Force Pulse - Spell Damage, Max Magicka and Tooltip Damage

arowz · August 2015

Hi everyone, I'm working on maximizing the damage my spells do versus the amount of Spell Damage and Max Magicka I have. Right now, I'm at 2147 Spell Damage and 32,000 Max Magicka (with food + magelight + other passives etc).

My Force Pulse currently hits for 1677 Fire, 1677 Frost, 1677 Shock damage each cast. I noticed that adding 160 spell damage to bring me to 2147 Spell Damage did NOT translate into an overall 160 damage boost to the spell. I also noticed that back when I had under 1400 spell damage, when I added 50 spell damage my Force Pulse went up by 150 damage, that being 50 damage for each element.

So here's my questions:

What damage does your Force Pulse do (please provide spell damage and max magicka numbers)?
Am I in soft-cap land with this spell and nothing else will really boost its damage aside from champion points?
At what point does the Spell Damage actually soft cap?

Other tidbits I've discovered:

Entropy/Surge/Spell Power potions only add 20% to your SPELL DAMAGE, not the damage of the spell.
Empower (mage guild passive) and the Crystal Fragments proc each add 20% to the DAMAGE of the spell (or spells for empower). Thus, using entropy and then unleashing a procc'd crystal fragment will do 40% more damage, with the 20% boost from Entropy itself only giving you a boost to raw spell power, resulting in a much less than 20% overall damage boost, more like 5-10% total damage boost.

In the crystal fragment example, my Crystal Frags go from doing ~8,400 normal damage up to ~12900 damage in the tooltip, which is about a 55% boost.

Dracane · August 2015

You answered your own question.
You add 150 spell damage, and each element deals 50 more damage which is 150 more damage on my book.

And if you look at Surge and Entropy, the are suppose to raise your spell damage by 20%, SPELL DAMAGE, which is the number on your character cheat, it does not increase the damage of your abilities by 20%. So everything's fine here.
My forcepulse deals a bit over 2300 per element, so around 6900.

arowz · August 2015

How is your force pulse doing 2300 damage per element? Are you talking about with the 20% booster on? If not, what does your max magicka/spell damage look like?

Regarding the 150 spell damage, your response would be accurate if I didn't see myself gaining 150 damage to the spell only by adding 50 spell damage. This was back when I only had 1400 spell damage total, leading me to believe there's a soft cap involved.

In short - when I was at sub 1400 spell damage, +50 spell damage would add 150 total damage (50 per element).

At 1900s spell damage, when I added another 160 spell damage, I only saw it go up by in total around 150 damage.

Dracane · August 2015

The sad thing is, some spells indeed have a very weird cap

for example lightning splash and lightning form. Both take some weird and low percentages of the damage you add.

But force pulse increases as intended, only that the damage is split into 3.
2300 is with combat prayer

hahaha, I'm a sneaky one, right ? But even without, it's over 2000 per element.
Not sure what class and race you are, but always have to add a bit to force pulse. For example if you are High Elf, you have to add 4% to force pulses damage. because it's not shown on the tooltip