Area Damage

Area Damage via Paragon points.

Area Damage (also called Splash Damage) is a 20% chance of all attacks dealing X% damage to nearby enemies. This means that every time a character hits an enemy, all nearby enemies have a 20% chance of taking some % of the base attack damage.

The likelihood of Area Damage can not be increased above 20%. What can be boosted, by Paragon Points and by item affixes, is the % of damage dealt per splash. This can be raised up to 50% (1% per point) by Paragon Points, and by 5-20% per item affix. Area Damage affixes can be found on many items, including weapons, rings, amulets, gloves, shoulders, and off-hand items (quivers, mojos, sources).

Splash Damage Utility

This property seems appealing to many players, but it's not considered very valuable by those with experience using it. It's not useless and it triggers very often; characters with fast attacks against large groups of enemies will score thousands of Area Damage procs in even a short game, and all that damage will add up to a perceptible impact. Every hit checks Splash Damage against everything in range, thus a single attack that hit 10 enemies in a cluster would deal the normal hit damage to all of them, and also (in theory) run a Area Damage check from each against all the other. That's 10 x 9 = 900 Area Damage checks, and at 20% hit rate that's approximately 180 Splash Damage hits.

The limiting factor is that critical damage is not incorporated into the Splash Damage, thus all splashes are fairly small amounts of damage, compared to the +300% and higher critical hit damage most end game characters are dealing. As currently utilized, Splash Damage is not considered powerful enough to base character strategy around.

For a hypothetical example, a skill like Sweeping Wind that deals 20% damage 100% of the time is equivalent in damage output to 100% Splash Damage that hits 20% of the time, and:

1. Achieving 100% Area Damage requires a lot of gear + Paragon Points
2. Sweeping Wind and other such skills Crit damage, boosting the damage 4x or 5x for well-geared characters.

That said, some players are fans of the property and swear by it. It's possible that builds or play styles will be found that utilize high Splash Damage very effectively, especially if uncommon Reaper of Souls legendary items add unknown bonuses to the property.

Area Damage display.