I remember speaking with Dark about this a while back and I tested there with some quick tests and found FireThrust proc'ing a whole lot more than TDB during that one test. Initial reactions thought that yeah that was the case.
Little bit of background information before we get into it though, for anyone who might not know, Bloodlust only procs on
successful hits. Bloodlust will only proc if your character is missing some health.
Just done some thorough testing now to be on the safe side. Contrary to what I found when talking with DarkStyle initially, I got the opposite this time and found TDB loved me more, hah.
Information:
I did 5 sets of tests overall.
Each test consists of 50 successful hits for each spell - that's 50 with TDB, and 50 with FireThrust against the same target.
The tests focus purely on the
amount of times Bloodlust activates, NOT how much Health is regained (that is something completely separate, see below).
Here are the results:
Test 1:
TDB - 6
FireThrust - 9
Test 2:
TDB - 11
FireThrust - 6
Test 3:
TDB - 11
FireThrust - 7
Test 4:
TDB - 8
FireThrust - 5
Test 5:
TDB - 11
FireThrust - 11
Overall: 250 Hits
TDB: 47
FireThrust: 38
Total Bloodlust Activations: 85/250
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I'm going to talk about the two things separately, more for educational purposes.
When talking about the amount of health being regenerated from a successful Bloodlust activation, there are many different factors that will influence how much health is regained. Remember that TDB hits twice, the first hit is what activates bloodlust and thus the health return is calculated based off the damage dealt from the first hit, not including the subsequent. FireThrust on the other hand doesn't have any followup.
View attachment 546 .
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As a very basic scenario, ignoring many of the other factors here: (I am really oversimplifying things here btw)
Let's say my damage output is always consistent. I.e. each hit will always deal the same amount of damage.
I hit a target with no resistances whatsoever with TDB - I deal 500 Damage overall. That output is 2 hits from TDB. So for this example, 250 per hit let's say.
I then hit the same target with FireThrust. I deal 500 Damage overall. One hit.
I'm more likely to regenerate more health with FireThrust because of the damage output from one hit (500) is more than TDB (250).
Then we throw in a target with quite a bit of AC, remember that TDB ignores 80% of that. Meanwhile, my DC etc. hasn't changed since the first target.
FireThrust is more than likely going to return less health now in comparison to TDB where the first hit that activated bloodlust ignored 80% of the target's AC.
Again, here I'm not talking about the amount of times it procs, only focusing on the health regain in this scenario. I oversimplified this to make it easier to explain, note this is not representative of exact values or outcomes.
There are many factors that can influence health gain and the mathematics behind it isn't quite so simple. Here are a few:
- Player DC
- Player Element Damage
- Player Skill Choice (i.e. What spell they used on the target - including the base damage output modified by player DC and elemental damage(s))
- Player Critical Hit %
- Player Critical Strike %
- Player Skill Modifiers - I.e. Slaying / TwinDrakeFire etc.
- ---> These influence damage output.
- Target AC
- Target Elemental Resistances
- Target Health Remaining (if HP lower than bloodlust health return %, returns equivalent of remaining target health instead)
- ---> These then counteract the above.
Then we can get silly and go into map modifiers, monster AI (defense buffs etc.) but we'll be here all year going through all the different outcomes.