Talk:Artificer/@comment-36329773-20190524221454/@comment-24.177.36.27-20190603064911

Yes.

Short version: Artificer has the most damage out of anyone in the game. Glass doubles this. One or two glass solves your damage so you can invest entirely in defensive and movement items.

Long version: Artificer does not scale well with any of the strong damage items used by other characters. The only two items that are ideal for her are Armor piercing rounds, (which has its limitation of only working on bosses) and alien head which is a major damage boost. The reason for this is the burn damage on fire bolt and flamethrower. The burn damage is equal to the inital damage of the skill (basicaly, its more complex than that in reality) so fire bolt does 200% (although it is actually 220% and the description is wrong) and burns for 200%, total is 400%. If it crits, you do 400% + the same 200% burn, so total of 600%. Flamethrower does a 200% burn on half of its 22 100% damage hits (yes, the in game description is wrong again, ask the dataminers) A non crit does 2200% + 2200% burn, a crit does 4400% + 2200% burn. This makes crit half as valuable on those abilities. In addition, proc items also go off the part that can crit and not the burn. So you basically get half benefit from EVERY proc item in the game (except tri tip dagger, because that scales with base damage. But artificer hits slow so she can't take full advantage of it. It does make flamethrower hilariously good early on though, 9200% total)

Given those numbers, let's take a standard full combo and see how much of that combo is able to proc items. You lead with 5 fire bolts (1 recharges while you fire) and then do a fully charged nano bomb, followed by 3 fire bolts. Then you go into ice wall and with the power of everything working nice on paper you hit all 9 pillars on the same enemy. After that you do flamethrower and then 5 more fire bolts. You finish with another fully charged nano bomb and 3 more fire bolts. Now everything is on cooldown for a few seconds (you would fire 1 - 3 more fire bolts as they came back and then go to flamethrower, then back to nano normally, but we will stop counting before that because it doesn't matter)

Totals: 2 full charge nano bombs are 2400% + 440% (the shock will almost always hit before the main hit which is one reason crowbars aren't that good)

1 flamethrower: 2200% + 2200% burn

1 ice wall: 900% (this is best case, really you will only do this against beetle queens if they are in certain animations, or if the enemy bugs out and walks straight through all of the pillars)

16 fire bolts: 3200% + 3200% burn.

the total base damage is 9140% and the burn is 5400%. The total overall is 14540%.

Now, let's talk about glass specifically. Let's say you are allowed to have 10 white items of your choice alongside enough hooves and drinks to not need any more of them. You also have a choice to have glass or not.

Case 1: you get 10 crit glasses. That makes your total 23680. Not bad.

Case 2: You go for 7 tri tips and 3 AP rounds. That sits you at 26300% against normal enemies, and 36820% aganst bosses. Thats pretty good.

Case 3: You take 10 shield generators and glass. You do 29080% and get a 250 hp shield that regenerates fast, helping to alleviate the need for healing items.

Lets talk about the shield then, up until level 11-12 that shield + your halved base HP is more health than you would have had without glass. After that it is only ~17 less per level. That means if you find 1 shield generator for every two times you level  then glass hasn't even hurt you at all.

So why is the glass number so much higher than the crit number? They both double your damage right? Well yes, but glass doubles your burn damage too. Your burn is ~37% of your overall damage output and there are only two items in the entire game that can boost that part, glass and AP rounds.

It is also worth mentioning, that the first glass you pick up is the weakest one. Every glass after the first will take away half as much hp as the previous one, but gives you twice as much damage as the first.

This is easily explained as an example. You have 1000 hp, and you have one simple attack that does 200 damage to the enemies. The first glass will take away 500 hp and give you 200 more damage, ok. The second glass will take away 250 hp and give you 400 more damage on top of the 200 you got from the last glass and the 200 you started with. The glass after that one (third) will take away 125 hp, but give you yet another 800 damage.

Glass scales damage so fast that there is nothing else in the game that can even come close. The infamous 39 sticky bombs are beaten by just 6 glass. Sure, you have no health, but if you can have 39 stickies in your example I can have 39 shield generators in my example. That gives me 975 extra health and it can regenerate faster than your base hp can. And if that doesn't convince you, grab another glass and you are sitting just under three times the damage output of those stickies.

By the way, I did label this one the long version. If this is too long go back and read the short one instead.