Elemental Damage Clarification, Making Legendary Drops More Noticeable, MF Article and More

Here is a blue post clarifying "+x% elemental" affixes.

Blizzard Tracker: August 31, 2012

Elemental Damage

The "+x% Elemental Damage" affix works by adding "x%" of your physical damage to your attack, in the form of the damage type listed. 

So, really basic example:
  • Your physical damage is 100, and the item adds +3% Fire damage.
  • You gain 3 extra damage to your attacks as Fire damage.


Things this takes into account:
  • Rings, mojos, orbs (etc) that have an "X-Y" damage affix (e.g. "1-2 Damage")
  • The base damage range of your weapon, before any elemental damage is added from the affix
  • +Min or +Max affixes on weapons

(Note: It doesn't benefit from "+X-Y Elemental Damage" affixes on weapons.)

We realize the current wording for this affix can be confusing, and it's something we'd like to make more clear in the future. If you have any suggestions for how this affix could be better worded, we're definitely interested in your suggestions. Just keep in mind that space is limited in item tooltips, and that whatever we use would need to be translated into all of our supported languages.

Source

Legendary Drops

Also, here is Blizzard on making legendary drops more noticeable.

We're definitely aware that Legendary item drops can be difficult to see against certain textures, and that this can sometimes cause players to miss those drops completely. 

While we'd like to avoid changing the actual color of the drops, we've been discussing a number of ways to make Legendary items on the ground more visible to the player. We've considered adding a new special sound, for example, having the location of the drop ping on the player's mini-map, and creating a unique FX effect that would appear underneath the item before it's picked up. 

We haven't settled on any one solution yet, but the issue is certainly something we want to address and improve on. I'll make sure the additional options you listed get passed on to our design team so they can be considered as well. :)

Source

Amazing Magic Find Write-Up

Someone over at Diablofans wrote a really great magic find article that includes lots of in depth statistics and sample sizes. You can check out the post here.

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, here is a list of the conclusions they draw in the post:
  • Magic find increases the class ("item-color" or rarity) of the gear found.
  • Magic find does not increase the number of items found (aka not effective on quantity).
  • Magic find does not increase the iLvl of the gear found. *The guaranteed rare drop from Nephalem Valor is an additional drop and it is possible to roll a legendary instead of rare.
  • The guaranteed rare drop from Nephalem Valor is applied to goblins as well.
  • Nephalem Valor is superior to magic find; in terms of maxing rare items found, it "devalues" the effect when compared to farming without the buff, but magic find is still an effective affix!
  • Early results indicate that MF does increase the number of affixes on rare items, however, the effect appears to be minimal and close to neglible for the standard elite drops. It does, however, appear to have a prominent effect on the NV rare drop.
  • Whether or not magic find affects the affix rolls themselves (aka not how many affixes you get, but how good the affix values turn out) is not investigated here, but there is no reason as of to suspect that magic find would increase the stat rolls.
  • The item drops in a predetermined sequence with each item dropped coming from a "slot". These slots have different chances to roll out a rare item, but only one of them (out of 4 gear slots without NV) seem to have the possibility to hit a NoDrop. The research mentioned here is very early, but is an important aspect if a complete picture of average drops is to be computed.
  • The items dropping from elite packs appear to be divided into "slots" that drop in a specific sequence. An elite pack has 4 of these slots and if 5xNV is effective a fifth is added. These slots have different chances to roll out a rare item: Gear slot 1 and 4 seem to be identical and have a base dropchance of around 10% for rare items, gear slot 2 and 3 seem to be related but have a very small chance to roll a rare item and gear slot 3 has a 50% chance to hit a NoDrop. Gear slot 5 (the NV slot) is always at least a 4-affix rare item.

Highest Hardcore Paragon Level Character Dies

The highest hardcore character died yesterday at paragon level 35.

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Inferno Diablo Stunlocked by 2 Monks

Check out this video of Diablo being stunlocked by 2 monks.



Description: Diablo only got to autoattack a few times and cast 1 (very short) bone prison the entire fight, as well as only summoning 1 wave of shadow clones. It's not a very fast kill, but it's fun and safe way to kill him.

Both of us were using the Sledge Fist legendary fist weapon (40%+ stun chance) as well as the standard thunderclap/sweeping winds build. For auras, my friend was using the transgression rune on mantra of retaliation (8% attack speed) while I used overawe. Unfortunately, you can't dual wield legendaries, so we both used a shield to maximize the stun proc. It will only proc on melee hits with itself, not with any other weapon while dual wielding or any abilities.

Sledge fist link: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/sledge-fist