Ravenswatch – Guide to Best Possible Damage (An Analysis on Consumables)

Best Possible Damage Guide

All credit goes to Beyond Blue!

Intro

Given that Storm Island is coming out soon and Ravenswatch runs will be getting longer, I figured that an in-depth analysis of damage-related consumables would be helpful for optimizing runs. As of this patch (Version 0.13.03), we currently have Four-Leaf Clover (+10% crit chance), Whetstone (+25% crit damage), and Silver Bullets (+5% damage).

The specific question to be answered with this post is: “What combination of damage-related consumables boosts damage the most”? Given that multiple consumables can already be stacked with Magic Mirror, Wishing Well, and Aladdin’s trait, this question becomes even more important as additional chapters are added.

Some of the background and assumptions of the study will be provided with key takeaways at the end of the post.

Study

To aid in the process of creating a damage formula and maximization function, the resource below (provided by Passtech) was used.

Ravenswatch Damage Formula

Given the assumption that every hero’s base critical chance is 5% (roughly estimated from a few test runs), the following maximization program was created. A base damage of 100 was used for the formula since damage increases are percentage-based and would apply in the same proportion using any other value.

It is important to note that the formula calculates average damage. With a base value of 100 and no other damage increases, average damage comes out to 102.5 since critical hits happen 5% of the time. With no consumables or upgrades, this particular attack will hit for 100 damage with a critical strike every 20 attacks or so, dealing 150 damage.

Maximization Formula

Using the formula above, all possible consumable combinations were calculated out to five items. Starting at one consumable item and progressing to five, average damage numbers for every combination were recorded as shown below.

Note: Green indicates a high-damage combination and red indicates a combination of consumables that provides lackluster damage on average compared to other possible combinations. Combinations are denoted as #a#b#c representing the number of consumables of each type. The letter “a” represents Silver Bullets, “b” Whetstones, and “c” Four-Leaf Clovers. A format of 2a0b2c means that the player has two Silver Bullets and two Four-Leaf Clovers.

Study Results

Key Takeaways

• Combining consumables generally provides higher average damage than stacking one type of consumable. Getting a few Silver Bullets (damage) and Four-Leaf Clovers (crit chance) or going for a combination of Clovers and Whetstones (crit damage) provides more long-term damage than just stacking Silver Bullets or just Clovers.
• Never get Whetstones (crit damage) without having Four-Leaf Clovers (crit chance). Builds that had only Whetstones or a combination of Whestones and Silver Bullets (damage) consistently had the lowest average damage.
• Get 2 Four-Leaf Clovers (crit chance) before going for any Whetstones (crit damage). From the study, it seems that increases to critical damage don’t begin to impact damage output until a critical chance threshold of 20-25%. In addition to this, it appears that following a trend of obtaining 2 Four-Leaf Clovers and then 1 Whetstone provides the best critical damage build (ex. Clover -> Clover -> Whetstone -> Clover -> Clover -> Whetstone).
• The more damage-related consumables you stack, the better crit builds become. Starting at 3 damage-related consumables, crit builds begin to outscale builds with Silver Bullets (damage). As an example (and using a base damage of 100), a build of 4 Silver Bullets will deal 123 damage on average, while a build of 2 Clovers and 2 Whetstones will deal 125 damage and a build of 3 Clovers and 1 Whetstone will deal 126 damage.