DD often doing much less damage than its supposed to? (in General)

I guess "supposed to" is something only Jon can confirm.. but lets say going by the wiki standard.

Fireball: 820,666 (100,988)

a phantasm's Fireball hit Lift me up!'s familiar [68780], Lift me up! [72958] (total of 141,738 damage)

This is in round 1 (hoc) against an opponent with 11 AC on both mage and familiar (junction). However, that's 11 in base items, and +0 enchant so basically 0 effective AC versus DD. No ToE obviously. No prot. No AMF, nada...

Now, theoretically the *lowest* I should be hitting in round 1 should be

{ (effect*5) * .5 *.7 } / 2

the effect*5 representing my absolute max possible damage

the .5 representing the 50%-100% damage variation, so we're assuming the worst case scenario with .5

the .7 representing the 30% DD penalty in round 1

the 2 representing the # of enemy minions I'm firing at, so this will give us the individual damage dealt to each of them (with the worst case scenario)

This gives me 88,364 damage to each minion, or 176,728 total damage MINIMUM. (In my battle I did 141,738). This is roughly a 25% damage difference in what I've inflicted and what I *thought* was absolute minimum damage. I didn't even pick and choose this battle, I'm sure my damage even lower. So what's up?

This is even more harsh when compared to AMF which hits based off of 100% of that effect*5 every time the mage fires.

on that next to last sentence I meant to say "I'm sure my damage *could go even lower"

I've noticed that fireball damage is usually lower then what it *could* be. I never done any formulas and tests to check if I was right though.

It seems my damage variation in round 1 against that opponent is about 65k-130k instead of the expected 88k-176k per minion (2 minions). About a 35% damage difference from what the wiki theorizes.

Also I just checked and AMF does *FOR SURE* cause backlash exactly based on effect*5 (and accounts for DD penalties in ranged).

Were your results based on round 1 of range or round 1 of melee?

it was round 1 of range and he already took into account the 30% penalty for DD.

Interesting find.

Sutekh, Oddbird, and I did some testing on this a while ago. Basically, there is essentially a multi-minion penalty. Or, rather, a lack-of-multi-minion penalty. You only realize the full power of FB against 5 minions. With fewer minion, there's some penalty applied. I got a bunch of data on it, but I never finalized the results. I kind of forgot. Sorry.

A penalty above and beyond the "targeting" penalty (where the FB still spreads based on number of opposition at start of round, even if a previous minion has killed one or more opposing minions)?

I had forgotten about that...

Yeah, when Oddbird first brought it to your attention (I was saying that there was no penalty, oddbird claimed their was), your reply was something to the effect of: "If there isn't a penalty, then I'm missing out on a LOT of fireball!"

I could see if FB acted according to the # of minions at the start of a given round, which would cause a damage penalty if some any were killed in that specific round before FB takes its turn to fire... But that's definitely not the case here. Maybe there is a penalty for less than 5 minions? That seems quite harsh though...

I need to reindex my brain.

"Maybe there is a penalty for less than 5 minions? "

Seems like that's what I said :)

the damage done to N minions is less than 5/N * (damage done to 5 minions), yes