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So I'm running with a new video card and finally found some time to investigate the behavior of shocking aspect.

Storm Armor's base damage is annoying and can get in the way, but here is what I have managed to determine:

Shocking Aspect's chance to trigger appears the same as the LoH coefficient of the triggering spell, but I don't have enough data points to say conclusively. I tested this against monster power 10 inferno slow ass zombies using a set with a lot of EHP 30% crit chance, and a static damage range (white weapon and +min damage rings). I was easily able to confirm that it triggers on every critical hit from a magic missile through simple observation. For energy twister I used a 1.0 attack speed weapon and no IAS. I noted the hit point total of the zombie, cast a wicked wind and stood there while it took the damage. When the first wicked wind expired I cast another. I do this continuously while recording. Afterwards I watched the recording, counted the lightning strikes from storm armor and their damage, subtracted that from the total damage done to the zombie over the course of the fight. I then calculated the expected damage output of the energy twisters and subtracted that. The total damage divided by the expected damage of a shocking aspect strike gives a number of procs, which when compared to the expected number of crits from energy twister yields a proc coefficient. I did this for a total of 7 zombie kills and came very close to 0.125 every time.

The Shocking Aspect attack can crit, but does not trigger LoH, Critical Mass, or itself. Base lightning bolts from Storm Armor similarly do not trigger LoH, Critical Mass, or themselves, at least when using the shocking aspect rune.

The range of the shocking aspect shock is short, roughly the same as the radius for frost nova. Shocking aspect will favor the closest target to you, but this isn't guarenteed.

I unfortunately didn't think to write down the number of times storm armor struck, just totalled the damage and subtracted it, would be nice to know how the base storm armor works and how much damage it does relative to tooltip DPS.

This should be very simple to model, even in a closed form rather than a simulation like Matlab. I'm curious for cases of 1 or 2 targets (read here ubers) how much DPS relative to tooltip DPS does shocking aspect provide at a given value of crit. Mainly concerned with the tradeoff between using a Shield and Shocking Aspect versus using a Source and Energy Armor.

Quote from Loroese

Quote from popzap

I've been success soloed 2/3 Realm on MP 10 , i can do the Zultan and Siege too but still not be able to beat enrage timer. Here's some of the video , feel free to check my build and strategy there.

Interesting build and strat for SK/Mag. Would you mind posting your stats used in the vid, like HP, Armor, resists or just EHP as well as DPS?

From the info on youtube:

Stats : 135k DPS/All resist 700/LoH 1350/ApOC20/Bonus vs Elites 33%/Meteor reduction cost-5

Spec: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VPXgOi!YXg!YZZZYa

Crit chance from his profile is 48.5% and I'm pretty sure he used a different weapon than the Axe on his profile, but 42% IAS on his other gear. Also 4 piece tal'rasha's. The bonus vs elites and meteor reduction listed compared to his gear suggested he swapped one of his rings for a -2 to Meteor Stone of Jordan. No idea what his HP or EHP was unfortunately.

Quote from SquirtieK

Does Diamond Shards trigger when u recast it before it runs out?

Yeah Diamond Shards will explode on a refresh. It essentially adds 14% weapon damage per proc and a baseline of 14% weapon damage per second, which is cool but you dump half your EHP from Diamond Skin to run it. You should run Glass Cannon as your third passive long before you run Diamond Shards for damage, because you give up less survivability and you gain more damage that way.

With respect to prism, one extra chain reaction every 21 seconds, or one extra Wicked Wind every 18 seconds gives you the same equivalent damage output as Diamond Shards does, and if you aren't at arcane power saturation we're talking about 25% more wicked winds and 50% more Explosive Blasts. Against a low number of targets, Prism is going to be the clear winner. At higher target density you can AP saturate with only 2 APoC sources so the gain will be less, but I'd argue that CM doesn't need any help on high target density environments and Prism should be the defacto rune choice for offensive Diamond Skin runes.

My impression of the other two sets of combats is as follows:

Keule and Siegebreaker - This one is tough. Non uber siegebreaker you can completely shut down with CM by holding your frost novas until he starts his attack animation and freezing him in the middle of it. However, Keule does a ton of damage and the uber siegebreaker has the reflect damage affix, which makes me suspect that running Shocking Aspect may be a non-starter for that fight as I've had trouble with newly buffed reflect damage affixes when running shocking aspect, though I don't run much LoH and no Life Steal at all. I'd be inclined to use Force Armor, Cold Snap, and Evocation to maximize nova uptime, and be able to reliably eat the slow heavy hitting attacks from either, I'm not sure that a teleport rune is necessary and though I'm loathe to run without it Blood Magic Weapon might be warranted.

Ghom and Rak - I'd try Prismatic Armor and aim to have the EHP and regen to stand in his clouds. If you can manage that then group them up and literally tank and spank all the way down. I'd run the full defensive version, Prismatic Armor, Crystal Shell, Blur, Evocation, Cold Snap, and Teleport (Safe Passage) to keep the four second buff up most of the fight.

The above is all speculative however, as I haven't tried either of these fights.

Also, as an aside, I really wish there were a UI buff for the damage reduction on safe passage, hard to tell when its working and hard to know when to hit teleport next.

Freeze on hit would be particularly valuable in builds makings use of cold blooded. My understanding is that the chance to proc is the coefficient of the spell multiplied by the chance to proc listed on the tooltip. Obviously as CM is based on proc optimization it would be ideal, but I'm not sure the chance to freeze/stun/etc is as valuable there as it is for Witch Doctors because of diminishing returns on CC and how that interacts with the nova freeze.

What I am more interested in knowing for CM is if chance to bleed on hit is worth picking up on items for its damage potential which depends much less on how it procs and much more on if it stacks against a single target, and what affixes on gear if any modify the bleed damage.

Quote from Loroese

Anyone tried soloing the uber bosses as CM? I'm tempted to try but after all that time it took to farm the keys I don't want to waste a machine.

I solo'd Mag and SK as CM with the following fairly standard CM build on MP5:

http://us.battle.net...XYTQ!gWZ!YcaZca

Stats were 2.02 attack speed, 42.5% crit, 18 APoC, 5200 armor, 780 Resist All

I had to equip a shield which brought my DPS down to about 26K, so I suspect pinpoint barrier or force armor over shocking aspect would have been a stronger choice overall and allowed me to use my source.

My strat was fairly simple, Mag bugs out on her first transition and won't drop her shield until the skeleton king is dead so i focused on dealing with him first. She is fairly easy to do by herself but was really hurting me while I was focused on the skeleton king. What I did was kite away from them until the SK teleported, then teleported away but kept him onscreen until he summoned two packs of skeletons. i would then use teleport to position myself so I could wicked wind the skeletons and freeze them but my explosive blasts would only hit the SK. I alternated dropping wicked wind on the packs of skeletons and the king. With 8 targets its very easy to maintain a full freeze lock and get maximum explosive blast damage in, and shocking aspect tends to target the closest mob to you which I made sure was the skeleton king. I leveraged the extra mobs to handle the damage of both ubers being up and took the skeleton king down fairly quickly, then soloed Mag pretty handily (she doesn't require more than jumping the arcane sentries with teleport once she is alone and CM can kill her add packs in the blink of an eye).

Other things:
Take note of any shrines you pass while gathering your stacks. Frenzied, Protection, and Empowred Shrines can be used to open the fight by passing them by as your stack valor, then going to grab them after opening the machine portal, teleport to town and open up the fight with the buff. For CM, Empowered Shrines make a huge difference.

If you wipe a few times, you can go down another elite to extend your valor stack. I had to do this because it took a good long time to work out a solid strat for SK/Mag.

Open the infernal machine portal the beginning of the game, before you go get any valor stacks so you know which realm you get and which bosses you are going to fight and can adjust your build before you go in.

I haven't done any serious investigation into its proc rate, I know on live with energy twister it is not possible to read all the damage numbers it generates because it is triggering so often, I'll see what I can figure out this week.

Edit: and my video card at home decided to quit on me last night, so I guess I won't be doing any testing on this very soon.

Well if that is the case it shows that Meteor Cost Reduction gear (rare sources, skull grasp, stone of jordan) is massively more valuable than APoC for single targets and attack speed is almost a dead stat in terms of DPS gain outside of scenarios where you have 5 or more targets getting rocks dropped on them.

I'm also curious how Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect) figures in with either of these specs and if using it makes Energy Twister a clear winner over Meteor (for the content that can be cleared without the use of force armor or prismatic armor).

Edit: Mechanics wise my understanding it is undergoes all of the same processes critical mass does, whenever you crit it rolls against the coefficient and determines if it is triggered. When it is triggered it produces a 35% weapon damage strike against a random single target within roughly the same range as frost nova, weighted towards the closest targets. These strikes can crit, but have an LoH/Crit Mass coefficient of 0. The PTR updated Storm Armor produces a visible lightning strike for the tooltip damage within a longer range roughly every 2 seconds (possibly affected by attack speed) that again can crit but has a coefficient of 0 for LoH/CM.

On live with the 0.5 coefficient on storm chaser it is a prolific damage dealer, so much so that I have considered at times running builds without Explosive Blast because it doesn't feel like I need it with shocking aspect. I'm not sure how well it will add to damage in 1.0.5 but it still seems like a worthwhile switch if you have the survivability.

Quote from Vibe1320

Thank you for the information. From the results it seems like mistral breeze is out performing wicked wind in most cases. Unless im not understanding the chart correctly. It also seems that ap on crit is a bigger boost to overall performance damage wise and shouldnt be underestimated

It should be noted that these sims aren't taking into account damage that can be gained from Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect). Assuming it can be calculated as simply 35% weapon damage * PPS * CritChance / AttackSpeed, it would adjust the relative cases in favor of wicked wind, which generates more PPS than Mistral Breeze. Not having matlab to look at the code I'm not sure how the implementation of shocking aspect would look like overall.

Also note that there is an assumption in this simulation that you get 50% uptime on mistral breeze casts, 75% uptime on wicked wind casts, and 90% uptime on meteor casts. I don't personally feel that wicked wind would be any less accurate than meteor, in meaningful cases, and I highly doubt anyone is routinely getting 3 full seconds of exposure on average from moving energy twisters, so I suspect that assumption is weighting the math towards mistral breeze and inflating its numbers.

I think those results speak to an important point about how to play CM.

Increases in DPS through increased APoC comes from additional casts of explosive blast, I assume you've modeled this to use explosive blast optimally when enough arcane power is avaliable so as not to interrupt spam of the proc generator. It is important to note however that optimal DPS is being obtained when the user is careful not to delay their next energy twister or meteor by activating explosive blast with insufficient excess arcane power.

With respect to your spreadsheet, I agree that we're basically calculating a soft cap beyond which APoC no longer provides a substantial performance increase, rather than a minimum to run the build.

Some clarifications though. Morphos was running, according to his thread 45% critical hit chance, 1.64 attacks per second, 27 APoC, using Star Pact and Prism. If we assume this gear is the minimum level of arcane power generation to make the build work, we can calculate the percentage of full APoC coverage he is getting to determine what out targets should be when reversing the process to produce required APoC values.

***NOTE: Doing the math on what I observed from the video I am led to believe that I have something wrong in my modeling of Star Pact, or the patch notes coefficient of 0.05 is off base and the actual value is higher than that.***

If we calculate assuming prism is up we find his coverage from APoC amounts to only about a little over 10% of the cost of Star Pact, which leads me to a different conclusion:

His Star Pact is not paying for itself, but his explosive blast is almost paying for itself, and actually pays for meteor casts beyond a certain level of APoC. Under a Prism his explosive blast only costs 13 arcane power, and it is generating about 4 AP per cast from APoC giving it a very low adjusted Arcane Power cost of 9.

Watching a 30 second sample of the keywarden fight (1:10 to 1:40 on the video) where only a single target is present, I count 24 meteors landing, and 13 casts of explosive blast, and prism is up for 27 of the 30 seconds (90%). His total arcane power expenditure during this time is 841 Arcane Power in 30 seconds or 28 arcane power per second. Thats a deficit of 18 arcane power per second from base regeneration. He generates 39 chain reaction blasts, each one has a 45% chance to crit, resulting in an average of 17.55 critical hits, each of which refunds 3 (2.97) arcane power, for a total of between 51 and 54 arcane power. His 24 meteors generate 24 landings and 72 DoT ticks, for a total of 96 chances to crit. On average 43 or 44 of these will crit, and that will generate 1.35 (so 1 or 2 depending on how APoC works with rounding and partial AP numbers) arcane power per crit, or anywhere from 43 to 88 arcane power.

Assuming this rounds very generously, the 122 arcane power APoC covers translates to only 4.067 arcane power per second of the 18 arcane power per second deficit, and with the reported old coefficient of 0.1 it would only be covering 8. This works out to 8 or 9 meteor casts that he should not have been able to pay for, or 50% more meteor casts, or almost five times the AP return from APoC than i would have expected based on the numbers we've been told.

Either I've made a serious error in my math, or the star pact coefficient of 0.05 is bogus, or the mechanics of star pact work substantially different from my understanding of them.

Edit:

While I don't want to base any conclusions on the above since it doesn't line up with observation yet, the calculations above show the net effect of 27 APoC on arcane power deficit to be reducing it by 4.067 (122 arcane power over 30 seconds), running Storm Armor (Power of the Storm), would have saved 3.7 arcane power per second (111 arcane power over 30 seconds), and a single -5 meteor cost item would have saved 4 arcane power per second (120 arcane power over 30 seconds) producing the same effect as three full sources of APoC.

I think what he is asking is at what point does energy twister (or various meteor runes) start paying for themselves and generating excess arcane power that can be funneled into explosive blast through APoC and what builds can accomplish this at what crit, APoC and attack speed values.

The calculation is fairly simple, the expected APoC return of the spell has to be greater than its cost, so:

Cost = Crit * Ticks * coefficient * ApoC

The real question is, how many targets. None of the meteor runes at real gear levels (i.e. less than BiS values) will break even on Arcane Power through APoC or enhanced regeneration on a single target, and it takes close to BiS to do so with two targets, but virtually all of them will generate surplus arcane power on 3 targets with moderate gear levels.

That is a really useful link. I wonder though what the formula is behind that and why. My guess is there is some odd coding behind that to ensure damage numbers that feel right when mobs run through or are grazed by twisters but only have a minimum of exposure time.

Quote from Loroese

APS, #LoH procs
0.9 11
0.963 12
1.01 13
1.071 13
1.5 18
1.605 20
1.71 22
1.785 23

Unless I miss my guess, the third attack speed in your list should actually be 1.026 as you appear to be using a 0.9 attack speed weapon with 0%, 7%, 14%, and 19% IAS, and then a 1.5 speed weapon with 0%, 7%, 14%, and 19% IAS.


This data doesn't quite fit the hypothosis that you simply get 2 * attack speed ticks per second but there is always a tick at the beginning and end of the spell essentially rounding up. If that were the case your final 2 tests should have yielded 21 and 22 ticks.

You can get a slightly better fit assuming that there is rounding ocurring twice, that there is a base number of ticks for each weapon speed of 2*weapon speed rounded up, and then that creates a base tick rate that is increased by IAS% and rounded up again at cast time to determine the total number of ticks for the spell. This yields slightly closer results but still suggests that your final case (1.5 attack speed weapon 19% increased attack speed from gear) should have 22 ticks rather than 23.

I make the assumption here that because LoH numbers did increase that number of critical hits per second were increasing as well.

I'd really like to have solid data on the under the hood pulse rate of wicked wind and meteor's DoTs. I think this can be observed via LoH since the coefficient is known to be 0.125. So my question is this. If the coefficient is 0.125 and you have 500 life on hit, you can engineer a tooltip attacks per second of 1.0, and observe from the half second amalgamated heals how many times the spell is triggering LoH.

With 500 LoH you should see a multiple of 62.5 per tick and that multiple is the baseline pulse rate of the spell.

If possible, doing similar tests with various meteor runes to obtain similar pulse rates for their DoTs would be helpful as well.

Quote from dabishi

take diamond skin for instance how many use crystal shell because the amount absorbed completely outweighs the bonus' of the others... raise of hands....

Diamond skin has some interesting runes other than crystal shell when you consider live and swapping when you hit the right EHP thresholds. Diamond Shards for damage, or Prism for meteor builds like the ones discussed here. If you can make the 10K absorb work, then the other runes are pretty solid benefits.

On the PTR, the lack of cooldown reductions mean you don't really hit these thresholds very quickly and more weight is put on the skill itself. With scaling monster damage for loot, every rune except crystal shell is essentially out the window. Similarly Energy Armor despite the nerf, is more important on 1.0.5 than on live, because you can always go up in monster power rather than swapping in a more interesting skill when you gear is good enough.

My point is more that Frost Nova is garbage unless you can CC lock people, its a short stun at a short range for a class that wants to use it to keep mobs at a distance. Slow time is never used as a defensive skill, the only runes that get used are Time Warp and Stretch Time, the niche offensive versions. Diamond Skin is 1500 life per second with both crystal shell and evocation when used on cooldown and it is in fact bugged and sometimes doesn't activate when you need it to. Blur is hands down the worst flat out damage reduction passive in the game (compare jungle fortitude, superstition, the 30% hidden passive DR of monks and barbs, which is before we get into One With Everything, Tough As Nails, Nerves of Steel or Blood Thirst) and the only one available, compared to say barbarians who get 4 effective defensive passives and 30% less damage taken to begin with.

The only thing making a tanking wizard viable was critical mass, if they just do away with it (or nerf everything that interacts with it into the ground) the character type of a melee wizard is basically gone.