Damage bonuses, does the implementation match the notation?

[Jon of the Wired]

So, I've noticed that there's two different notations for damage bonuses. Some damage bonuses (like the bonus from Might, or Burning Lash) are written as "+N% Damage" (e.g. +20% Damage, +50% Damage) and others (like the bonus from weapon quality and many talents and abilities) are written as "xN Damage" (e.g. x1.2 Damage, x2.0 Damage).

 

The first notation implies the bonus is additive and the second implies it's multiplicative, which has a significant impact on what the bonus means. Are there really two different kinds of damage bonuses, one additive and the other multiplicative? If so, how are they applied (there's a few different possibilities, each of which would produce different final damage totals)? If not, I guess that means that all of the instances of the "xN Damage" are wrong, and should be "+((N-1)*100)% Damage"? (If that's the case, is there a bug open to have that corrected?)

[Matt516]

I'd be very interested in knowing this as well. I know they switched around from multiplicative to additive and back during the Beta, and I have no idea what they eventually ended up with. Notation would indeed suggest that the +% boni (including the one from Might) are additive (with base damage as the reference point, I assume?), and the x1.X boni are multiplicative. What order these are applied in is a mystery.

[illathid]

IIRC all damage bonuses are additive (as they should be). However, for whatever reason all the bonuses are displayed as x1.5, etc.

[Matt516]

Not all are displayed that way though - that's the confusing thing. The Might bonus, Lash enchantments, etc - are all displayed the other way.

[taek]

There are definitely some UI display errors.

 

I believe one example (unless the patch fixed it) was that as a Cipher if you picked up both 1.2 damage whip talents, your char sheet said you were doing x2.4 damage (1.2 + 1.2), but in combat it felt more like 1.4 or 1.44.

[endruwiggin]

Damaging displayed as x1.15 while fire enchantment displayed as 25% or something like that.

Makes me think that when its displayed as x1.15 it enhance the original damage, while +25% means it don't enhance the damage itself but add another type of damage to the calculation.

Maybe its just semantics and maybe not, im not 100% (or 1.00 !!!) sure