Epic Lord of Blades: Spells and SLAs

[Dark-Star]

While running the Lord of Blades raid on Epic difficulty over the weekend as a Sorc, there seemed to be some mechanic that severely reduced the damage of my SLAs (I am currently a Cold Savant), yet let my Polar Rays hit for what seemed like full damage.

Specifically, Niacs and Frost Lance SLAs were hitting for 3-12 yellow damage (before crits), even when the LoB was cold cursed, and Polar Rays were hitting for 2,200+ purple damage seconds later.

The only other nuke cold based spells I had were Cone of Cold and Otiluk's Sphere, and he evaded those every cast, so it was not possible to see if they produced yellow or purple numbers. Niac's Biting Cold DoT also gave yellow numbers, and damage was somewhere around 230 or so.

It was either a spell level breakpoint (similar to the Wiz King), or a division between SLAs vs. regular spells. Either way there was no buff on the LoB that gave any information.

Can we either have a buff on the Lord of Blades that tells us what is going on or have a brief dev explanation? Conducting tests in that raid on epic was pretty tough with the amount of things one needs to pay attention to, especially for a gimp like me, and it's certainly possible I am missing something obvious here.

Any response would be appreciated.

[HarveyMilk]

This is interesting and disturbing at the same time...

[apep1412]

Might it have something to do with the new metamagic mechanics?
Did you check to make sure that your non- polar ray spells were doing full damage against other mobs? It could be that your global setting is off for empower/ maximize and/or your individual setting for those spells' slot is off.

[Shade]

Think it's just a quirk in how the colors work:

You will still get purple numbers as long as the damage is increased : after everything is factored - even if the target has specfic resistance against that type.

So chances are he has a very small amount of cold resistance - enough to mess up your low SLA and generate the yellow numbers... But not enough to drop down a 2000 dmg +15% polar ray from doing reduced dmg.

Also keep in mind the Hound of Blades dmg shield can really muck with things.. So you can really only test reliably when those are dead.. As they give him a buff that reduces all incoming dmg by ~20-25%, and can stack up to 3 times for some high dmg reduction. It's an aura the dogs give off, but has a huge AOE and generally hits him.

Same actaully works for melee:
If a target has DR you aren't bypassing, but a monk hits him with the +10% physical vuln buff, and the difference in the +10% dmg is more then what you lose from DR, the numbers go back to red. (tho oddly melee numbers never go purple)

[Xiadais]

What Shade said.

In eChrono, my drow water savant sees yellow numbers on Frost Lance and purple numbers on Polar Ray. It all depends on whether the static resist or the %bonus is bigger.

[LeLoric]

Probably what you are seeing is the % increase on polar ray is more than the resistance total. If a spell hits for 300 dmg and resistance is 50 while increase for savant debuff is 15% or 300*.15=45. So the spell would do 345-50=295 and since it was below the initial 300 it shows yellow.

Take a 2k polar ray under the same circumstances and you get 2300 after the savant debuff -50 resist for 2250. This is above the original 2k and so it shows as purple.

This same instance I have seen on my sorc in current content also so it is nothing specific with LoB.

[sephiroth1084]

For example:

50 damage, -20 resist, +25% = 37, less than your 50, so you get yellow
2,000, -20, +25% = 2,475, more than your 2,000, so you get purple

[Dark-Star]

Makes sense to me. I'll continue testing to verify.