I have not been able to find it written anywhere, but I believe that there is a cap on spell damage. I have 2 enchanter accounts that I can log into and here is what I find: My main enchanter has 200 more spell damage than the second. Both have the max aa's and identical equipment focus. Both have the same proc augs on primary and ranged. Both have rk3 mindsunder, rk2 mindcleave, and rk2 mindsythe. The main difference is one enchanter is agility, and the other is spell dmg for augmentations and gear. (The main focus is actually H-int) I have been testing them out for over a week now, several times a day on the combat dummies. They both do about 120K dps (self buffs/aa's only, and no tribute/trophy running), and roughly the same damage. When I look at the parse breakdown, I am not seeing the extra damage per spell bonus I should see when all of the numbers are averaged. If there is some cap on spell damage, it would be nice to know, so that I could swap those augs out for AC/Agi or something that will be used on the character. I was given the formula for spell damage as: (Cast_Time + Recast_Time) / 7 * Spell_Damage = bonus damage per hit of spell I am almost tempted to just remove half of my spell dmg augs and see if anything changes. Does anyone have any insight on this?
Your not getting a very large multiplier with 4 second cast and 9 second recast on those spells, that is only 1.85 x spell damage; in your case by magelo 1243 spell damage is adding 2299 to each spell cast. Dropping spell damage to 1040 only drops the bonus to 1924. How much spell damage does the "agility" toon have? Max bonus added will not exceed the base damage of the spell or proc. 2299 vs. 1924 or a 375 point difference, assuming casting 15 spells a minute would add an extra 5625 damage done or 5625/60 = ~94 dps
Remove your enchanters' wrist armors. Nuke dummies. They should each be getting an unvarying number with each cast. Compare those.
Basically the bonus from 200 spell damage is so small you'll need hours of parsing to notice it (and it'll still be very small). If you remove all effects that use SPA 124 (focus effects) and cast the same spell on both toons (there should be no variability between casts, so recasting the spell should give the exact some values), the damage should be slightly higher on the one with more spell damage. Edit: Basically what Brohg said
I believe that Spell Damage (and Heal Amount) should cap at the spells base damage (that you see on a spell parser). So if a spell base nuke damage is 10k and your spell damage is supposed to add 15k, you will only get 10k of that 15k on that specific nuke. There is also level cap difference on the nuke for Spell Damage mod, I don't know if that was changed from the original 5 (I think it was?). Anything wider gets nothing.
I see, thanks for the clarification. Spell damage is not as good as I thought it would be when it is all added up. So over an entire night of raiding, it may add up to a couple of nukes worth of damage. I tried it without the bracers and over 12 casts, the SD enchanter was 21K ahead, but that was a tiny sample and cannot represent the true picture. I'll test more on it over the next couple of days. Thanks again for the help.
No that's it. That's the whole, true picture. That's the actual difference the +Spell Damage mod makes. Nothing else going on with it. No discs or foci or whatever change its impact, what you've seen now is what you get.
Since sympathetic procs don't have a cast or recast, you get 25% of your spell damage up to the base damage of the spell. According to a PM from Beimeith it was changed to 9 levels; (i.e. if you are 105, it will work on any spell 96+)
Spell dmg has been totally irrelevant since about 2009. IIRC back when it was introduced in SoD, you could get like 700 SD, and it was only good for 1 specific spell that auto-cast another spell, because the spell dev put some random huge recast value on that 2nd spell since it was never meant to be cast directly. That made the spell very OP in combination with SD. Soon after, the mistake was fixed and the spell recast time nerfed. And that was the end of SD's usefulness. It was never upgraded to the amounts that would make any real difference for DPS, and it also fell way behind the mudflation. Just ignore that stat. You get some baseline amount of it on any caster gear, and the amounts added by augs are meaningless.
Spell damage adds very little in terms of raw damage to any given spell. however i believe that spell damage is treated like augmenting aura damage (or vis-versa?) and will be effected by the critical multipliers when the spell or proc critical hits. it is still a small number of added damage but its something that does help and EQ is a game of small improvements.
Yes, SD crits. But it's still a very small amount compared to the main spell's damage. And almost all of it comes from the armor, i.e. automatically. The amount added by augs is irrelevant. That's why OP can't find the difference made by 200 SD.
Like genuinely meaningless? This is the first I've heard of aug SD not doing anything and since I focused on SD for all my augs, I kinda want to see some evidence of this before changing them out...
Meaningless as in very, very small. One could make the argument that other stats are equally or more meaningless, however, so it's not like you're missing out on anything particularly good. Augmenting Aura (SPA 413) is affected by foci/debuffs/crits, whereas spell damage is only affected by crits.
As suggested above, you can easily see exactly how little it matters by nuking a test dummy. Remove all your focus items so that your nuke damage does not fluctuate because of them. Every non-crit cast of the same nuke should land for the same damage X1, and every crit should land for the same damage Y1. Remove all your SD augs and cast the same nuke again. Now non-crit nukes land for X2, and crit nukes land for Y2. See the difference: X1-X2, and Y1-Y2.
I worked it out for wizards once. What it boils down to is thus: Wizard A has +200 SD, casts Ethereal 180 times. Wizard B has 0 SD, casts Ethereal 181 times. Wizard B beats Wizard A by a few points of damage. That's how little 200 SD matters... a single extra cast in 9 minutes worth of nuking is enough to erase the bonus of the SD on the other player. Put another way, the benefit is so low it is unnoticeable outside of carefully constructed parses that are exactly equal in the number of casts. In any real world scenario there are too many variables that affect the number of casts you will never be able to see the difference. Note: the above is a non burn situation, but really it doesn't matter. Burns will benefit the SD more, but still not enough to really matter.
Time to camp some new augs. There are plenty who would disagree with me, but personally I can never have too much mana!
Actually, just looks like I need to switch 3 augs out. NBD. Despite valiant efforts, I still do not have that damn Naggy aug. Next year!
