Death Blow - How much is enough

[chattius 2,534]

I am currently writing down the experiences my daughter made with her Waffenmeisterin (female weapon master). She had Deathblow, Opponent_level_for_death_blow at around 88%. She said that her feeling was that she got most of it this way. Every class build is different of cause and she was playing a type of a weaponless Kungfu-Dryad where you had to choose between base damage and deathblow.

 

So doing a guide for Death Blow will be hard. But we can do some basic maths which hopefully allow the reader to understand how to optimize death blow.

 

How much deathblow is enough:

 

One Hit Kills

doing more damage than the full health of an enemy. Obviously deathblow is not needed in this case.

100

 

Two Hit Kills:

Either each hit doing more than half of the health of the enemy as damage

50+50

or doing a third and having a deathblow of more than 66.7%.

33+67

 

Three hit kills:

Either we do one third of the health of the enemy as damage

34+34+34

or doing a quarter and have deathblow at 50.1+%

25+25+50

or doing a fifth of the damage and have deathblow at 80,1+%

20+40+40

 

Four hit kills:

a quarter of the health as damage

25+25+25+25

a fifth and deathblow at 60+%

20+20+20+40

a sixth and death blow at 66,7+%

17+17+34+34

a 7th and deathblow at 85,8+%

15+30+30+30

 

So for the weaponless Kungfu dryad a balance had to be reached: is it better to socket base damage and x% damage or deathblow. If you look at the 4 hit kill numbers (which are actually only 2 ravaged impacts because of the double hit): you can nearly half your damage if you have deathblow above 86%. Since the Kungfu has no weapon damage, you can take away more than half your damage related sockets(more than half because tactic lore and combat art add to the damage but are not socketed) and change them for deathblow. If you need less sockets to reach this deathblow values we should go for deathblow, even it has high diminishing returns.

[essjayehm 58]

Ahhh, the most powerful offensive modifier in the game! Sooo powerful that it cannot be ignored, but when it comes to DB and its' huge diminishing returns, I use the KISS method (Keep It Simple, Scotty)

 

I will only use 1 item with native deathblow and socket(s) - so either a weapon with DB+2 slots into which DB rings are forged... or bracers (or is it gauntlets, I forget which gets DB) with a DB ring forged into it (I've only ever seen bracers/gauntlets with 1 slot, save for the "Bracers of Atheron" - which has 2 gold sockets, but no DB

 

I never shoot for a specific value, just the best of what I can find/buy and I will always try to have it, but I don't spend too much time thinking about it.

[chattius 2,534]

My feeling is that on full servers it is better to give away some damage to get more of it back again by using deathblow. A higher deathblow seems to be more important the more hits you need for killing.

 

There are obviously 2 approaches:

 

A) Get as much damage as you can and perhaps the finals blows will be deathblows with a single item.

 

or

 

b) It will take too much sockets to double my damage, way more than bringing deathblow to 80+%. All but the few first hits will be double damage deathblows.

 

So if your main combat art is predamaging enemies already: double-hits, explosions on nearbies, ... wanting an early death blow becomes a real option.

 

As I said: the 4 hits scenario in first post are just 2 ravaged impacts.

 

NOTE to myself:

I have to look if life leech damage is doubled too. Boss hunting would be better with highest death blow then.

[Dragon Brother 619]

%LL Damage definitly doesnt change with deathblow.

 

I usually aim for around 50-70% and go for a 2 hit kill.

[lujate 578]

2-hit kills were what I was thinking too, except for bosses. Since bosses have significantly more HP, DB% should have more impact than on run-of-the-mill mob enemies, so I think it might be better to sacrifice some damage in order to increase DB%.