rank of the spell. This is because Rank 3 is a 2.8s cast and Rank 2 is a 2.2s cast. There's no weird hand coded diminishing returns, it's just a different casting time. Every spell that gets a longer casting time at higher levels (fireball, frostbolt, etc.) has this.
One other comment. I have not tested AoE outside of mages with +damage, but for Arcane Explosion at least, I have not seen any kind of "we assume 3 targets" thing. By my math, it's been a straight 43%. My AE hits for around 300 per hit and I have no where near the +327 damage gear that would be required if there were a 1/3 in there. I haven't really ever tested this for, say, Hellfire or Hurricane, though, so this may be an exception.
[right][snapback]91864[/snapback][/right]
dang, AE was mentioned as specifically one of the spells with the 1/3 rule!! a little harder to test since I do not have significant +dam on my mage yet.
as previously mentioned this could even change from patch to patch I guess.