A Beginner's Guide to Theorycrafting - Including both Videos and Text Descriptions

"Planning your Offense" section write up complete, including links to videos addressing this content as well.

very nice read, even as a long time player my characters always struggle with defenses so i could learn a lot here and in your video

thanks!

Added information in "Building your Passive Tree" section. It isn't complete yet, but now has videos and considerations to make and decide about prior to planning the skill tree itself.

Added in the "Should I get this Jewel Socket?" subsection to the "Planning your Passive Tree" section.

Hey, just letting you know that I fully support this; thought it was another beginner guide, just a little more in depth. You could probably imagine my surprise when I learned a couple of things.

Added in "Potential Offensive and Defensive Stat Benchmarks" into the "Planning your Passive Tree" section.

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NetherArum a écrit :

Hey, just letting you know that I fully support this; thought it was another beginner guide, just a little more in depth. You could probably imagine my surprise when I learned a couple of things.

Glad you found this useful. :)

Nice read, one thing I wonder about is how to best gauge diminishing returns when building a character...

Like how once you have 100% increased damage, another 100% will be half as effective, and the next 100% a third as effective. Important to weigh between defense/offense or different options (is it better to get my first 20% armor scaling instead of increasing evasion from 180% to 200% for instance).

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cryptc a écrit :

Nice read, one thing I wonder about is how to best gauge diminishing returns when building a character...

Like how once you have 100% increased damage, another 100% will be half as effective, and the next 100% a third as effective. Important to weigh between defense/offense or different options (is it better to get my first 20% armor scaling instead of increasing evasion from 180% to 200% for instance).

This is a great question (though not one I would really think of for beginners). Regardless, the way you have to measure this is to compare the relative increase the damage would provide. That is, you have to compare the ratio of the scaling after it's applied compared to what you had before the new scaling was applied. I think an example may help explain what I mean.

Imagine you have 200% increased attack damage an you socket a jewel which will give you an additional 20% attack damage (I'm using attack damage to cover a lot of bases, such as physical damage with X, melee damage, etc.). This would leave us with 220% damage scaling compared to our initial damage scaling of 200%. As a ratio, this is 220/200 = 11/10 or 1 and 1/10. That 1/10 tells us that there was a 10% increased in our damage output compared to what we were doing before. A similar comparison could then be made for an attack speed bonus (e.g., ratio of attack speed after scaling compared to the attack speed prior to scaling). The ratio that is the largest is what makes for the greatest damage increase! This is an important idea to use when trying to maximize your damage and determine which stats you should be focused on scaling.

In terms of defenses, it's much more difficult to gauge because armor mitigation of physical hits is dependent upon how hard the physical hit is, and evasion is based upon the enemies attack rating. So what may appear stronger in some situations (e.g., very, very small physical hits and getting some extra armor) but not in other (e.g., a large physical hit). For defenses, I tend to aim for benchmarks (see the tables given in the "Potential Benchmarks" section of "Planning your Passive Tree") to help me decide when I should start stacking another defensive stat.

This being said, it's important to consider that damage calculations alone isn't always the best metric to try and decide what is better. For example, if a particular stat allows for consistently inflecting a shock status ailment, then this may be a more valuable stat, as shocked enemies take 50% increased damage.

Made minor wording revisions. Hope this information helps you with the upcoming Prophecy league preparation!