Another day another bad 2021 post. What kind of high level math would you apply to diablo 2 to determine what the best infinity base is o high and mighty

i wouldn't make any futile attempts to mathematically solve the base issue to begin with

using avg dmg, aps and cb % to calculate damage output only works when your merc is attacking without interuption, on a particular mob in a particular setting.

attack windups, fhr animation (both the merc's and the mob's), mob types and density etc all factor into your merc's damage output and survivability.

these factors that are unaccounted for are why people tend to go with higher aps rather than higher avg dmg, say a thresher instead of a ca, even though on paper a ca has a higher damage output.

it's also why people prefer forti to treachery in most cases, even though they're mathematically similar in their efficiency. calculations simply fail to take into account that treachery mercs die all the time while forti mercs don't.

now explain why im wrong you brainiac. rick avatar and a prideful 06' joindate, you've got this, right?

This post was edited by Dolphy on Jun 23 2022 07:39am

So your solution is to just not try lmao. Very cool man, thank you for offering nothing useful to the conversation.

Attack windup of 4 frames vs 5 frames whoaaaaaaaaaaa ya man that's a great reason to lose 2000dps. Fhr animation for a merc? A static variable that doesnt change across any of these builds? Okay lol... And Fhr for a mob? Something LESS likely to occur if you have lower damage per hit? Okay... They tend to go with thresher instead of CA because dbrunski said so - and no other reason. His main claim is that CB makes a faster weapon amazingly better but the math doesnt check out on that in p1 games. Fortitude has nothing to do with this conversation. You bringing it up is a poor attempt at a "gotcha" when the autist who claimed that treachery > fort used shitty math and only proved it's slightly better under extremely specific circumstances (lvl 35+ conc aura)

This post was edited by BrianPeppers on Jun 23 2022 08:50am

There is a lot to discuss here.

1. Topic was not about forti vs treachery, but let us adress that first:
It is true that in special case, such as decrepify treachery can have higher dps, but in general fortitude has 10...50% higher damage output and around 250...300% higher survavibility against phyiscal attacks depending on helm and armor base used. In fact the difference is so big that players even without calculating anything, only by experience correctly assume, that forti is much better. Mercenary dies 95% of the time against physical attacks. The remaining 5% is conviction pack or bugged hydras, those are dangerous, but doesn't happen enough times to be considered when deciding what armor to use.
I am not sure what calculation or what math resulted in that or who said that calculations fail? They don't fail here and never do actually. With fortitude your merc has simply almost 3 times effective hp (even with fade included) and ~ 1.1 or 1.5 times more damage than treachery. And it is the better armor to choose 95% of the time. Who told you something else? Or where did you read calculation that says otherwise, that they would have similar efficiency? Math is not "futile" there might be people who are bad at estimating stuff, or bad at math in general and end up with the wrong result, or just dont understand the result. Again, it might be surprising to some that treachery merc dies, but forti merc does not? Not sure why, simple math can prove the 3 times EHP. At this point I am interested who told you the wrong info about this.

2. It is not true that those things were "not accounted for". They were considered, and correctly assumed not to have effect on the result. Or minimal effect, lets take a look at your list:
attack windup: you don't get fhrd in pvm. There is not a single type of elemental attack that puts a normally built character in fhr animation. Physical damage can do that, but even only that in special cases, such as aura + amp + crit together, or crit + amp + extr strong minion together. Generally it can be estimated not to happen. Same is true for merc, so you don't need to consider attack windup.
fhr: same as above.
mob density: doesn't matter for damage, unless you want to consider the chain lightning proc. Which causes maybe 0.000000001% difference. So this can be ignored.
mob types: your are correct here. Merc is mostly important to kill stuff that is immune to your element. That is why it is considered for unique mobs. Both in player 1 and player 8. Results are not that different anyway for p1 and p8. I don't really care how long it takes to kill the less important white mobs. The most frequently occuring case is considered. That is how one should choose your weapon base. A summon necro ganging up on baal with his skeleton army doesn't occur often so I don't calculate it. It would be too much data that is useless to most people.

Nice calculations. Ty for this!

For my chaos java in Baalruns the most important thing is, that my runs are not slower than x. Therefore they can last longer if I have a unlucky run.

Can you do the same for the weapons minimum damage? Or if you have some math skills the percentile 1 or 0.1 of unlucky damage rolls that could occur. This would narrow it down for me, because I still think mancatcher is the right base for me.