Blazing Arrow Demystified

There seems to be still some lack of understanding around Blazing Arrow and I decided to have some nerd fun and quantify the effect. What I found was somewhat surprising. Feel free to jump to the TL;DR Conclusions, I won't be offended.

Verifying Skills

Part 1 of this investigation consisted of throwing every archer skill imaginable at KunKun, everyone's favorite elemental immune mega-boss. If KunKun is hit with even a small amount of fire damage, he will show a "resist" to other people. This can't be used to verify metal skills but all other skills from Take Aim to Blood Vow were tested. For metal skills I found a lvl 1 mob and checked if I was able to inflict more damage than my maximum base damage plus the fixed metal damage from the skill. This was only possible with blazing.


1) All skills except Winged Pledge receive fire damage from blazing

Yes, Wingspan and Barrage get fire damage but poor Winged Pledge does not. I had previously thought Thunderous Blast did not receive fire damage since firing it appeared to be fully resisted by a metal-immune but I later learned this strategy is not reliable and could have false negatives.

Not satisfied I wanted to not only know when damage was added but also exactly how much.

Selecting the Test Subjuct

The ideal way to test blazing arrow would be to have a bow that does a fixed amount of damage and shoot at a physical immune lvl 0 mob with 0 fire resistance and tons of HP. This bow does not exist and neither does the mob b:cry

Ohh well, gotta make do with what you got and I settled on this little bugger:
Ancient Sea Dragon

I then proceeded to shoot hundreds and hundreds of arrows into the mighty beast both normal and with blazing. I transcribed my damage log and corrected for crits / physical resistance.

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/3076/blazing.jpg

Keep in mind I find this more enjoyable than actually playing the game at this point so don't judge too harshly.

Quantifying The Results

In my control trial I noticed a couple of normal arrows that fell slightly higher than my calculated maximum. In looking at the numbers it seems like his resistance was slightly lower than expected. Here I found a new result:

2) Physical resistance multiplier is rounded to the nearest percentage.


So if you resist 46% against a level 100 mob that's exactly 46%!!!! Ehh I guess noone's all that excited about that but it effected the calculations. I made sure to factor in this adjusted resistance in analyzing the second trial with blazing.

The difference between the average damage between the first trial and the second trial should be equal to the fire damage added by blazing. The accepted formula showed that it should be 13% higher than the control value but the actual result was only 9% higher, significantly less than expected b:angry

I guessed maybe some parts of the weapon attack formula did not apply. As a reminder:

weapon attack = attack from weapons + attack from ammo + attack from other equipment + your level

These values work exactly when factoring in damage added by things like spark, barb buff, and gloom. Maybe for blazing the ammo doesnt count? Maybe the level shouldn't be there? No matter what though the formula didn't quite make sense.

Finally I looked at the distribution of the damage and noticed something odd. Not only was the average fire damage added 490, this 490 added fire damage was consistent damage across all shots. No matter how much damage the bow actually did I got exactly 490 more damage.

3) The fire damage added by blazing arrow is a FIXED value no matter how much damage the attack does

Realizing I'm an Idiot

In preparing to figure out where this damage comes from I realized I was an idiot and came up with a much better way to measure fire damage. Ruffling around in my pockets I pulled out a genie with Expel and a pet Quilue. An expelled Quilue has physical immunity should only take fire damage from normal shots. For any archers that don't have a pet Quilue I highly recommend getting one as they make great target practice.

I equipped the genie on my Quilue and proceeded to open fire. Interestingly shooting the Quilue will still show "Resist" but checking the damage log reveals the fire damage, showing that "Resist" is not always true. This confirmed not only was the fire damage constant for any normal attack, but all skills produced the same damage as well. The value still didn't seem like anything obvious, until I started swapping gear.

Using a lvl 1 bow cut the fire damage to almost nothing while swapping out rings had no effect on fire damage. Finally an exact formula became apparent.


4) Fire Damage = (minimum attack of bow + maximum attack of bow) / 2 * Blazing Arrow Percent
or
Fire Damage = Average Damage from WEAPON ONLY * Blazing Arrow Percent

With this fomula I could exactly predict the fire damage.

Why this is Surprising

Blazing arrow does not use the same weapon attack as that used by sparks or skills like Take Aim. That weapon attack includes damage from rings, ammo, and attack charms. Blazing arrow only uses your bow (or other weapon) and comes up with a fixed damage from that. Bow damage includes base bow damage, damage from bow adds, and damage from garnet gems in bows, nothing else. This happens to explain why unarmed punches have no fire damage, no bow.

TL;DR Conclusions

1) All skills receive fire damage except for Winged Pledge
2) The fire damage added is a fixed value equal independent of skill damage
3) Fire Damage = Average Damage from weapon only * Blazing Arrow %
4) Physical and magical resistance amount is exactly rounded to the nearest percentage


Conjecture not tested

Frostblade and wood apothecary behave the same as Blazing.