Are we hitting a cap on percent based buffs?
Earlier today a guildie was asking about the % DMG passive and if it works, because he/she didn't think it did. I remember running simulations two seasons ago that proved that it did, so I decided to go through the case again this season.
What I found is completely unexpected.
Using Loki (+15% DMG happiness bonus) as my case-study, I went into elite Brackenridge and started my test. There are three class of mobs at the start of the map, so these were my practice dummies. Granted, what follows is a relatively small sampling (30 attacks for each attack type, resetting the mob after every attack), but it is enough to provide some insight and clearly demonstrates the anomaly I found. For brevity, I will only show the summaries for my testing on the spearman.
The cells that I highlighted in Green are reasonable values, the one that is green and bold is almost dead-on versus what I was expecting. Yellow shows some improvement but at roughly half of what I expected to see. Red is very far off from what I expected to see.
Essentially, with Loki's 15% DMG bonus, I would have expected to see average differences around 15%.
What is most troubling is my results when performing this test with Combo Elixir. It seems that there is no benefit to having a %DMG pet when you already have the +30% DMG from Combo.
Take a look at the last two rows, this is the differential between normal damage and damage on Combo. For the most part, damage improvements seems to be limited to +16-17%. The difference between normal and combo without a pet is close to what is expected at +27.67%. I expected to see +30%, but a 3% deviation is acceptable in this case.
Another troubling statistic is the nearly 10% change in Standard Deviation when comparing damage while on Combo elixir with and without Loki. I expect minor variances (3% give or take), but 10% is abnormal in this case.
Perhaps someone could shed some light on these anomalies, because if I am reading this correctly, I see a ceiling on the %DMG buffs (via Passive, Pet and Elixirs). That implies that if you are running with Combo elixirs, don't bother using a pet with %DMG bonuses, because they may not actually be helping you in any way.
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