The Iron Maiden skill description is…lacking.
Gain Thorns.
How much thorns? What exactly does this passive do?
Diablo – What does Iron Maiden do
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Related Solutions
Those numbers are the levels that passive skills will unlock at. So, you will unlock new slots at levels 10, 20, and 30.
There are a maximum of three passive skills that can be active at any one time. Which skill you use does not matter; each slot provides the same bonuses. Be aware that not all passive skills will be available until level 60, so you can continue to mix and match which skills you want.
The truth about these numbers is much more mundane. Simply put, the way the abilities are coded, all of the green numbers are variables.
For Runes
Runes used to have quality levels, with each successive level of rune increasing the efficacy of the skill. This is why runes like Arcane Torrent's Cascade list "a 100% chance", instead of saying "whenever" or "always" -- if you used a lower level rune, it wouldn't be a 100% chance.
For Abilities and Passives
For abilities, the thinking is mostly the same, though the rationale is different. Essentially, by designing the abilities in the way that they did, they've made it very easy to tweak and balance the individual abilities against each other.
Consider, if you will, Bolas Shot.
Notice which values are in green: The hatred generaiton, the delay, the initial damage, the splash damage, and the splash range. Now imagine that Blizzard determines bolas shot to be horribly, horribly overpowered. They have to nerf it. What do they change? Well, because of the way they built the game, they already have 5 "knobs" to tweak in an attempt to better balance it - the five variables in green. Even when one of the green values isn't affected by any of the five runes, it's still useful as a tuning mechanism.
This happened in beta all the time - the balancing patch notes would always tweak the green values, and leave the rest of the ability untouched.
There is also a subclass of skills and abilities which have the green text because they scale with level.
Most healing abilities are this way. In these cases, the text is green to signify that the value is not constant (because, again, everything in green is a variable), and is used instead of listing a formula (which would be constant, but would be bothersome to calculate manually each time it changed).
Even here, the underlying formula can be changed, with the same results as tweaking the formula in one of the non-scaling abilities above.
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Best Answer
As of patch 2.0.5.
Pre patch 2.0.5 information.
The passive gives you a static amount of thorns damage based on your current level and difficult level. You can't unlock Iron Maiden until level 50. And you can't unlock a passive slot until level 10.
Here is what i have so far:
Assuming level 70. And assuming a base value of thorns 6102 at normal level and level 70.
You can multiply that base value by the Monster Health % gained from the increase in difficulty level. And you will get numbers that are VERY close to the numbers that show up on the passive for each of those difficulty levels. The "calculated value" column in my picture is
=6102*monsterHealth. Difference is just theactual value - calculated value.Here are my numbers:
At level 70 the passive says the following for each difficulty level: