Guide Raw Spell Conversion Ratios

Any classbuilder worth their salt knows on some level that raw spell is more effective on Mage, and less effective on Archer. The question is, how much more effective? To answer that, we need to be able to convert raw spell values to percent damage values, and vice versa.

This turns out to be pretty simple actually. If we look at Motoki's Damage Calculation Guide (note this doesn't have some of the more recent fixes, such as the defense changes and the corrected raw spell display), in Section 6, we can see that raw spell and base damage are both multiplicative with the spell multiplier, so this can be cancelled. ID Boosts are all additive with each other so we can simply compare spell damage percent boosts and raw spell damage by using the base spell damage - that is, post-powder weapon base damage times the natural attack speed multiplier. Everything else has no effect on the relative efficacy of raw spell to spell percent.

* Note that this doesn't take into account class defense/Warscream, not that this is likely to matter since those don't apply in PvE. It also doesn't take into account elemental defense, but we don't really have good knowledge of elemental defense values for mobs - no one makes builds with exact elemental defense data in mind, usually we're just estimating those effects anyway.

Calculating a Raw Spell to Spell Percent Ratio

For example, consider Infused Hive Bow:

This weapon has 360-430 base neutral damage, and no elemental damage - by mousing over each damage value on Wynndata (only one, in this case), I can see the average base damage. Note that some weapons may have decimal average damage, in which case Wynndata will display a rounded value - keep that in mind when doing these types of calculations.

Infused Hive Bow has 5 powder slots - suppose we use exclusively Tier 6 Thunder powders. The only relevant factor here is the base damage addition, which for thunder powders is 5-45 thunder damage (average = 22.5 thunder damage). We can simply add these values to the base damage to get the post-powder damage.

395 + 5*22.5 = 507.5

Now we take this and multiply by the appropriate natural attack speed multiplier. Remember that +tier and -tier IDs don't have any effect on which multiplier is used.

Spoiler: Attack Speed Multipliers - from Motoki's Damage Calculation Guide

Super Fast: 4.3
Very Fast: 3.1
Fast: 2.5
Normal: 2.05
Slow: 1.5
Very Slow: 0.83
Super Slow: 0.51

507.5*2.5 = 1268.75

Effectively, what this means is that +100% spell damage is equivalent to +1268.75 raw spell damage for this particular weapon and powdering. Of course, that's not exactly the most useful way to think about this. I prefer to express the values in 100 raw spell equivalents - e.g. for full T6 thunder Hive Bow, +100 raw spell damage is equivalent to +7.88% spell damage. So, you can easily look at, say, Soul Signal, and see that its 300 raw spell (post-revamp) gives the equivalent of 23.4% damage boost on full T6 thunder Hive Bow.

You can run this calculation for yourself pretty easily, allowing for a more concrete way of determining just how effective raw spell damage is for a particular weapon.

* There is one edge case where this breaks down - if you have a net ID boost below -100%, obviously adding more % boost isn't going to do anything until your ID boost goes above -100%. The most obvious example is with Centipede, which effectively brings your raw spell to spell percent ratio to infinity, since your spell percent isn't going to do anything until it counters the -1000% spell damage on Centipede (which is almost always impossible). This can also apply to elemental damages with weapons like Return to Ether, which brings thunder damage below -100% - although, since ID boosts are additive, you'll still end up having above-zero ID boost on thunder damage on many typical builds.

Graph

Below, you can see a graph of 100 raw spell equivalents for a selection of major spell-oriented legendaries for each class, alongside (relevant) spell-oriented mythics. I also added a couple of illustrative Rare weapons. It's obvious from the graph that base damage, while important, doesn't automatically make a weapon good (e.g. Fog of Creation). The increasing difference as we go from bows to wands is to be expected, since the scale is on an inverse relationship (if you were to plot base damages time attack speed directly, you'd get a more linear relationship, though still likely a bit skewed due to powders).

Warning - this graph uses damage data from the now-canceled Elemental Revamp



Coming SoonTM, some interesting findings on EWF vs. TWA and how the characteristics of these archetypes could explain certain classbuilding phenomena.

 

Nice TED talk.
That's something intuitive I haven't seen explained so perfectly before. I should make a calculator for that.

 

Wow. Thank you for making this guide, this clears up a ton of stuff for me. Just as a clarification to make sure I understand what this is saying; the freedom I bought has very low spell damage raw (143 under maximum), but Freedom with thunder powders is affected by raw spell less than any other bow in the game? So it doesn't matter as much as Spell damage raw would on a Morrowind (as an example)?

 

Freedom has a lot of elemental damage, so Neutral % is more effective at amplifying all of them than on other bows. Adding 100 raw spell is less efficient than using neutral spell % on freedom. Basically, neutral spell % increases all your elemental and neutral spell damage. Neutral raw just adds a flat amount. Weapons with very high base elemental damage and/or diverse elemental damages benefit from neutral % more than raw spell. Weapons with very low base damage benefit from adding flat damage to their attacks.

 

Exactly. That 143 raw spell is relatively inconsequential on Freedom.

Edit: That said, it's more useful as a comparison for, say, the % spell versus raw spell on Singu or something, or for comparing different armors for a particular weapon.

 

Unless you need raw spell to pierce.

 

I'm sad I missed when this was posted
10/10

 

so i don't have to care bout raw spell while building cata right?

 

I wouldn't go quite so far as to say you don't have to care, but it's a lot less important that percent damages.

 

desperado between bonder and peaceful rest, very funny...
it's base damage is even higher than that of fatal, why so low?

 

The beta weapon had the wrong data. Somewhere, the real weapon data is floating around (Major posted it somewhere, possibly on classbuilds Discord).

 

https://www.wynndata.tk/ci/149838579
found it
muuuuuch more balanced

 

I'm back here cause i was wondering how you made that graph...i wanna make a bigger one :P

 

Heh... manually in Paint. Took me 2 hours or so.

 

I finally understand which ones is better spell raw or spell %