Most efficient charms for physical damage chars?

Convention Wisdom suggests the more +max damage, the better. And the most efficient being the grand charm variety.

But when trying to maximize the damage on one of my characters i found charms with more +stats (dex in the case of my RA - +6 dex compared to damage and AR) actually had a bigger impact.

So then is safeguarding the efficiency of your stat points better for your overall build than just adding damage?

If so, what would you think be the best charm layout?

Large charms: only sharp large charms of dex/strength i think should be considered. All other stats are less efficient than small or grand charms (i think)
Small charms: +20 life seems to be most efficient as the primary stat, 20 life = 10 stat points for sorcs, necro, druids; 6.5 for pally, amazon & assassins; and 5 for barbs. For secondary +all res is good, +3damage and ar is good too, +run/walk is important, +FHR also important…

Damn it’s complex… probably every build has different requirements.

Casters builds are so easy, skillers and res, done.

What charms do your physical characters use?

Nate2.0 wrote: 11 months ago

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every build has different requirements.
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This.

max/ar tends to be among the top choices and really the top choice for many phys builds but certainly not for all of them. As with everything else, exceptions apply.

Suffix gets even more complicated because you're ideally not looking at "raw dmg number" but at "clear speed" which means you not only have to weigh dmg vs atts but also vs survivability and even consider things like run speed as alternatives.

Ideal choice hence varies with build, other gear, playstyle, target farming zone/purpose and all that jazz.

So yeah..no one size fits all answer here.

Depends on how close to different benchmarks I am.

I realized recently on my tesladin that optimizing my damage charms for +life instead of +damage lost me about 15 max damage, which was only 1000 DPS

But that let me put 140 points in strength instead of vitality, which supposedly adds 8000 (or 8%) to my overall DPS.
I think it's noticeable in game--silly that I didn't think of this before

There aren't really many physical builds compared to casters and every one of them has different needs. For example, one can focus more on attack rating for a Fury Druid since he has greater life pool than most of the others. That applies to Barbarian, too. So str and ar charms with frw, fhr, res combination would be nice. Paladins, on the other hand, should go with +life versions but also mostly need dex to reach max block.

This variation list goes on but it's not that easy to find and stack proper charms so I mostly use what I think useful.

Dex and thus AR is needed/impactful as you level up. When you pass lvl 87 (I think) the gains drop significantly. Why? It's because of how % to hit formula works -- the major thing is correlation between cLVL (character level) and mLVL (monster level). The other part of that formula is ofc mAR (monster's attack rating) vs cDR (character's defense rating) and vice versa...

The accuracy is, essentially, your actual dmg you are doing (by affecting DPS significantly). There are also sweet spots for AR thus also Dex, it's often enough to keep it at about 75-80% hit chance and not invest waaaay too much points to achieve that 90+% (points you can put somewhere else but that highly depends on the class/build). Since I ran with some off-meta builds myself a lot lately, I would say don't go under 65% at any cost, it's just painfully slow and counter-productive to play it like that.
Hit chance hard

Cap is 95% tho, so keep that in mind as well.
Note: For ranged weapons Dex boosts dmg as well like Str does for melee, but I think I did some testing on maxroll and that it never was enough to outshine the actual dmg you get from +min/max. Now % wise as in instead of +ED %, maybe? Just because ranged weapons don't have that huge basic min/max dmg to begin with (well except for

Windforce I guess).

You can test and see how many AR you get from 1 point of Dex and compare that to nominal AR you can get straight from an item.
Very important note: AR you get from Dex is not affected by % to AR unlike nominal AR bonuses are (example: if you have 100 AR which all came from Dex and you have something that gives you 5% bonus to AR you will still have 100 AR unlike if you have 100 AR directly from the gear in that case you'll have 105 AR).

There are some exceptions to how and what is calculated as "physical attack" -- IIRC

Exploding Arrow is one such a case, when you fire it the actual arrow that flies and hits stuff takes the AR formula while the explosion after is considered a magic attack/spell thus always hits.

And building up Dex for defense (which is hard capped at 95% like everything else, max res being one as well) is kinda meh not only for "Natural Defense rating also improves by 1 for every 4 points of dexterity" but also because it doesn't work while you are running (walking works tho). On the other hand, raising Dex for max block (75%

Cap) is considered optimal for most builds (that have block component).

Don't also forget that CB (crushing blow) is halved for Ranged physical attacks in comparison to Melee ones. So if you are doing most of your dmg with the CB you will still need quite a bit of raw/pure dmg. On top of that, actually hitting with

Arrows/

Bolts and positioning is much more tricky then just swinging with your weapon close range where you'll almost always hit something (or have a chance to hit something at least)!

TL;DR
I would say Melee builds prefer 3/20/20 sc or whatever you can find in that manner (for example even 'just' max dmg + life are valuable and still useful) with a couple of charms that has bit of other useful stats (like FHR, FRW or all res), while Ranged care more about pure raw DPS so +min/max and AR (or alt. Dex if you prefer).

For my Fury Druid (L87) I dropped a Sharp Grand Charm (10 max 63 ar) a while ago, I'm using it.
According to https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/ni4dd036#1 if I replace it for a skiller, I would deal the same damage, but would have less base AR (12.4K -> 11.9K)