The Red-Headed Stepchild: Adds X% to Elemental Damage
I left this affix out of the previous calculations because D3 treats the Adds X% to Elemental Damage affix much differently than it treats the +X% Damage affix. I had to do a lot of research to figure out what the game was doing, and I believe it deserves its own section. It was just too complicated to incorporate into the earlier sections, which are intensive enough without the anomalies.
Let’s consider Schaefer’s Hammer, which always rolls a boost to lightning damage. Here’s the version I keep in my stash:
Tooltip DPS: 1,081.4
Tooltip damage range: 875–1290
Tooltip attack speed: 1.00
+224–578 Lightning Damage
Adds 8% to Lightning Damage
Increases Attack Speed by 11%
Your gut might tell you that the Adds 8% to Lightning Damage affix is the elemental version of the +X% Damage and that you can simply work backward to determine the weapon’s base damage by modifying the method we used earlier.
Well, that’s reasonable—hey, that’s the first thing I tried, too—but it’s wrong. The Adds X% to Elemental Damage affix doesn’t have anything to do with elemental damage in that sense. It’s actually a super-charged “black damage” modifier. Unlike the weapon-specific +X% Damage affix, however, it is not used to calculate your tooltip damage range. The base damage range of the hammer in this example is just what you would expect if the Adds 8% to Lightning Damage wasn’t even there—it has a base damage of 651–712 and lightning damage of 224–578. The average damage per hit is (875 + 1,290) divided by 2, or 1,082.5. The weapon’s base attack speed is 0.90, which is then multiplied by 1.11 to account for the 11% IAS bonus. This produces a final attack speed of 0.999, which is then multiplied by the 1,082.5 damage per hit to produce a DPS of 1,081.4175 and a rounded tooltip DPS of 1,081.4, which matches what I see in the character sheet.
When calculating your character sheet DPS, however, D3 handles this weapon’s affixes (and your gear affixes) quite differently. For starters, the elemental damage bonus is applied to your base damage—the weapon’s “black damage”—which means that it applies only to the 651–712 portion of the weapon’s tooltip range, not the lightning damage like most (sensible) people would expect. This is similar to the +X% Damage affix in that it applies only to the weapon’s base damage, but it is different in that the +X% Damage affix, unlike the Adds X% to Elemental Damage affix, is included in your tooltip DPS.
Remember when I said that this affix is “super-charged”? Well, that’s because the elemental damage bonus is applied to any +X Minimum Damage, +X Maximum Damage, and +X–Y Damage affixes on your gear. This is very different from the way the game treats a weapon’s +X% Damage affix, which does not apply to your gear affixes.
Using these rules, I can correctly calculate my character sheet DPS of 25,032.60 with the following equipment:
Schaefer’s Hammer:
875–1290 tooltip damage range
1.00 tooltip APS (actually 0.90 with the +11% modifier applied)
+224–578 Lightning Damage
Adds 8% to Lightning Damage
Increases Attack Speed by 11%
Ring #1:
+25 Minimum Damage
Increases Attack Speed by 7%
Ring #2:
+34 Maximum Damage
Amulet:
+24–56 Damage
Increases Attack Speed by 9%
The real damage per hit, to use another calculation method, is the base damage (including rings) multiplied by 1.08 plus the lightning damage.
Base damage per hit: (651 + 712 + 25 + 34 + 24 + 56) * 1.08 / 2 = 811.08
Lightning damage: (224 + 578) / 2 = 401
Total damage per hit: 811.08 + 401 = 1,212.08
The weapon’s real attack speed, with the Enchantress’s Focused Mind skill active, is 1.19364:
0.90 (base AS)
x 1.11 (+11% IAS on weapon)
= 0.999
+ 0.03 (Enchantress buff)
= 1.029
x 1.16 (+7% IAS on ring #1 and +9% IAS on amulet)
= 1.19364
So the weapon’s real DPS is 1,212.08 damage per attack times 1.19364 attacks per second, or 1,446.7871712.
Next, we multiply this figure by 1 plus DEX divided by 100. My DEX is 1,337 with this weapon equipped, so:
1,446.7871712 DPS
x (1 + 1,337 / 100)
= 20,790.331650144
Finally, we need to account for my 26.5% CHC and my 77% CHD, which entails multiplying the 20K-ish figure by (1 + 0.265 x 0.77), or 1.20405.
20,790.331650144
x 1.20405
= 25,032.59882335588
D3 rounds this figure to the nearest hundredth, which accounts for the 25,032.60 I see in my character sheet with this setup.
Is this a bug? I don’t know. The game is consistently inconsistent, I’ll give it that much. All I know is that this is definitely how it works.
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