Stacking vs. Standard Damage: Which One Is Better?

[Kaziscate]

Hello! I wanted to make this as a guide to help people decide on how to spec out their gear or pets. First off, let's talk about the difference between stacking and standard damage. The first obvious difference is that stacking damage can stack, but standard damage cannot. Standard damage only scales off the highest value. If you have a 30% damage elixir and a pet with 25% standard damage, you would only benefit from the 30% damage elixir. Stacking damage and standard damage are separate values and are multiplicative with each other. If you have 30% standard damage and 30% stacking damage, you would get:

30% standard * 30% stacking = 69% more damage (nice)

I want to now talk about how you can use stacking and standard damage to spec out your pet to dish out the most damage possible. When specing out a pet for damage, elixirs should be taken into consideration, 30% damage elixirs are standard damage, while 25% damage elixirs are stacking damage. If you have a 30% damage elixir go for stacking damage in your arcane ability and happiness bonus. If you aren't using a 30% damage elixir, you can have standard damage in your happiness bonus and stacking damage for arcane ability (or vice versa).

If you are looking for some good pet builds, a couple of the best pets for arcane ability would be Mephisto and Guenivere. Mephisto's aa gives 50% standard damage and Guenivere's aa gives 50% stacking damage. If those pets are too expensive/rare, a few cheaper options for stacking damage would be Werewiger (normal and arcanite are both good), Heroic Tadthep, Arcanite Reppy, Morpheus, and Seirian. There unfortunately aren't many good arcane abilities that give standard damage, but the 3 best pets I was able to find were Timur, Stanlee and Shadowlurk. For happiness bonus, there are so many great pets that give stacking damage, so it ultimately comes down to what other stats you need. Some of the best would be, Heroic Garlic, Arcanite Samson, Arcanite Sentinel, Arcanite Redd, Yinshe, and Heroic Lammy. For standard damage, the best pets would be Electra, Armored Zhulong, Phoenix, Lancelot, Arcanite Shoggoth, Feng (for mages), Geng (for rogues), Antonio, Noe, and Iridyas.

Hopefully this was helpful!