With the introduction of the 3.15 patch, a lot of new POE players have found it extremely difficult to create characters that can output the damage necessary to progress and deal with end-game content. The goal of this post is to help you understand how damage is calculated and how you can best maximize your character’s damage output. We will be using  Path of Building Community Fork thoughout this post.

Damage in Path of Exile consists of a series of multiplications that happen before a hit is applied to an enemy. In order to best visualize this, we will start off with the following hypothetical character:

1. A 3 link Cyclone with Brutality and Melee Phys supports
2. Abyssus as a helmet with maximum % crit multiplier
3. An Elegant Foil sword with 22-40 Physical Damage and 25% crit multi
4. Astramentis amulet for some stats
5. You are level 1 Duelist with a few passive points allocated on tree (we do this for simplicity)

Obviously this is a scuffed and unrealistic character to make in game but the simplicity of the setup will help us keep things from getting out of hand for the time being. Link to PoB can be found here (copy the code and paste it into your Path of Building).

In order to understand how damage is calculated, we should actually calculate it manually and then sanity check our work against the PoB. So let us start off by gathering some important numbers.

1. BASE WEAPON DAMAGE:

Weapon:   22 to 40
Averaged: (22  +  40)  /  2  =  31

2. ADDED FLAT DAMAGE: 

Cyclone:    28 to 42
Abyssus:    40 to 60
Total:          68 to 102 
Averaged:  (68  +  102)  /  2  =  85

3. EFFECTIVENESS OF ADDED DAMAGE:

Each skill has its own effectiveness of added damage. This number is listed on the active skill gem itself. The default number is 100% in case none is listed.

Cyclone Effectiveness of Added Damage: 59%

 

4. % INCREASED DAMAGE:

This mod is fairly ubiquitous. It can be found on tree, gear as well as gems and jewels. Additionally, attributes such as Strength tends to provide a boost to this mod for melee attack skills. The engine basically adds all the sources together into one lump sum. 

% Increased From Tree            =  14  +  12  +  14 +  14 +  12  =  66
% Increased From Strength    =  30
% Total Increased                     =  66  +  30  =  96

5. % MORE MULTIPLIER:

The More Multiplier mod is much more difficult to obtain in most cases. This is because the main source of it is the support gems linked to your main skill as well as active auras. This is where most of the 3.15 damage nerfs took place. The reason GGG decided to nerf the sources of More Multi instead of sources of % Increased is that More Multiplier has an internal multiplicative property. This can be seen in our setup as follows:

• • level 20 Brutality which grants us 39% More Physical Dmg
  • level 20 Melee Physical Damage which grants us 49% More Melee Phys Dmg

If More Multiplier worked like % Increased, we would simply do 39% + 49% = 88%. But this is NOT how More Multi works. Rather than adding these two values together, the engine will multiply these two values such that:

More Multiplier  =  1.39  x  1.49  =  2.07 (or 107% MORE)

Most new players assume that More is the same as Increased. But in reality, they are very different. This can be best further understood if we imagine two formulas with 3 sources of each mod at a standard value of 2. As you can see below additive growth is not the same for multiplicative growth. So the two damage mechanics should not be confused and lumped together.

Formula 1  =  2  +  2  +  2  =  6
Formula 2  =  2  x  2  x  2  =  8

6. PENETRATION (EFFECTIVENESS MOD): 

Penetration is an extremely cool mechanic. Rather than inflating your own damage, it instead makes your enemy more susceptible to a particular type of damage. In our example we had no effective penetration. One thing to keep in mind here is that as you go through the campaign and start mapping, the deeper you go the tankier your enemies get. So at level 1, our enemies have on average physical damage reduction of roughly 1%. But at level 90, assuming you are doing end-game content, your enemies will have physical damage reduction of 85%. And even more so for bosses (90%+).

Side note: One thing to keep in mind here is that penetration for Physical hits differs slightly from elemental or chaos hits. You can reduce the enemy elemental resistances down to below 0% (example -200% enemy fire res), meanwhile enemy physical resistance can only be reduced to 0% (example when using overwhelm) but it will never go below that cap. I will write more about this in a follow up article.

As it stands, with our POB at level 1 we have the following effectiveness:

Effective DPS Mod (Pen)  =  0.992

7. HIT DAMAGE CALCULATION:

All we need to do now is to plug all the numbers we gathered into the formulas below and then sanity check everything against POB. 

Note: The base dmg formula below is slightly inaccurate but it functions as a close approximation. The reason I am not using the real formula is because we are going to be talking about flat damage and attacks vs spells in a separate article.

Base Dmg  = (Base Weapon Dmg  +  Added Flat Dmg)  x  Effectiveness of Added Dmg

Base Dmg  = (31 + 85)  x  0.59  =  68.44


Hit Dmg  =  Base Dmg   x   %Increased   x   More Multi   x   Effective DPS

Hit Dmg  =  68.44   x   1.96   x  2.07  x  0.992   =   ~275.5

Please keep in mind that POB shows the MIN (213) and MAX (337) dmg values with some rounding while we are working with the averages (275.5). 

 

8. AVERAGE HIT DAMAGE:

At this point, we need to account for the portion of our damage that crits. We do that by splitting our damage into 2 portions, the portion that crits and the portion that does not and then adding these two together. In our case the Crit Chance is 5.5% which comes from the Elegant Foil’s base crit chance, and our Crit Multiplier totals 300% which comes from Abyssus (125%) + the implicit on the weapon (25%) + the base value (150%).

Dmg From Non-Crits  = Hit Dmg  x  (1  -  Effective Crit Chance)
Dmg From Non-Crits  = 275.5  x  (1  -  0.055)  =  ~260.3

Dmg From Crits  = Hit Dmg   x   Crit Multi  x  Effective Crit Chance
Dmg From Crits  = 275.5  x  3  x  0.055  =  ~45.5

Average Hit Damage = 260.3  +  45.5  = 305.75

 

9. AVERAGE DAMAGE:

One of the things we need to pay close attention to is our accuracy rating for attack builds. Accuracy is a proxy for your chance to hit. The reason I kept the character initially at level 1 is because I did not want to overcomplicate the item/tree setup in order to account for accuracy. In general, you need ~3000 accuracy in order to have a 100% hit chance against common monsters in the end-game.

Accuracy can be thought of as a damage deflator rather than an inflator. The purpose of accuracy is to reduce your damage in case you’re not invested enough into it. You can at most have a 100% hit chance. Accuracy also plays a role when it comes to Critical Chance. If you do not have 100% hit chance, your crit quantity may suffer. If you miss an attack, you can obviously not crit on that miss or apply any other effects. Additionally, there are a few complex interactions between accuracy and critical strike chance that deserve their own article so for now, all you need to know is that maxing your chance to hit (100%) is extremely important to the quantity of crits you deal. 

Average Damage  =  Average Hit Damage  x  Chance to Hit

Average Damage  =  305.8  x  1.00 = 305.8

10. DPS – DAMAGE PER SECOND:

The Hit damage is sufficient on its own to tell you what your final damage is. However, players like to know how much damage they are doing over a period of time. DPS is what is most commonly used. It is calculated as follows:

DPS  =  Average Damage  x  Attack Rate

DPS  =  305.8  x  4.32 = ~1321

This is your Final DPS. 

 

Okay, I get it! What now?

As you can see, this process is actually fairly straight forward. We start with a base value and keep inflating it over and over until we have our final DPS. Along the way we have different tools to use such as added flat, % increased, % more mult, pen, crit and attack speed. Additionally there are other methods that we have not discussed here such as Conversion, DOTs, First of war, Barrage support and many others. As long as you know your way around the Calcs tab in POB, you can explore all of these mechanics at your own pace.

When trying to maximize for damage output in a build, the most important part is not the numerical values themselves; What matters is how well the numbers multiply in ascending order.

Example 1: a build that has 1000 added flat, 59% added damage effectiveness, 100% increased damage and 500% more multi would result in a 7 080 Hit Damage

Example 2: a build that has 600 added flat, 59% added damage effectiveness, 400% increased damage and 350% more multi would result in a 7 965 Hit Damage

Obviously, the second example is a better one all else being equal. Using our resources (gear, tree, etc.) in the first example to add flat damage to a skill that has 59% added damage effectiveness may not really ideal. If we could instead use our resources to maximize another portion of the calculation, such as % increased, we would have a better damage output even when accounting for the loss of % more multi.

This is what you need to focus on. It could possibly be the case that you have too much added flat and not enough % Increased. Or you have too much % increased and not enough More Multi. Perhaps you have decent numbers overall but your Effective Crit Chance is too low making your heavy investment into Crit Multiplier a liability compared to using a cheaper setup with more added flat. etc. etc. 

It is all a matter of trade-offs. You have to tinker a lot in POB in order to understand which trade-offs typically have the highest yield in terms of damage. Ironically, the most broken builds I’ve found have been rather cheap to make. This is because when doing the right trade-offs, you can produce insane amounts of damage by using uniques that most people dismiss as “garbage”.

We will be talking about defenses and how to maximize those in a future post. So stay tuned for that.