The tooltips are lying!

I don't know if this really counts as stating the bleeding obvious, but I'm going to throw a mathematical bent into things. Recently, I've been studying the wiki, looking at all this talk of 'damage multiplication', 'average DPS increases' and all of that stuff. The result is that the tooltips of abilities are highly misleading as to how much damage an ability is actually dealing. This is usually related to illusions, but isn't just those - lower base attack time is also a prime offender, since that's not immediately obvious from the tooltip.

Firstly... I'd like to award Coup de Grace the medal for ****tiest steroid of all time. I mean, it's an ult. It grants an average of +52.5% damage increase. This is actually >>less<< than Juggernaut's steroids. Blade Dance combined with his 1.4 BAT means a DPS increase of about 55%, and Jugg isn't clogging down his ultimate slot. Luckily, poor PA has Phantom Strike to fall back on, but... man. What a sad hero. Especially since the +50% damage isn't as noticeable since the hero doesn't even have high natural damage.

Now, let's get onto Mana Break. 64 mana burnt, 60% of which becomes damage. So an extra 38 physical damage per hit. Well... not really. Mana Break applies to illusions. +76 damage. Anti-Mage attacks 3 times a second. +76 damage. Each illusion attacks twice a second. Another +76. So it's actually an added 266 damage per second on a target with mana. Again, low BAT amplifies this meagre 38 to a huge extent, as does its illusion properties. Although Spectre and Desolate deal much more damage flat-out, her standard 1.7 BAT means that Anti-Mage possesses a MUCH scarier right click steroid - Desolate works out to roughly an added 325 DPS, without as much of the bashing that AM tends to do because, again, lower BAT, lower attack speed.

For the sake of analysing just how ******** Terrorblade's damage is, Metamorphosis doesn't give +80 damage. It gives +199 damage. Since illusions get the damage, you've got 120% base damage worth of illusions at your disposal, bumping it up to 176. Then, multiply by Terrorblade's BAT of 1.5. This grants an extra 13.3% damage, turning it to a grant total of 199.408. That's not damage per second, that's damage per hit.

I came to all of this after pondering how a Legion Commander with 200 duel damage still seems to have nowhere near as much damage as even a Lifestealer. Aside from the obvious Feast being a damn good counter to any tanky hero, LC herself included, Rage as a damage steroid and Feast as an attack speed steroid complement each other scarily well. What this basically says, is that the BAT nerf to Lifestealer was well-targeted, as it also reduced his bashing and lockdown opportunities since he attacks slower.

So the next time you're examining damage, be aware of one thing; tooltips are misleading. Don't trust them.

These tooltips are not actually lying though. It's more a "use your freaking brain" rant. Nobody to blame but yourself.

Unlike some *actual* lying tooltips like Cloak and Dagger saying that backstabs can't miss.