Ranger: Unexpected negative damage calculation behaviour for weak circle + projectile dmg + arrow sight being additive instead of multiplicative

Recently, while practicing DPS on a dummy, I noticed that the max damage number that my charge pierce crit weak circle hits do aren’t as much as they theoratically should.
After some digging, that is to say spending hours validating each number in theory and realtiy, it turns out that projectile damage(armor affix), arrow sight (lvl 15 talent) and weak circle, add their multipliers instead of continous multiplication.

Basis for this:

  • A charge shot on a weak circle should see 82.5% increase in damage over a normal charged shot while the Critical Aim(Level 30 Talent) is selected
    ** Originally this was a 100% because a charge shot by default spawns a weak circle on hit and a circle increases dmg by 50%, this was changed with the ranger buff to reduce the punishment for not hitting the weak circle. Balanced out by the massive increase in base damage it resulted in more damage overall anyway
    ** This works under basically all circumstances unless projectile damage or arrow sight are involved, the most extreme working example being a charge piercing arrow with full globes which which we can see here still applying the correct 82.5% increase:


    These, and all other screenshots of that sort, are tested numbers at the fellowship dummy taken from my attempts to figure out whats wrong

  • Arrow Sight simply adds a 10% damage increase aslong as the arrows are shot from 30+ meters away
    ** Dots aka poison not included
    ** This also works completly fine up until weak circles or projectile damage gets involved, the most extreme working example being a charge piercing, non weak circle arrow with 6 globes and without armor:

  • Projectile Damage is an armor affix that adds 1% of extra damage to projectiles, per armor piece it is applied on, for a maximum of 4%
    ** Intrestingly enough the crit damage increase affix doesnt seem to be affected by this problem
    ** Same as the 2 above this works completly fine as long as the other 2 dont get involved, the most extreme working example again being a charge piercing, non weak circle arrow with 6 globes while no lvl15 talent is selected:

So since this is already fairly long i am not gonna go over all the combinations that dont work and rather just give the example with all of them in the mix:


The original expectation was that the different multipliers multiply each other since this is the case with almost all debuffs/buffs, class mechanics like globes and stats like intellect and strenght.

So the expected number would be: 56158*1.825 = 102488 * 1.1 = 112737 *1.04 = 117247 which is quite a bit higher then the actual result: 110361.

This is because instead of multiplaying it seems to combine this very random combination of mutlipliers(armor affix, class mechanic and class talent) into one: 56158 * 1.965 = 110351.
Which just seems wrong, cause as I said above that isn’t the case with almost all mutlipliers in the game.

This causes expected maximum Ranger DPS to drop by around 3k for default rotation Rangers aswell as Travel Time Manip Rangers.

Also, this might apply to other classes as projectile damage is an armor affix but I only tested it for ranger.

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This seems like a really weird bug or oversight. is it possible for a dev to look into this? And like Astragt says it could be more than just ranger that this effects.

Yeah thats really strange. This is definitely something that needs to be tested on other classes as well to see if similar things are happening for them.

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Can someone Tl;DR this? Im interested, But my head is kinda hazy and its hard for me to understand all this math.

Multipliers are being added instead of multiplied. I believe that’s the brunt of it but I’m super tired so could be off.

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basically from what I understand:

  • Crit circles buff the damage of a charge shot by 82.5%

  • Arrow sight makes far away shots do 10% more damage

  • 4 pieces of armor with +1% projectile damage make arrows deal 4% more damage.

Because these have almost nothing to do with eachother and are functions of entire separate systems it would make sense that their buffs would apply separately and multiply to give:

1.825 * 1.1 * 1.04 = 2.0878 times more damage than a regular charge shot (108.87% buff)

Instead the game adds the buffs together and gives

1 + (0.825 + 0.1 + 0.04) = 1.965 times more damage (96.5% buff)

The difference between the end number is fairly small but It doesn’t make any sense at all that these buffs would be grouped together. Other systems in the game like crits don’t get grouped like this and do multiply separately.

I feel like this warrants further testing with other classes to make sure that things like tiles and other class mechanics don’t get randomly grouped as well.

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