Ways to increase Bonus Damage?

[TedEBear]

Hello,

 

What are the ways you can increase Bonus Damage for a SS / Fire (or any powerset).

 

1. Inspirations

2. Rage

3. Incarnate

 

Anything else?  Not sure how people are getting 600% or so.  Is it from buffs from other classes like Fulcrum Shift?

[Frostweaver]

You can turn off all insp but damage, or there are some converter macros out there you can use to turn stuff into reds.

There are spikes and ebbs all the time, especially if you have a Gaussian's in the right place, but anyone that claims that they consistently average 600% damage (especially considering that alpha spikes the attack's damage directly, rather than adding to your damage%) without keeping scads of giant reds in the AH to refill between runs on bloody rainbow, is pulling your leg.

Yes, on bloody rainbow, with careful planning, I can go from start to finish on a single mission at 600%, But unless I head to the base insp storage between every mission or stash them all in the AH between missions.

 rage can double-stack for +160, plus the default 160-170 for Fury, plus spikes of 60 and 80, respectively, plus (maybe) another 40 for IO sets. that means that you can HIT 600% for about 8 seconds, with a lucky gaussian's proc of cap. but as for it being....well... average? No way.

Then again, bloody rainbow is designed specifically to exploit a tray full of reds.

Edited September 1, 2019 by Frostweaver
ran the numbers

[Werner]

If you're talking about solo farming, you hit the damage cap by having a fast kill speed, which means inspirations drop faster, and you convert them all into reds, which you're eating faster, which increases your kill speed, and so on. But my damage is all over the place during runs, probably mostly in the 300% to 600% range on +4x8 Comicon. I imagine it would be possible to hang out mostly at the damage cap if I turned the level down some, but I've not tried, and it would probably be counterproductive overall. I'm not using Rage. I also don't have a dedicated farming build. Anything that increases your damage output will indirectly also increase your % by increasing the rate at which inspirations are dropping.

[Werner]

OK, I turned it down to +1x8 just to see what would happen. I would guess I spent 1/3 to 1/2 the time damage capped, which I think is actually higher than benefits me since I think I need to include the damage enhancement in the powers themselves. Anyway, it took maybe 30 seconds to get there the first time because I went in with a tray full of random inspirations instead of loading up on reds, and then it kept dropping whenever the enemies started thinning out and I had to move to another group, and that was awfully frequent with the kill speed I had against +1s. I didn't track influence, but it was less satisfying than fighting +4x8. Too fast, I guess. Too much time hunting for the next group rather than killing.

Edited September 1, 2019 by Werner

[Frostweaver]

See Werner, now you are starting to make me wonder about the wisdom of exclusively going against +4's... I mean, +3's might keep you damage capped and enable you to clear rainbow vastly faster, although obviously +1 was not the way to go.

[Frostweaver]

after testing through a bunch of rainbows (fast, I know) I have come to the conclusion that +3 is a LOT more efficient than +4. You lose about 12% of your exp and/or influence, but you stay much closer to your damage cap, and because of your clear speeds you can spend almost the entire run under your hybrid effect.... hybrid downtime is a BIG slowdown for me. I imagine that ageless or barrier being active almost the entire time might help other farmers out as well.

Unlike some people, I don't actually LIKE farming. I do it to tweak the characters that I DO enjoy playing. So faster/more efficient farming is my ultimate goal, the most kills (The most chances for purple drops and converters/catalysts), fastest inf, and fastest exp being the ultimate goal. Most of my runs I do in cave because it's easier to keep PL's safe in there, unless I am loot farming, in which case it's pure rainbow.

The biggest thing though is that the 'cleanup' phase of dealing with stray bosses is much, much shorter.... I cannot bring myself to abandon a map when there's still bosses on it.

So yeah, it looks like the magic point is not +4, it's +3...at least for my builds.

 

Edited September 1, 2019 by Frostweaver
edit- for pure PL purpposes, getting reds is still horribly uncommon with door sitters. Under those circumstances, +4 still seems to be the way to go.