Can anyone explain why inferno is so damaging now?

[Pren]

We've all seen venom lords in act 4 doing sick damage even with huge resists and -md. The same can be said for flayer shamen in act 3. I've yet to see anyone explain -why- the drastic increase in danger, with actual math. Heck, venom lords do more damage than diablo's lightning hose.

[Occhidiangela]

Or was it a feature?

Inferno has two streams, and for one reason or another, typically only one would actually do damage.

Perhaps all that they did was fix it so that both streams worked, and perhaps they beefed up the slvl of Inferno that the Balrogs shoot, or gave them Fire Mastery as well as Inferno at the same old level. :)

[Blanky]

This also applies to the cold breath guys in ancients way too. I've also read (I think it was in amazon basin) that decrepify actually lowered the damage of the attack a good deal, so perhaps there's some physical damage mixxed in? Would explain why it deals more damage than the lightning hose when your resists are decent.

*shrug*

Blank

[TaiDaishar]

This also applies to the cold breath guys in ancients way too.  I've also read (I think it was in amazon basin) that decrepify actually lowered the damage of the attack a good deal, so perhaps there's some physical damage mixxed in?  Would explain why it deals more damage than the lightning hose when your resists are decent.

*shrug*

Blank

Nope, it won't explain a thing because Diablo's Lightning Breath of Doom is 50% physical.

To me it seems that they just went overboard about the buff to the cold/fire inferno of the monsters.

[Occhidiangela]

What mechanical/procedural change to the function was put into place. I suppose that answer may be some time in coming.

One way to do that would be to change the mlvl/X divisor. Rather than mvlv/4, for example, for Inferno, maybe an mlvl/3 or mlvl/2 method was used.

If a mlvl 80 monster has an slvl 40 inferno, and the old bug the kept one of the damage streams from working was repaired, then one Inferno might indeed have been "buffed" by a simple change in arithmatic.

Likewise for Arctic Blast and our Cold Creeping friends in the Ice Caves.

Now, the suspicion that I have that a Mastery Skill was added to the attack, pulled from Sorceress file tables, is another method of taking a skill and boosting its power without changing the formula above. Level 20 Inferno with Level 20 mastery is no slouch for damage dealing, wouldn't you say?

534 to 567 per second at present.

With 75% resists, that is still 130-135 per second. Add two or three Blarogs breathing at once, and it all stack up pretty quickly.

At level 40 for both . . .1700-1750. (Ouch!) With 75% resists that is still over 400 points per second.

[LucianDK]

Sounds interesting, but what about the player inferno skills? Ive hearing various things about how they do miniscule damage now.

[Occhidiangela]

You get some damage synergy. There is a discussion of that in the Workshop or the Armory at the moment.

[Ruvanal]

The Venom Lords in v1.09 used the skill FetishInferno at skill level 4 (normal difficulty) for the flame breath. This would have been about 5-7 damge per frame or 125-175 damage per second if you hung around in it. MDR worked moderately against this attack; 2 missiles with one having a DamageRate of 82 and the other a DamageRate of 0 (no degredation of MDR).*

In v1.10 the Venom Lords that you see in act 4 now use the skill MegademonInferno at skill level 9 in normal difficulty. This should be doing 43-46 damage per frame or about 1075-1150 damage per second. With only a single missile and a DamageRate=82, MDR will only work poorly against this attack.*

note that the Venom Lords that appear in Baals Throneroom are a different type of monster with a missile infernoflame1. I didn't trace this all the way but it looks like it will be a sorceress Inferno skill at slvl=mlvl. In normal these Venom Lords are mlvl=40 (nm=68, hell=93).

*See here for the effects of DamageRate on the effectiveness of MDR.
http://www.hut.fi/~tgustafs/mdrmod.html


It looks like there may be quite a bit of balancing issues with this beta on top of all the bugs.

[whyBish]

Only 1k damage per second in normal. Thats ok then :o

No wownder my hireling and shadow were falling so fast. :blink:

[roguebanshee]

What about the fetish shamans now? Have they got increased skill or a different one compared to 1.09?

[Ruvanal]

What about the fetish shamans now? Have they got increased skill or a different one compared to 1.09?

Error in the normal v1.09 Venom Lord inferno damage it should have been 8-10 per frame and 200-250 per second.

Fetish Shaman of the Great Marsh v1.09 used FetishInferno slvl=8. Damage 16-18 per frame or 400-450 per second.

Fetish Shaman of the Great Marsh v1.10beta use FetishInferno at slvl=8. Damage 30-32 per frame or 750-800 per second. Still uses the dual stream with one stream having a DamageRate of 82 and the other a DamageRate of 0 (no degredation of MDR).

This higher rate per frame makes it so that an equal amount of MDR will not end up stopping as much of the damage (percentage wise) as it did before. In 1.09 a MDR of 18 would have compleatly stopped the damge from one of the streams, but in 1.10beta that same MDR of 18 will only block about 55% of the damage from the stream with DamageRate=0.

Looking at these examples, the greater damage that the monsters are dealing is seriously degrading the value of MDR to being nearly useless compared to v1.09.

[Occhidiangela]

Hotspur and Nokozan Relic. :)

Even at 95% resistance, you will take a bit of damage. I imagine Fire Absorb will soon be all the rage in the Chaos Sanctuary in NM and Hell Difficulty.

The down side to all of this is that players will leaky connections will die rather quickly, even with Fire Resistance Maxed. One second or two in the jet of two Balrogs will "cook one's goose."

[TaiDaishar]

I really think they (blizz) should tone down their breath attacks... the Fetish's inferno was strong even before but now it's overpowered.

The Balrog's inferno seems a little less harming than the shaman's but it's still way too damaging (I thank god for Cloak od Shadows :) )