That was the player. That said, I would argue that the player is not really doing anything wrong with their loadout. Rather, as has become very popular, they are taking advantage of some low-hanging flawed mechanics regarding skull damage.
Here’s what’s happening:
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Maximum damage reduction for any given damage type in-game currently is 80%. Therefore, with maximum damage reduction for that damage type, 20% of damage will be inflicted on the opponent.
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The amount of damage modifier needed to fully overcome that 80% damage resistance is [100% full damage / 20% damage received) = 500%.
Check: 500% damage modifier * 20% damage inflicted = 100% damage taken (aka full damage)
- Because the player already has 100% base damage output, only 400% more additional damage is needed to fully overcome maximum skull damage resistance. This takes the form of Critical Hit Damage Bonus.
So, how does one get 400% additional damage bonus from skulls? Quite easily, actually.
- One of the easiest ways to quickly boost crit damage is from stacking +Cleave attributes.
While Mythic +Strike attributes yield +8% bonus spell output:
Mythic +Cleave attributes add +80% crit damage output:
Therefore. +Cleave attributes are ten times more efficient for damage output than +Strike attributes
So, at 80% per +Cleave attribute, it only takes five of those to reach 400% crit damage bonus to fully negate maximum skull defenses. And that’s before Gear effects are applied.
- Gear: The two lowest hanging fruit pieces of Gear for making the most of skull damage for most players are Bloodfang Twinblade (for boosting crit chances) + Runic Wristband (for further boosting crit amount)
With the increase in the size of the gameboard in a previous update, it is very easy for the board to naturally contain significant numbers of the right colored gem to boost crit chances to close to (or reach) 100%.
Late game characters in Mythic gear easily field mono-color masteries in the thousands, resulting in several hundred percent additional crit damage being added from the gear effect from this piece alone.
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As a random example, here is a Shaman in PvP deploying such a build that I took some screen snips of today while typing this post:
Pre-Combat Opponent Crit Stats:
Turn 1 In-Combat Opponent Crit Stats after Twinblade and Wristband effects applied:
Quite intimidating for a healer class, and likely strong enough to one-shot me through maximum block at more than 1.5x base damage on a successful crit after 80% damage reduction is applied. As discussed and verified by multiple players above in this long thread, dedicated melee oriented classes can reach 1000% or higher with Critical Hit Damage Bonus.
And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg on the matter. There’s other gear/gear set bonuses that affects crit/crit chance, Mercs have a spell that boosts both, and so on.
The whole skull crit/crit damage mechanic needs an overhaul badly. As long as players can easily achieve enough crit hit chance to semi-reliably crit and enough crit damage modifer to overcome 80% skull damage reduction, there’s no real reason to run a spell build at all as skull damage is simply vastly more efficient right now even with the new Dragonking Axe in play to boost spell damage.
thank you for this detailed feedback