Does DarkFire still proc? (drow racial ability)

kieranmtorn

I was reviewing ACT parses for a number of my Drow characters, and as far as I can tell, it never proc's....
Any contrary or confirming information?

kieranmtorn

I may have answered my own question in the past, it doesn't show up in ACT, but only in the buff to damage effectiveness. Sigh. Makes it hard to test/quantify.

thefabricant

It definitely procs. It also stacks with itself and seems to have no upper limit on the number of stacks of darkfire you can achieve. My personal record when testing is 6 stacks of darkfire, it provides a 5% dps boost per stack.

kieranmtorn

Unfortunately since I can't see the log entries, I can tell what proc's it. Was hoping to determine on my 2 Drow what would proc it, since it would change my builds for my GWF & one of my CW's.

romotheone

The chance and the duration are both really low. You need to deal damage as quickly as possible to be able to use it effectively. It can be quite OP with the right, really-fast-hitting builds. I wouldn't use it for a GWF however, you cannot deal damage quickly enough.

sangrine

On preview, I recently tested darkfire (on target dummies) with a MoF renegade CW, without a weapon enchantment.
Log data shows damage is +5%. never more.
I am trying to decide whether or not to become a Drow. 1500 zen is not cheap.
currently a Tiefling with trans dread.

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Drow
Darkfire: You have 5% chance when attacking a foe to apply Darkfire for 4 seconds, reducing its Defense by 10%. This debuff does not stack, so if there are multiple Drow in a party, only one debuff is applied to any given foe; however, more than one foe can be affected by Darkfire.

thefabricant

sangrine said:

On preview, I recently tested darkfire (on target dummies) with a MoF renegade CW, without a weapon enchantment.
Log data shows damage is +5%. never more.
I am trying to decide whether or not to become a Drow. 1500 zen is not cheap.
currently a Tiefling with trans dread.

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Drow
Darkfire: You have 5% chance when attacking a foe to apply Darkfire for 4 seconds, reducing its Defense by 10%. This debuff does not stack, so if there are multiple Drow in a party, only one debuff is applied to any given foe; however, more than one foe can be affected by Darkfire.

It does stack, so that article is wrong. If you want I can provide act parses with 10, 15 and 20% effectiveness which was applied only by darkfire.

sangrine

Why would I want to see your ACT parses?
I tested it myself. 5% damage buff in my tests, based on looking at actual raw log data, not looking at parsed data.
Look at the raw data.

Edit: when testing on a character without feats/boons, I sometimes see +10% damage buff.
But yesterday, when I tested on a fully built character, I never saw more than +5% damage buff.
Will do more testing.

Edit: After selecting all feats/boons (to MoF renegade) and doing more testing, +10% damage buff is seen in the log data.
I can't explain why yesterday, I only saw +5% damage. Maybe the respec changed something.

Edit: I am fully respeeced now. Did quick test. Look at log data. Very first damage I inspect in the log data shows +30% damage buff (20% swatch of destruction + 10% darkfire). Very strange that yesterday, I never saw more than 5% darkfire dps buff because I tested it at least one hour. And today, after only 30sec of testing, I see 2 darkfire stacks (+10% damage) today.

Edit: after a few more minutes of testing, in the log data, I see +35% damage (+20% swath of destruction, and presumably 3 stacks of darkfire). Must have been something wrong with my character yesterday because today darkfire appears to be stacking, and I'm not using a weapon enchantment (testing on dummies on preview server). class features : chilling presence + swath of destruction.

thefabricant

sangrine said:

Why would I want to see your ACT parses?
I tested it myself. 5% damage buff in my tests, based on looking at actual raw log data, not looking at parsed data.
Look at the raw data.

Edit: when testing on a character without feats/boons, I sometimes see +10% damage buff.
But yesterday, when I tested on a fully built character, I never saw more than +5% damage buff.
Will do more testing.

Edit: After selecting all feats/boons (to MoF renegade) and doing more testing, +10% damage buff is seen in the log data.
I can't explain why yesterday, I only saw +5% damage. Maybe the respec changed something.

Edit: I am fully respeeced now. Did quick test. Look at log data. Very first damage I inspect in the log data shows +30% damage buff (20% swatch of destruction + 10% darkfire). Very strange that yesterday, I never saw more than 5% darkfire dps buff because I tested it at least one hour. And today, after only 30sec of testing, I see 2 darkfire stacks (+10% damage) today.

Edit: after a few more minutes of testing, in the log data, I see +35% damage (+20% swath of destruction, and presumably 3 stacks of darkfire). Must have been something wrong with my character yesterday because today darkfire appears to be stacking, and I'm not using a weapon enchantment (testing on dummies on preview server). class features : chilling presence + swath of destruction.

An easy way to make it stack is run MoF thaum with points in abyss, then use critical conflagration + CP and a bilethorn enchant. The only effectiveness buff at that point should be from darkfire and with all the dots (especially if you still use the elol set) you should see darkfire stacking frequently. It is the icon that looks like a purple spider. You can try it on preview, it becomes even easier if you use dot companions. (example, death slaad)

Remember, that wiki article was written by a player and not a dev, in this case, the wiki article is wrong.

nathan

Thinking of switching to drow from dun elf for this reason ( the stacking debuff ). I know their base stats are a bit dufferent, not sure if I'll notice the AP gain loss. Thoughts ??

nathan

From sun*

nathan

Bump. Anyone with any thoughts about viability of switching to drow from sun elf for the stacking debuff as a ss thaum / oppressor ?

thefabricant

The best debuff CWs I know are drow. If you want to go pure dps, its not the best choice, but there is nothing wrong with going drow for the debuff.

nathan

Is the DPS problem just an issue because of the differences in ability point allocation ? You had mentioned seeing a drow with multiple stacks of the debuff, surely that might offset the difference between it and like a sun elf ?

kieranmtorn

It should work better for your CW that for my GWF, with the mechanical disadvantage of being GWF, it basically compensates for not being 1/2 Orc. I may actually come out ahead depending on the what can actually proc the dark fire. The CW's probably have the advantage for the checks to proc it from the DoT's & proc abilities. I can only manage about 3 ticks of damage a round per target in my weapon reach (deep gash, slam, weapon damage), hopefully it's checking on each of the ticks.

nathan

It should check on each tick, everything else seems to. I would think it could be really powerful. Hesitant to spend the zen on a race reroll, I once turned my elf male warlock into a female half Orc and basically never played it again. Lol

kieranmtorn

I have 2 Drow characters (a GWF - played as 1 of 2 main characters, and a baby CW alt), so -

I did a quick test using my GWF on a test dummy using only Sure-Strike, no buffs, just letting the toon auto-attack. My base effectiveness should have been 106% (quirks of my build & transcentdant vorpal weapon), My actual effectiveness was 107.6 (Sure Strike). During this time:

Over a span of 448 seconds:
Sure Strike, 664 hits
Lostmauth, 587 hits
Deep Gash, 462 hits

I also tested using my MoF/Thaum (baby alt), with a expected effectiveness of about 102, and an actual effectiveness of about 104.8 (Magic Missile):
Magic Missle, 548 hits
Warped Magic, 128 hits
Dread, 292 hits (probably from the crits for weapon damage only on Magic Missle).

I had approximately 214 Sure Strike (111% effectiveness) hits buffed by Dark Fire. So for GWF, it doesn't proc off of Lostmauth or Deep Gash (grrr). For my baby MoF/Thaum, she only had 154 Magic Missiles buffed by Dark Fire. My guess from the numbers is that things that can't be buffed/crit won't proc dark fire, since it doesn't appear that Lostmauth, Deep Gash, or Warped Magic will proc it (and I'd assume that Slam/Creeping Frost/Assailant can't proc it either). As a side speculation, I would not be surprised if the `can't proc` group also fails to proc lifesteal.

Also from my data, it looks a 5% boost, not a 10% boost on proc'ing.

So your mileage may vary (given that this was a fairly casual test).