u/chulpichochos

Been working on a spreadsheet (please maxroll/d4builds/moba, bake in damage calculations to your build planners! :D) and need help with following. I've watched macrobioboi and wudijo's damage videos from last season, read the maxroll damage and attack speed articles, but still a bit confused.

1. How are aspect multipliers combined?
2. - ie: I have 90% Blood skill damage from Thickened blood and Untimely death, and then 75% damage from Inner Calm. Since all I do is thump blood wave, is this just a total 2.55x multiplier (.9+.9+.75 + 1) or does it get lumped into the global multi along with things like Red Blessing? OR, are blood skill multipliers applied to the skill damage multi (for my rank 37 blood wave, I have x2205%)?
3. How are Seal multipliers applied?
4. - ie: I have 25% crit damage and 10%x Blood Skill damage. Does blood skill just also get dumped into global multiplier? Is the crit damage from here separate from standard gear crit multi?
5. - Does anyone know if the +blood damage on blood orb pick up from seal bonuses stacks? And if so, does it just get lumped into additive global?
6. Super confused as to paragon multiplier interactions!
7. - Imbiber potion multi (x5% per missing potion, max of 20%) is the ONLY thing in the game that literally feels like a flat 20% damage boost -- if I hit the dummy, I literallly see my big crits go from 10T to 12T on dummy. But that would only be possible if it was a completely isolated separate multi. Are ALL paragon multipliers separate?
8. Overpower
9. - Everything seems to have ditched overpower but I dont get it. Personally, I get +78% damage per stack, and have 11 stacks (bloodwave +2, red blessing +2). Mythic Banished Lord's is +13x Crit Damage per stack. So for me, I get all of this from my 100% uptime on 11 stacks:
10. - x143% crit damage
11. - x77% damage
12. - +858% damage
13. I do not get how x175% from blood mad charm can be considered better.
14. Attack speed
15. - I currently do sum ALL (including paragon) attack speed bonuses. Then, treat this as a multiplier to base weapon speed. Assume that each weapon attack corresponds to a blood wave cast.
16. - My rank 37 blood bone prison (when pushing, I am always inside a bone prison when thumping) increases my cast speed by 99%: is this a +99%? a x1.99?
17. - My current spreadsheet basically tells me that (for pushing!) attack speed is stupid good for me, but I dont really see anyone talk about this other than in the context of minion paragon boards so kinda confused.
18. - Unfortunately, maxrolll does not have an attack speed breakpoint table for blood wave. I have been using the blood surge table as an approximation.
19. Transfigured elemental damage?
20. - I've heard from various places that "this is a separate multi" -- so want to confirm that I should split this out in the same way I split out crit/vuln multis into a separate multi to multiply together.

I've been hardstuck at tower 135 for about a week now running a Banished Lord's + Redirected Force/Interdiction based Blood Wave build in normal SSF. This puts me somewhere in Top 5 combining both SSF and normal ladder, but frankly I only started last season and have pretty much only played blood wave necro so still trying to solidify my understanding of basics/common combos. I fully realize that being top 5 doesnt make me particularly skilled, just somewhat of a degenerate but I'm embracing that for this season and really want to try pushing as high as I can so hoping to learn from ya'll to accomplish that.

This is my current build/gear, paragon 297.
- https://maxroll.gg/d4/planner/1a1dpo0t
- I think I have very good gear, but certainly nothing godly (my only multi transfig is +atk speed/+lucky hit on shield)
- I abuse sever to ensure enough corpses for corpse tendril+blood mist every 5 seconds, and largely only move with sever/blood mist allowing for very high uptime of max stacks inner calm
- I have zero problems maintaining constant Untimely Death (even against a dummy thats not attacking, the self-damage + self heal from blood binder provides this on its own, blood mad is not at all necessary for untimely death)
- Currently only really die due to me missing a dodge, bad rng with corrupted robs / lightning obelisks and reprisal.

With decent map rng, I feel like I'm ~30-45seconds short of clear. I feel like if I got amazing rng (ie, no shielded, lifelink, dense mobs, good random spawn on goblin, etc) I could clear 135 but counting on great rng is a bad time.

Things I'm currently trying to do:
- My gloves have an eh transfig (+5 item quality), but crafting 4x offensive gloves has been hard -- I'm only fishing for crit multi GA on bases. Still though, I feel like I would need physical damage transfig could maybe make 135 clear more likely but not beyond that.
- Constantly crafting mythic amulets to try for GAs on banished lords / good blood-mad idol
- I always dump greater lair keys on Andariel trying to side grade pants with GAs
- I still need 8 mil topaz fragments for last flawless horadric but again dont think 30 int is a gamebreaker
- Im leveling Exploit glyph to 150 to see if that can outmargin Dominate.
- Have tried dropping banished lords for legendary redirect foce/interdict neck and tides of blood on weapon but falls short w/ my gear.
- Still need 2x +blood skils GA on charms, I dont think my seal will get much better (25% crit, 7% blood)

The berserkering elephant in the room (Blood mad idol):
- I've tried using this as a charm (have a +2 blood skills one) but it strictly feels like less damage than red blessing over a tower run.
- I have a mythic blood mad (no vuln multi on it though), and same as charm, I dont feeel the extra damage.
- I think my issues with blood-mad idol are a "skill" issue potentially as the problem is I really struggle to have good uptime on teh buff -- I treat bone prison as my bunker, using it to zone out vile lunatics/earthquakes/melee; it seems I need to find the magic ground of "move through map defensively so you dont die, but play aggressive against packs to keep buff up without dying"
- Im continuing to practice with it but not sure how to make it consistent. The other blood wave build at top uses barrier to deal with DoT but barriers kinda get in the way of untimely death + the base 2 piece blood binder bonus where you do x60% when being healed by fortify. I legitimately dont get how theyre pumping so hard but kudos to them.

My tower run strat is:
- Clear "dense" white packs while headhunting for blues with good affixes
- I always skip: shielded, lifelink, and elites cause the number of progress orbs arent worth the squeeze given the extra time to kill
- I always skip reprisal cause I waste too much time dodging rocks if I want to kill, making it not worth.
- Always kill the goblin.

Trying to figure out what's the best mercenary combo to use while pushing tower and would love input. I just started playing halfway through last season and have been unable to settle on a merc/reinforcement combo. Playing a "traditional" overpower crit based blood wave and pushing tower.

I'm currently running Varyana w/ Raheir reinforcement. I take the attack speed path for Varyana and have Raheir use bastion when I drop bone prison.

I don't have any numbers calculated or anything, this is just vibes:
- Aldkin merc seems interesting, I have no idea what the "curse" is supposed to be as I've never noticed any negative effects when running him. I found thata outside of guardian fights, he was often off to the side doing his own thing.
- Subo I guess is supposed to be the best but frankly I find that without being able to control when he casts his crit multi, its usually wasted / used too late leading up to guardian, and on guardian it can feel hit or miss whether he uses it at a good time. The map visibility is nice but also doesn't feel game changing in any way.
- Raheir merc with bastion skills seems good, but I have the same issue with him as Subo -- without being able to control his bastion, it feels like he almost always uses it at the wrong time. I do like having him as a reinforcement with bastion on bone prison as it allows me play more aggro by always having bastion when i engage a pack.
- I really like Varyana cause she basically gives passive 10% attack speed, with the extra 15% from bloodthrist being a cherry on top. I consistently feel her presence and can notice the damage boost (specially playing blood wave where I'm always in my bone bunker that gives +100% cast speed).

Since this is just vibes though -- am I way off base with my choices? Do mercs even matter that much beyond personal choice?

I had the time available this season to grind pretty hard so set a goal to try to compete for rank as a blood wave necro. I've consistently been in the top 5 in the SSF leaderboard. These are the issues I've found.

1. The skill cap required comes down to: can you dodge one shots. I strongly feel that given enough time, most players can meet this requirement. It is actually easier to do in the tower than in open world as you have time to anticipate/recognize monster affixes.

2. Pushing high level tower devolves to very little time spent actually running tower, instead you are constantly farming gold, Refined Primordial Dust, and Volatile Primordial Dust because you're farming for, ideally yellows, gear you can craft to gamble on transfigs. For whatever reason, the drop rates on these dusts are atrocious and there is no mechanism to convert between any of the primordial dust variants. Why can't we salvage the 1000s of useless prisms into dusts? Why can't we convert raw/coarse dusts into refined? Can the prisms at least vendor for more than 1g?

3. Any dopamine hit you might hope to get from getting a good loot drop disappears because so much depends on transfigs. You could, and I have multiple times, get a multi-GA item that will get salvaged because you didn't roll the right transfig on it.

4. I have come to dread getting amulet upgrades because transfiguring an aspect is so incredibly annoying. Even with mythic uniques rolling perfect aspects, you can expect to dump 50+ volatile dusts hoping to roll the right one. Going back to the awful drop rates on volatile dusts, this is miserable.

5. The RNG lottery doesn't stop at gear, runs themselves are fairly RNG dependent. Yellow mobs are almost never worth effort to kill, so you're fishing for maps with lots of blue packs. Then, you hope those blue packs dont have affixes that will make the time spent killing them not be worth it: reprisal, life link, and shielded being the worst to run into. In an ideal world, you also want the more "open" maps that allow you to move quickly while trying to find those blue packs/have enough trash mob density to make killing them worth it. With all that, blue/elite packs can randomly spawn and this can drastically affect a run: if you get a double blue pack w/ good affixes its a significant time boost, but can also get screwed if bad affixes spawn on top of you. In turn, my pushing sessions have turned into: fish for a run with even mid conditions otherwise its likely a waste of time.

6. Pylons are only worth it if you there is a pack worth killing right next to them and you're about to pop guardian otherwise its likely just a a waste of time.

7. Fundamental issues with terrain: there is one map in particular I despise, which is the Skovos volcano map. There is so much micro terrain that completely kills the ability to use sever to move around because 9/10 times you'll get stuck on an invisible rock. The micro terrain can also hide aoe effects which makes it even worse. I have to actively avoid fighting mobs near doorways/walls because sometimes the game decides my blood wave will land on the top of the wall instead of on the ground thereby doing no damage.

8. The lack of a combat log quickly becomes extremely annoying as you have no way to tell how much damage or of what elemental type you're mitigating/eating etc.

9. The game is plagued by awful UI issues that become really infuriating when you have to spend so much time craft-gambling. The entire prism based crafting is just annoying to engage with (I'm on PC, can't even imagine how bad it feels on controller to have to switch prisms constantly). Its nice the cube at least has a bind for transfigure, but why doesnt the enchanter, tempering, or masterworking? Its just constant clicking.

10. Everyone already knows the character sheet is a pretty useless source of information for your character's damage/toughness but it bears repeating that this should be reworked.

I don't know how much more of this season I'll be playing. I think I can hit tower 135 once I finish getting 150 glyphs and get a decent run. To go further, I'll have to alter my build but feels daunting as it'll require re-grinding transfigs etc so we'll see.

Currently rank 4 on SSF ladder, started using disobedience two days ago (it is awesome if short lived!) but as of this afternoon all my Disobedience imprints are ... not obeying:
- Doesn't work in dungeons, open world, pits, even against training dummies
- No buff shows up, even if I manually cast iron maiden (instead of rune proc)
- I'm essentially wearing a yellow cause I have no aspect.

Has anyone ever encountered something like this? It is extremely frustrating. I've tried restarting, disabling cross play, crafted a new piece using an oboled chest, imprinted something else and reapplied, still nothing.

Any help appreciated! Was looking forward to getting rank 1 again (to, of course, lose it by the morning) tonight but cant really do anything without a working aspect.

*Edit*: Also doesn't work on last season's necro on eternal : (