Paragon Board Meta Analysis for Sorcerer in Diablo 4

hello everyone and welcome to this discussion on the top Paragon board choices for sorcerer the purpose of this video is to mathematically compare some early Paragon board strategies to find out exactly what is better and why we'll be comparing three scenarios a non-physical damage focus a crit focus and a vulnerability Focus now this is a continued discussion from my previous two videos where I demonstrated how to reach over 500 Elemental damage scaling with this early Paragon board setup and I really appreciate the feedback from everyone on those two videos and that's actually what prompted me to make this video and a big shout out to a member of the community named Rocket Cat who ran a very thorough and well-documented experiment to show that there appears to be a tooltip error in the game and that the elemental damage modifiers on gear seem to just be added instead of multiplied and then added like the tooltip suggests you can find a link to their experiment in the comments of all three videos this means the non-physical damage start might not be as crazy as the tooltip suggests so I decided to run some calculations to find out exactly how strong it really is when compared to other strategies for the record I I care about discovering and understanding the truth and then bringing that to the people so we can all enjoy the games we play that much more and so this will be as fair and objective of an analysis as I can manage now my gut tells me the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle as it usually does so be sure to stick around till the end of the video where we will try to combine these ideas to make the most powerful Paragon board possible alright so there's a few good strategies floating around out there but one of the main ones I keep hearing about is this idea that you should prioritize crit damage and vulnerability damage over everything else because they're multiplicative so what the does that even mean good question to understand this you basically have to understand the concept of how damage is grouped in Diablo 4 and this basically boils down to the equation that Diablo is using under the hood to calculate your damage at any point in the game which looks something like this now this probably deserves a whole video of its own but let me briefly try to explain what's going on here because understanding this is essential to comparing these ideas okay so this first group is your weapon damage you can think of this as essentially your damaged floor and for the sake of this calculation it's always going to be 100 if you had none of these additional modifiers to your weapon damage your total damage would be a hundred percent of your weapon damage number and so this real value number will change based on how powerful your weapon is but can always be represented as a hundred percent the second group of damage is your skill damage every skill is based off a certain percentage of your weapon damage if you toggle on the advanced tool tips and the gameplay options each skill will show you exactly how much it's getting multiplied by your damage number now this number can range from a couple percent to a couple hundred percent based on the skill and in general the only thing you can do to increase this percentage is increase the rank of that skill the third group is your primary attribute every class is a primary attribute that scales their skill damage by a percentage and for sourcerer this is intelligence the fourth group is by far the largest group in every type of damage modifier besides crit vulnerability and overpower falls into this buck it this group is basically split into two types of damage modifiers conditional and non-conditional a conditional modifier is one where a specific condition needs to be active for it to be in effect so for example the Frozen modifier something needs to be frozen for this modifier to be applied if the target is not frozen this multiplier is removed from the equation essentially doing nothing conversely non-conditional modifiers are active all the time meaning no matter what or how you attack these will be factored into the equation to increase your damage the only two non-conditional modifiers for sorcerer are all damage and non-physical damage these will always be more valuable than the conditional modifiers in this group because they are active 100 of the time now this brings us to the final three groups which are crit damage vulnerability damage and overpower damage with the whole equation the way it is executed is that every percentage modifier within a group is added together and then the groups are multiplied by each other so when you hear someone say crit or vulnerability damage is multiplicative this is what they're referring to even if they don't know it what most people fail to realize is that these final three are conditional damage modifiers meaning they're only active sum percentage of the time if you don't crit every point you've invested in a crit damage does nothing when your target isn't vulnerable your vulnerability damage is useless so to get a true picture of our actual damage these values need to be multiplied by the percentage of time they are active so crit damage needs to be multiplied by crit chance and vulnerability damage needs to be multiplied by your estimated vulnerability uptime this is the reason these have their their own group the game designers wanted these to be the most valuable and focused on conditional modifiers for gameplay every other conditional modifier is under the fourth group what this really means for us is that in order for either of these to be truly valuable we need to be playing a build and a style that focuses on these conditions in general for sorcerer builds fire has the most crit Frost has the most vulnerability and lightning is somewhere in the middle so for the multipliers on these damage types to take effect one has to be geared and built toward maximizing the amount of time these modifiers are active when I created my previous two videos the intent was to create a powerful start for any Source or any build any play style what we are doing when we build into non-physical damage first is essentially maxing out this number in the fourth group because it is non-conditional meaning it's active one hundred percent of the time no matter what you are doing this along with all damage and intellect are really the only non-conditional modifiers under our control and I've never said crate or vulnerability damage is bad or not worth building I simply think that building a powerful floor of Elemental damage first is a sound strategy for any Builder play style before focusing on these multipliers later in the game for a specific Builder place though so now that we understand the equation let's plug in some values to understand how it affects our total damage let's start with my sorcerer's base stats at level 70 when I made these videos and the non-physical damage path I recommended I pulled these numbers directly from the stats sheet shown in my previous video and we'll use them to demonstrate a full calculation the only thing I've changed is I adjusted my non-physical damage multiplier to be only my non-physical modifier added with my Elemental damage rolls on gear instead of the gear rolls being multiplied then added like the tooltip suggests because of the results shown in rocket cat's experiment I also added the final 10 non-physical damage bonus I am missing on one of the nodes from not having enough decks to bring me to the full 240 base this results in a 240.2 percent gain for my Paragon board added with a 39.1 percent cold damage I have on my gear to be 279.3 percent total shown here instead of the 359.3 percent that the tooltip suggests remember that this first part of the equation is dependent on what skill you're using so let's use ice shards at rank 5 which is 35 of weapon damage let's pretend I'm blasting these ice shards into a boss that is staggered which triggers every one of these conditional modifiers in the fourth group to be active as you can see my conditional and non-conditional modifiers in the fourth group are added together and then this total is multiplied by the other groups we need to multiply my crit damage by my crit chance my vulnerability damage by my estimate of how often I have vulnerability up on enemies and overpower damage by three percent which is everyone's overpowered chance and cannot be modified to execute the equation we multiply these different groups together remember that when multiplying by percentages a hundred percent is our base value so to increase something by sixty percent we actually have to multiply by 160 percent or 1.6 when we run this calculation we are given a value of 2233 percent which is my total damage multiplier under these conditions if I were to apply this total modifier to my actual weapon damage number it would give me the exact amount of damage I'm dealing in this situation if the enemy had no armor or resistance now let's take a look at this calculation for three different Paragon board strategies focused on different parts of the equation and see how they compare we're going to remove all gear and modifiers for our Baseline calculation so that the only thing changing our Stats come from the Paragon board in glyph we will add the gear modifiers back in later to see how they influence the result the first strategy we will look at is what I recommended in my previous two videos selecting the enchanted Rune in the enchanter board to max out our non-physical damage for the sake of this discussion all runes will be compared at level 15. as this is when they get their second range and become truly effective running the damage equation will give us an 817 percent total damage increase now let's make crit damage our main focus and prioritize it for our first board and Rune here we're taking the destruction glyph which is the only Crick glyph and only works with your core skill by the way so since we're using eye shards we'll leave it active but keep in mind for the crit scenario that your overall damage multiplier will be even lower than shown in all these examples because this glyph is only applying to your core skill so at level 15 with 39 decks available around this first socket the destruction room would give us 53.2 percent additional crit damage on our core skill we are then gonna Rush the only crit damage available on any board which is right in the middle of the Searing heat board as you can see running the same damage equation under the same circumstances only changing the first board and glyph will give us a 426 percent total damage increase about half of our non-physical damage scenario now for the sake of this analysis I'm excluding the extra fire damage you would get from this board because it's specific to fire damage only and we already have a conditional caveat on this board which is that it only applies to your core skill so at the end of this video I'll show how adding back in this extra fire damage influences the result but we are trying to get a comparison of our total overall damage and since this crit glyph limits us to our core skill only the fire damage would limit us to just Fireball or incinerate way too specific of a scenario to fairly compare against all total damage like the other two scenarios Additionally the fact that we get access to a legendary node in the board and vulnerability board but not the enchanter board will also be discussed at the end of the video once we all fully understand the analysis and results now let's take a look at the third scenario where we'll prioritize vulnerability damage this means running the exploit Rune which with 39 decks available around this first socket will give us 21.7 percent increased vulnerability damage at level 15. we are then going to rush the only board with vulnerability nodes which is The Frigid fade board this has two early node clusters which will give us a total of 70 extra vulnerability damage and running the same calculation will give us a 561 total damage increase about two-thirds of our non-physical damage scenario alright so now that we have our Baseline calculations let's add some different gear modifiers and see how that influences the result let's apply 50 Elemental damage increase which we are using to represent either plus cold or plus fire or plus lightning rolls on gear as you can see running the calculation for these three scenarios gives us a 937 total damage increase from our non-physical scenario a 556 percent increase from our crit scenario and a 731 increase from our vulnerability scenario so all the numbers improved from Baseline but when you look at exactly how much they changed you'll notice something very curious the non-vis legal scenario which is based on Elemental damage went up 120 percent but the crit scenario went up 129 and the vulnerability scenario went up 170 percent even though the non-physical scenario wins out for total damage why would the vulnerability scenario improve 50 percent more when we equip Elemental Gear all right now let's say we have a heavy crit focus on our gear and add 40 crit chance and 100 crit damage running the calculation for all three scenarios again gives us a 1 364 total damage increase from the non-physical damage path an 819 increase from the path and a 937 increase from vulnerability if we compare the results to Baseline our crit scenario improved by 392 percent our vulnerability scenario improved by 376 percent but our non-physical scenario improved by 547 percent this is where you're probably saying WTF might why would adding 40 crit chance and 100 crit damage improve the non-physical scenario by 171 percent more than the crit scenario hmm okay now let's say we have a heavy vulnerability Focus to our gear and build and increase our vulnerability uptime by 40 bring it from 50 to 90 and at 100 vulnerability damage running the same calculation gives us 1545 total damage increase from our non-physical board path an 806 percent increase from our board path and a 1046 increase from our vulnerability path again comparing how much they changed vulnerability went up by 485 percent crit went up by 380 but the non-physical damage scenario improved by a whopping 728 percent why would adding 40 vulnerability uptime and 100 vulnerability damage improve our non-physical path by 243 more than our vulnerability path interesting the answer to all these questions lies in the way numbers interact when they get multiplied to simplify things let's say you have a total of 12 12 boats 12 elephants 12 anything if you split this 12 into 10 and 2 and multiply them together it's going to give you 20. but if you split this 12 into 8 and 4 and multiply them together it's going to give you 32. and if you split this 12 into 6 and 6 and multiply them together it gives you 36. if you have the same total why does multiplying 6 times 6 give you almost double multiplying 10 times 2. this my friends is one of the many profound conundrums of math that I don't have the time or capacity to explain but this is how it works so basically if you have the same total of things getting multiplied the more evenly those numbers are distributed the better the final result now in our example consider that we're not operating with the same totals the non-physical path has about a hundred percent more in total damage bonus stats than the other two routes so it will be ahead from the beginning additionally equipping vulnerability gear improve the non-physical scenario the most because the gear bonus is getting multiplied by the 240 damage bonus from our Paragon board since those stats are in a different damage group whereas those gear bonuses are getting added with the 157 damage bonus from our vulnerability Paragon board since they are in the same damage group this means that if we add more crit or vulnerability modifiers to an already high base value of damage in non-physical the values are getting closer we're operating with a hundred percent more damage stats in total and they are getting multiplied by an already large number so our results are going to Skyrocket what this tells us is that if we have a non-physical damage Focus from our starting Paragon board in glyph we should actually be building as much crit and vulnerability into our gear as we can because those will get multiplied by our already large non-physical damage number instead of building Elemental damage which will get added alright so far the non-physical damage path has been the clear winner in total damage increase for every situation regardless of what gear we equip but as you can see from what we just learned it has the highest total value when we build vulnerability Gear with the non-physical damage board and glyph now let's experiment with a couple more scenarios to see if there's a situation where the crit board and glyph or their vulnerability boarding glyph would pass the non-physical damage in area and actually be better let's take our Baseline and add back in all the conditional modifiers my character had equipped at the beginning and run the calculation as you can see non-physical focus is still winning but vulnerability is starting to catch up the vulnerability Focus clearly improves the most from this staggered State increasing 166 percent more than the non-physical path even though the non-physical path still wins in total damage now we know why this is happening the conditional modifiers are in the same group as the non-physical damage from our board so they are getting added with the bonuses from the non-physical damage path and glyph whereas they're getting multiplied by the bonuses from the vulnerability path in glyph because vulnerability has its own damage group okay now for the final situation let's toggle everything on that we've tried so far we're going to add 50 Elemental damage 40 crit chance 100 crit damage 40 vulnerability uptime and 100 vulnerability damage and all the conditional modifiers we just looked at in this final scenario with all these fat gear boosts against a staggered boss the non-physical damage path still wins it's worth noting that the vulnerability path is finally starting to catch up but only with this massive amount of stats underneath it what can we toggle on to get the vulnerability scenario to finally pass the non-physical damage scenario let's change our crit chance to 100 percent non-physical damage path still wins and even has the highest percent increase all right let's add another 100 vulnerability damage the non-physical damage path now wins by a long shot improving 500 percent more than the vulnerability scenario let's try adding a conditional 200 crowd control modifier ah there we go finally there is a situation where another build path catches up vulnerability improves 676 percent more than the non-physical damage path when we add 200 damage to crowd control because the CC modifier is added with our non-physical board path in glyph whereas it's multiplied by our vulnerability path in glyph what this basically tells us is the only time it makes sense to start your board with a vulnerability focus is if you're already in end game with this massive amount of stats underneath you and a high amount of uptime on your conditional modifiers in the fourth damage group this is why vulnerability Focus has mistakenly become the recommended meta for everyone it will be a better start for some builds only once you're already in end game with lots of stats and lots of conditional modifiers active all the time in every other scenario the non-physical damage path will consistently deliver more total damage which is why I recommended it as the best starting glyph and board path for any sorcerer any build any playstyle now let's consider the fact that we're missing out on a legendary node by choosing the non-physical damage path so considering vulnerability let's take a look at what the legendary node on The Frigid fate board gives us dealing cold damage to vulnerable enemies increases your lucky hit Chance by one percent for 5 seconds up to 15 percent lucky hit is a very interesting stat that's only valuable once you have a bunch of Lucky hit effects stacked which doesn't happen until later in the game even then these effects are usually for extra utility instead of flat damage increase so this aligns with our conclusion that this board should only be used as the starting board once we're already approaching end game and have these lucky hit effects stacked to where this node is truly effective these conclusions also tell us that starting with a crit Focus will always be worse than these other two scenarios even with 100 crit chance remember that sadly the actual total damage for crit is even lower than shown in all these examples because the glyph only affects our core skill whereas the other two glyphs affect all skills crit should Main only be used as a strong supplementary glyphen board after starting with non-physical or vulnerability the only time it should be considered for your starting board is if you're in a full fire build because you can pick up the 105 fire damage on that board along the way which will bring it closer in these comparisons note that it will cost a couple more points than the other boards to snag these final fire damage nodes if you want to run this comparison for yourself for a fire specific build factoring in your specific crit chance or the variable crit chance of the legendary node you can copy the formulas in my spreadsheet and add these modifiers to the crit scenario to see how it plays out this was excluded from the analysis because the damage is specific to fire only not total damage so this very much limits the versatility and choices of builds that will hit this damage number if you run the calculations again adding 105 fire damage to the path these are the results but remember these are only the results for fire damage with your core skill while the other paths are representing all damage with all skills non-physical damage still wins in every scenario except the one where everything is active but again that's only when all these heavy gear conditions are stacked and you're doing fire damage with your core skill under any other conditions non-physical still wins considering the legendary node searing heat gives you a variable crit chance increase up to 15 percent when you cast Fireball or meteor and we already showed that the non-physical damage path still wins with 100 crit chance but if you stack literally everything in Fire's favor and run the very specific scenario where you have all the strong gear modifiers applied and you're only casting Fireball into a staggered boss keeping your legendary node fully stacked it will finally win out now even though crit is a weak starting board it may be one of the most powerful supplementary boards because of the way the damage equation and it groups operate like we discussed if you think about it you need time to scale your crit chance for it to really come online anyways since your increased to crit damage will only come into effect when you actually crit so if you use it as a supplementary board late game instead of a starting board early game not only will you naturally have a higher crit chance because you have more total stats under you but you'll also benefit much more when it gets multiplied by the r 30 large numbers in your damage modifier group and your vulnerability group now why does the non-physical scenario win out in pretty much every case the answer is twofold first it is non-conditional meaning the damage multipliers are on one hundred percent of the time whereas a focus on crit damage will always be heavily dependent on crit chance and a focus on vulnerability damage will always be heavily dependent on how often your targets are vulnerable second the enchanter starting glyph and board path simply have way more total stats than the path or the vulnerability path starting with the enchanter glyph and enchanter board will give you a bonus of 240 increase to non-physical damage active with all skills all elements all the time while the board only gives you a 30 increase to crit damage and another 53.2 percent increase only to your core skill and it only activates when you crit the vulnerability board gives you 70 vulnerability damage and the glyph gives you 21.7 percent for a total of 91.7 damage increase activating all when your target is vulnerable since they all have the 65 non-physical damage increase from the very first board this gives us the comparison of 240 all the time versus 148 or 157 some of the time so if we can build any of these stats on our gear to get multiplied by the board and glyph path that we've chosen it makes much more sense to start with the non-physical damage path for the hundred percent extra stats you're getting and try to multiply that by vulnerability crit and crit damage modifiers on your gear man numbers are beautiful because they can't lie and the truth they reveal always tells a story the final conclusion we can draw from the analysis of this set of numbers is that a non-physical damage Focus starting with the enchanter board and glyph clearly appears to be the strongest starting path for sourcerer the only time I should consider dropping it to start the vulnerability path is when I'm further into end game playing a build with a high crit chance and damage High vulnerability uptime and damage and a significant amount of conditional damage mod modifiers that are active a majority of the time now remember we're only looking at one situation with these results so I encourage you to copy the formulas from this spreadsheet and test it for yourself enter your own character stats and find out exactly when it might make sense to start with vulnerability or crit and toggle different categories to see what gear stats it makes sense to prioritize for your specific build test it with different skills amounts of intellect and active modifiers to find out exactly what is best for your character at your current state in the game no matter what you start with it will always be worth considering adding all three of these boards and glyphs into your build at some point because of the way the damage equation works these three boards and glyphs are multiplied by each other with the enchanter path being the only non-conditional damage modifier that is active all the time in a damage modifier group the path being the only boarding glyph that support the crit damage group and the vulnerability path being the only boarding glyph that support the vulnerability damage group including all three in your build at some point will give you multiplicative results enabling you to do the most damage possible additionally as we showed earlier with the way the damage equation works if you're on the non-physical damage path and will always be more valuable to build crit chance crit damage and vulnerability damage on your gear then it will be to build Elemental damage because the additional crit and vulnerability are multiplied by your 240 percent non-physical damage increase rather than added like the elemental damage holy we did it if you just watch this whole thing congratulations on understanding Source or damage scaling way better than you ever knew you wanted I hope this information was useful and I hope you can use it to maximize the power of your build at any phase in the game for whatever style of sorcerer you want to play I'll provide a link to the spreadsheet in the comments but unfortunately it will be view only I can't give edit permissions because some idiot will try to change something in the formulas to mess with the data so if you want to run your own numbers you can look at the formulas I used and quickly rebuild it yourself again I hope this was valuable to you and I hope you can use it to become a better sourcerer sorceress and killed more demons thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one peace

Channel: Zikorik

Views: 42,763

Keywords: diablo 4 best, diablo 4 sorcerer, diablo 4 paragon, diablo 4 best sorcerer, diablo 4 best sorcerer build, diablo 4, sorcerer paragon, best sorcerer paragon, best, paragon, sorcerer, sorc, sorceress, d4

Id: tnMPu68cv3o

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023