Wiki: DD Spells (in General)

From the wiki: "Since damage is spread equally among targets, if less than 5 targets are present, per-minion damage will be correspondingly greater."

Now, granted, I wrote that. However, I just copied it from other text and reformatted it. I just verified today that it isn't true. I have two minions that have equal magical resistance -- none. I used a familiar and a minion with no magical AC. I went up against an enemy tossing out a fireball along with a DM powerful enough to cancel out my protection spells (TestF1, fittingly enough). (And yes, for this test, I unequipped the elven gear that is now on my enchanter). The result is that there were wildly differing damage values between the minions, sometimes as much as 50%. Further, I saw in my testing instances where the front minion (the familiar) took more damage than the rear minion as well as instances where it took less damage. There was no consistency in the damage values that I could see.

Where did this misconception originate? Is there any validity that I am missing?

To clarify: the part that isn't true is the first phrase dictating that damage is spread equally.

there is a random factor to consider

Don't forget that any +'s to your armor will help to nullify the damage done by any magical attacks, and since your other minions have some +'s and your familiar none, they will have a slightly greater resistance.

All the DD spells are very variable in the damage the can do.

IE my mage has about a 100 AC and when I go vs Son of Lorhar his FB can do anywhere from 200k to 550k damage a round when I have just 2 minions left.

There's a very high factor of randomness in the damage output, but it should average out to be about the same damage spread.

I'm assuming you were only talking about the "Since damage is spread equally among targets..." part, since the other part is arguably noticeable to any mage and/or target.

The base damage is spread evenly, then the random factor is applied individually.

In CB1, FB would do a little more damage for each minion it didn't have to hit. Gah, that makes little sense GL...

OK, facing 4 minions, FB might do 100K to each for 400K total. When facing a single minion, FB would do 450K instead of 400K.

I'm not sure if CoC was the same, or if this has changed for CB2.

th00p: Reread my post. I was dealing with two minions that had zero magical damage reduction (ie, no pluses to armor).

Borderliner: What is this base damage and how is it determined?

NS, as far as I can remember, back in CB1 (before the massive changes to DD damage in CB2) to a single target, FB did a little over 1/2 it's level, and MM a little under 1/2.

But that's changed a lot here. :)

46.42% of the MM level is the maximum damage of magic missile. Or, to be more accurate, it's the value attained when reversing the AMF equation thusly:

D = Damage reflected in melee combat
A = The percentage for which AMF casts
X = Unknown DD effect

X=(40)*D/A

Now, according to the wiki, that should be the maximum effect, the same as the number in parenthses next to your spell level. If DD spell damage is some base value multiplied by a percentage in some range, I fail to see how the maximum effect could be the base. It seems to me that the base should be some percentage of the maximum, which is then modified by a percentage range. This would unneccessary effort, however, and simplicity tells us that damage calculated should just be a random percentage of the maximum in some range from X to 100%.

So again, why the statement that multi-target spells distribute damage equally, when this is clearly not the case? I am presently unable to understand this. From what I can tell, each targetted minion receives his own calculated damage of the form 1/N * X1 * M where N is the number of targetted minions, M is the maximum effect, X1 is some random value between X and 100%.

Nowhere do I see that it is 1/N * B + X2*(M-B) where B is the "base" value defined as some percentage of M, and X2 is some random percentage between X and 100%. And even if it were, this would reduce to my equation above, thus making the sentiment that any amount of damage "is spread equally" somewhat erroneous.