Talk:Buzz Kill/@comment-71.223.43.47-20150106235632

Something interesting to note: The way we've calculated for elemental damage is to take the sum of your weapons damage (puncture, impact, slash, and any native elemental damage) to get your base damage, and then multiply that number by the effects of a damage mod card. Note that mods like Pressure Point increase your base damage first, so you would apply Pressure Point first, and then multiply something like Molten Impact after.

As an example, Dragon Nikana has a base damage of;

Impact: 4.3, Puncture: 8.4, Slash: 72.3, Total: 85.1

If we were then to add Molten Impact, which at max rank adds 90% Heat damage, we should expect the added heat damage to be (85.1*0.9), or 76.59. If we go into the game and add a maxed rank Molten Impact to a Dragon Nikana we can see that this checks out and the Heat Damage added is 76.5, with the .09 likely being cut off due to the way the UI displays information.

However, the Arsenal page at very least does not follow the same method of calculation for mods that increase the Impact, Puncture, or Slashing damage as it does mods that add elemental damage. A mod like Buzz Kill would take only the base Slashing damage into consideration when it is figuring out the final amount of damage, and completely ignores the Puncture and Impact portions.

If Buzz Kill worked like elemental mods we would expect to add up the Impact, Puncture, and Slashing base damages of Dragon Nikana to get 85.1, multiply that by 1.2 (120%) and get an added 102.12 Slash damage. We would expect to see our Slash damage increased from 72.3 to 174.42 in the Arsenal, but this is not the case.

If we go into the Arsenal page and equip Buzz Kill to Dragon Nikana we'll see our Slash damage increase from 72.3 to 159.0 damage. This is the number we would expect to get if instead of taking all the base damage into consideration, Buzz Kill was instead only increasing the base *Slash* damage of the weapon. So instead of a base of 85.1, we would be working with a base of 76.5, which seems to check out as (72.3 * 1.2) = 86.76, which when added to our base Slashing damage is a total of 159.06 slashing damage.

This is significant as it means that mods like Buzz Kill are only really effective on weapons that already have innately high damage in the category that mod increases; In this example the damage Dragon Nikana deals is mostly Slash, meaning that Buzz Kill can add quite a lot of Slashing damage to the weapon. However, if you took a weapon that has relatively little base Slash damage you would see little gain from combining it with something like Buzz Kill.

I think most people already *knew* this, but as far as I know the exact math concerning this isn't detailed anywhere, and it's nice to know mechanically how these things work. It's possible, of course, that the Arsenal page is simply wrong in the feedback of its' information, but given that I've never been terribly impressed with Buzz Kill on anything but slashing weapons I would kind of doubt that.