Multistrike Question

I seen to be misunderstanding how multistrike works.

From the tooltip it says the attack repeats 3 times, so I assumed that if my DPS is 100, I would deal 3x100 when I activated the skill with multistrike. But it seens the DPS shown is the sum of the 3 attacks and it's very confusing and unintuitive.

To put it another way, let's say I have heavy strike dealing 100 DPS per the tooltip of the skill. I use this skill on a monster and it dies instantly (say the monster has 100HP). Then I add multistrike and increased melee damage to offset the "less attack damage" of the multistrike to my heavy strike skill and the tooltip says that I continue to deal 100 damage but I attack 3 times. When I use this combination of skills on the same monster (with 100HP) it takes the 3 attacks for it to die, when I expected that he would die on the first as it should deal 100 damage.

Maybe it's just me but it seems really confusing and somewhat underpowered as if the DPS on the tooltip is really the sum of the 3 attacks then I think multistrike is not really worth it, as the small extra damage and the extra speed end up dealing not much more than a faster attack skill, with the added drawback of having to wait for the 3 attacks to complete. =/

First of all you should remember that DPS stands for damage per second. Bearing that in mind it makes perfect sense. You execute three quick attacks in succession (DPS shows your average damage over one second - however many attacks there may be in one second) and if you kill your target, Multistrike picks another target for you. If there are no other targets in range then you may end up wasting one or two attacks.

That said, Multistrike is one of the strongest and most used melee support gems in POE. For most builds the pros outweigh the cons of this skill by far.

First of all, DPS is a treacherous statistic and should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Say I put a flicker strike gem on a no-DEX, no-RT mara. The tooltip DPS might show values in the tens of thousands ignoring the facts that:
(1) I have to somehow generate a frenzy charge, or be forced to wait for the cooldown.
(2) I have abysmal accuracy, to the point where most of my flickers miss.

DPS won't account for these and many other important "details". It simply multiplies your average damage with the number of attacks per second and that's it.

Now onto Multistrike -- as tsalal said, it's a widely used gem and for good reasons. Rather than relying on DPS, take a look at your damage and APS and from there decide if Multistrike is a good option for you.
Purely theoretical example: you have an average damage of 100 with 1 APS. Total DPS equals 100. You support this attack with lvl1 Multistrike and you get an average damage of 64 with 1.88 APS. Your tooltip DPS should jump to 120, BUT:
(1) You're locked in place for 1.59 seconds, until the multistrike attack finishes.
(2) If you hit a 100HP mob you'll need 2 of the 3 hits to kill it. The third hit would either damage another mob (if one is nearby) or go off into thin air, resulting in wasted time and mana/life.

Whether Multistrike is a good option or not greatly depends on your build and playstyle. For low-DEX characters is a great way to improve attack speed, and tanky characters who jump straight into the middle of any pack love it. More squishy characters which rely on hit'n'run attacks should avoid it.

Thanks everyone, it makes much more sense now!

I guess I'll have to try and see if it fits my playstyle then =)

"

Cadumal a écrit :

First of all, DPS is a treacherous statistic and should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Say I put a flicker strike gem on a no-DEX, no-RT mara. The tooltip DPS might show values in the tens of thousands ignoring the facts that:
(1) I have to somehow generate a frenzy charge, or be forced to wait for the cooldown.
(2) I have abysmal accuracy, to the point where most of my flickers miss.

...actually:


1) Flickerstrike doesn't show dps in the tooltip, it shows average damage. There are a few other skills that show average damage per hit instead of damage per second.

2) Expected accuracy is taken into account on tooltip dps/average damage (as is crit). If you want proof, just pick up RT (when you've got nothing extra for crit) and observe as your tooltip dps/damage goes up... when I pick it up, I generally have around 85% accuracy and it results in about a 15% tooltip dps increase


But, with that in mind, your point still stands that paper dps isn't reliable. There's too many factors both on the player and enemy sides that affect actual dps, like physical/elemental/chaos resistance/weakness, elemental penetration effects, extra enemy evasion/blocking/possibly dodging, aspects of skills that aren't accounted for in tooltip dps (like the expected damage from Ice Spear's extra crit condition, Freezing Pulse's fading damage, Point Blank, the projectile damage from Molten Strike or Lightning Strike, etc etc).

Not to mention the fact that dps isn't always the relevant statistic. For my build right now, for example, I'm much more concerned with damage-per-hit, as I'm using both Bloodrage/Flickerstrike and stunlocking tactics, not to mention I'm avoiding Blood Magic so I need mana-leech. I need to focus on big individual hits for getting frenzy charges in a limited number of flickerstrikes, for stunning enemies reliably, and for leeching enough mana off my attacks to sustain my costs. Dps means very little to me, in this build, aside from needing to make sure my attack speed is high enough to stunlock (which doesn't take much, and stun duration can replace that); I could make a version of this build using less damage and more attack speed and attain the same tooltip dps, but it would be excruciatingly less effective... i'd be starved for mana, fail to stun reliably, and it'd be much more difficult to automate frenzy charges through flickerstriking.

And the multiplier isn't that readily apparent, on level 20 you get 36% more dps using multistrike (without increased bonus), but it's 'all damage' since it scales attack speed, not just physical like MPD gem. Also, since you pay for every third attack, if you spread it over time, mana cost multiplier is actually 128%, not 180%.

So you're getting a decent dps multiplier that works on all damage you do for a modest mana hit. But there's also utility, if a skill chooses new targets on its own it's very helpful versus desync because on the server side it knows which enemies are actually in range of your attack. Also, some skill setups hugely benefit from more attack speed, like reave, any proc on hit, on crit and whatnot, so I assume it would be used even if dps bonus was lower.

Another funny thing to note is the penalty on it is 'less attack damage' so it doesn't penalize damage over time inflicted by your attack if you're doing ignite, bleed, poison or viper strike.