An in depth look at how the Luck stat affects the bleed mechanic in Dark Souls 3 and what it means to Bleed Builds.

Get Dark Souls 3 here: [ Ссылка ]

Bleed Builds are a popular play style in Dark Souls 3, and Luck is the key attribute tied to the bleed mechanic. I found plenty of posts of people boasting how OP their luck-based bleed build was but I never found any tests or data to support this claim. How exactly does luck affect bleed? Let's take a look.

Weapons that do Bleed Damage have a Bleed Effect Strength. Your target, whether it is an in game enemy or another player, has a Bleed Defense Value. Once the bleed build up overcomes the defense value the bleed damage kicks in. Essentially, luck governs a weapon's Bleed Effect Strength, and the higher its value the quicker you inflict bleed damage.

I wanted to test the correlation between the Luck stat and bleed damage. For my experiments I used a Bandit's Knife and The Barbed Straight Sword. Other weapons, such as the Warden's Twinblades, are more efficient at inducing bleed, but the Bandit's Knife and Barbed Sword have consistent, controlled swings making them perfect test subjects.

I upgraded both weapons to +10 but did not infuse them with any gems to be sure that Luck was the only variable in damage calculation. I tested both weapons at Luck level 10, 25, 40, 60, and 99. I tried the same tests again with Carthus Rouge and dumped my findings into a great big spreadsheet. This is what I found:
Luck ONLY increases a weapon's Bleed Effect Strength; it has no correlation to the bleed damage inflicted. Bleed damage itself is a percentage of the target's Max Health. Situational adjustments are made from there but Luck is not a factor.

I was disappointed to find how little Luck actually affected the bleed mechanic. The Bandit's Knife +10 with luck at 10 has a Bleed Strength of 34. It only increases to 40 at luck 99. The Barbed Sword saw a bigger jump from 34 up to 43. That's an increase of over 26%; a statistically relevant value but one with only marginal practical use.

At 10 Luck it took 10 hits with the Bandit's Knife to induce bleeding on my test dummy. At 99 Luck it took 8 hits. 89 levels of luck only reduced the hits needed by 2. Doing the same test with the Barbed Sword took 11 hits at 10 luck and 8 hits at 99 luck. Both tests resulted in a flat 413 points of bleed damage.

Introducing Carthus Rouge into the mix made the testing a lot more interesting. Bleeding was achieved roughly twice as fast and increased bleed damage from 413 up to 463 in this test. The addition of Carthus Rouge almost completely negated any levels I poured into the Luck stat. At 10 luck, both the Bandit's Knife and Barbed Sword caused bleeding in 5 hits. Maxing out luck only reduced it to 4.

I found a few other interesting tidbits about while testing. A plain Dagger with no reinforcement, buffed with Carthus Rouge will do the exact same amount of Bleed Damage at luck 10 as a Rouge buffed Hollow Barbed Straight Sword +10 at 99 luck. You probably knew that already, or at least figured it out by my earlier test results. But did you know that Carthus Rouge actually scales with the Luck stat? I figured this out by buffing a completely stock dagger and testing it at luck 10, 40, and 99. At level 99 it took 3 fewer hits to inflict bleed damage than at 10. I was pretty surprised to find that out.

I did some quick testing with Blood Gem infusion too. This upgrade will increase a weapon's bleed damage by as much as 150 points for a +10 weapon. But its decreased damage output and inability to be buffed with Carthus Rouge make a blood infusion a novelty option at best.

In conclusion, dumping levels into Luck isn't as wise of an investment for a Bleed Build as placing them in other areas. Remember the term "opportunity costs" from school? Placing dozens of levels into luck might save you one or two hits at best but at the cost of increased health, stamina, equipment load, etc.
What about Hollow infusion? That scales with Luck. That's true. And +10 hollow weapon on a high level character tends to outperform other infusions. But the D level scaling with luck means you're going to have to make some serious sacrifices if you plan to stick to the generally agreed upon 120 level cap.

Whether you find my results useful or not I think we can all agree on one thing: Carthus Rouge is a beautiful thing.


For the latest GWTG news please check out my site: [ Ссылка ]
Like Game With The Guys on Facebook: [ Ссылка ]
Follow Game With The Guys on Twitter: [ Ссылка ]
Watch the Game With The Guys live on Twitch: [ Ссылка ]
To visit my t-shirt site, click this link: [ Ссылка ]

свернуть