Damage for Dummies

[Belatsunat]

A very informative read. One detail seems to be missing so far, though:

How does the magic/fire damage of a HoX factor into the damage formula of its combos (Burn to Death, Hell Strikes, Molten Steel Slash, Pillar of Infernal Flame, ...)?

[Gaerlin]

From original post:

Specific CR can be either types of magic damage or weapon types. So CR(dagger) will only increase your dps when using daggers and CR(cold) will add cold damage to your melee hits (which will ignore enemy's armor and be stopped by cold protection instead).

How can this be verified? With a weapon with +Combat Rating (Fire) eqipped, I don't see any fire damage being dealt in my combat log, just regular slashing damage. This was tested with white hits only.

My understanding of +Combat Rating (Fire/Electrical/Holy/Unholy/Cold) was that is increases the DPS of combos that inherently do that type of damage. For example, PoIF for a HoX. However, that doesn't really make sense either since there are no combos that do cold or electrical damage that I can find.

I would be interested in seeing samples of combat logs that show fire/electrical/holy/unholy/cold damage being added to melee attacks.

[Lurvi]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSQ2QyF0HZE

[Gaerlin]

Excellent test and proof, thanks Lurvi.

[Vahush]

I think Lurvi just posted the link, Stian did the test and made the video. Though Lurvi plays his dt like a baws, that I know .

[Lurvi]

Yes, all credits to Stian for that one. Not me ^_^

[sanagav]

To any prospective reader: Sorry folks, this guide has been removed. You're on your own.Last edited by cins; 2nd February 2018 at 07:21. Reason: because **** you, that's why

Here is some info about damage in AoC and dealing of it. Stuff cribbed from Tul over here: http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=138831, Cynara’s blog over there: http://cynarablog.wordpress.com and Sheerkya's guide copied here: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=180670

To start with, there's 7 types of damage: Physical (you might see piercing/crushing/slashing elsewhere but that's ********, it's all physical), Poison, Electric, Fire, Cold, Holy, Unholy.

DEFENSE AGAINST DAMAGE

This stuff is kind of important if you want to deal damage.

There's three layers of damage reduction. Deflection, Mitigation and Invulnerability.

Damage Deflection is your (and enemy's) first line of defense. It reduces all incoming damage from anything and everything (except fall damage, your stats fail to impress gravity). One point in Damage Deflection is one percent less damage making it through this first layer of defense. We see DD in abilities such as soldier feat Cunning Deflection or "bubbles" like Hand of Mitra and Blessed Conquest.
Those 3 directional shields around everything are also sort of DD too. They work against melee hits from their directions (magical damage ignores shields). Stacking shields means more or less stacked DD so shields are pretty important if you're melee. So this means depending on enemy's shields, you'll be dealing:
No directional shields = %20 more damage (-20 DD)
1 directional shield = normal damage
2 directional shields = 1/3 less damage (+33 DD)
3 directional shields = 2/3 less damage (+66 DD)
Note that shields don't protect the back: if you're standing behind an enemy or you're standing on his/her/its side and using combos that'll land on his/her/its back, you'll be bypassing the directional shields.
There's a stat called Penetration Rating (usually feated, such as Slaughter for BS) that negates DD point by point, but it's not very common. This also works against directional shields.
Warning: Penetration Rating is not Armor Penetration. AP (also from BS's Slaughter or guard's Precise Attacks) bypasses enemy's Armor value and does squat against Deflection. Don't mix these two up.
DD can be more than 100 (such as conqueror's Blessed Conquest) but this is pretty pointless aside from foiling the odd Penetration Rating.

Your next line of defense is Mitigation. This is a numeric value that comes from item stats, spells (such as +1250 protection(something) stuff from casters) and feats (like +Armor/+Protection from general trees). This total then translates into a mitigation percentage through some nonlinear formula that I don't care to know (the results are already visible in your character sheet).
Your (and enemy's) Armor value decreases incoming Physical and Poison damage. Your (and enemy's) 5 seperate Protection values do the same for magical damage types (if it says just +Prot instead of +Prot(something), it means it adds to all types of Prot).

The last layer of defense is Invulnerability. There's one for all 7 types of damage (while Armor value protects against both Physical and Poison, they have seperate invuls). Invul is a percentage modifier that can be positive or negative and it only affects the specific damage type. A 7% holy invul means incoming holy damage drops by 7% and a -12% fire invul means incoming fire damage increases by 12%. It's possible to have an Invul number higher than 100% and this will make that specific type of damage heal the target instead of harming (such as Molten Flesh of hox).
Everything that says Invul happens on this layer (all spells like Molten Flesh, wracks and ruins, guild city buffs or defensive/frenzy stances). All of these things stack linearly; a hox that gets Elemental Ruin (-15%) while Molten Flesh is running (+120%) who has a guild city buff (+1%) will have %106 fire invul.

Note that the damage reduction % numbers you see in your character sheet is the sum of Mitigation and Invulnerability layers, you can see these seperately if you hover. All 3 layers are multiplied for the total damage reduction.
An example to make all this weird stuff understable:
We have a soldier whose Armor value translates into 40% physical mitigation in normal stance. Something deals 100 physical damage to him, he mitigates 40% and takes 60 damage.
He goes defensive stance, which is a flat +7% invul to everything. 100 physical damage comes again, 60 damage passes through Mitigation layer, then Invulnerability layer removes %7 of 60 so finally soldier takes 55,8 damage.
Before the next 100 damage comes, soldier stacks all his shields to left so he'll take only 1/3 from melee attacks on left. Shields drops the incoming 100 damage to 33.3, then Mitigation reduces it by 40% so 19,98 damage passes that layer, then Invulnerability takes away 7% of 19,98 so finally soldier takes 18,58 damage. (ignore any errors with fractions here)
If he'd also used Cunning Deflection in addition to shield stacking, he'd have 99 DD. Direction shields and normal DD work as seperate layers (otherwise it'd go over 100).

DEFENSE AGAINST DEFENSE AGAINST DAMAGE

You got all that? Good. Now comes the part where we destroy these defenses so we can deal more damage. We do this with two things. First is a couple of stats called Armor Penetration and Spell Penetration. If you have these stats, your attacks will be ignoring X amount of enemy's Armor and Protection values, passively increasing your damage. And second is the debuffs that decrease enemy's defenses so everyone does more damage. A debuff is “a harmful effect placed on an enemy target” and every class gets a number of those.

The primary debuffs that we care about hit the Invulnerability and Mitigation layers. Other debuffs affect enemy's damage, healing and movement. And finally, some debuffs provide what might be called a reverse proc. The reverse proc puts a beneficial short term buff on the attacker (such as bear's various claws spells). We don't much care about other debuffs here.

Invulnerability Debuffs

There's 2 types of Invul debuffs: Wracks (-10%) and Ruins (-15%). They're further divided into Physical, Elemental and Spiritual. You can have all 6 of them going at the same time. Applying these again refreshes their duration.

Physical Wrack is -10% Physical and Poison Invul for 30 seconds.
Physical Ruin is -15% Physical and Poison Invul for 15 seconds.
Spiritual Wrack is -10% Holy and Unholy Invul for 30 seconds.
Spiritual Ruin is -15% Holy and Unholy Invul for 15 seconds.
Elemental Wrack is -10% Fire, Electric and Cold Invul for 30 seconds.
Elemental Ruin is -15% Fire, Electric and Cold Invul for 15 seconds.

Mitigation Debuffs

These are called Torments and they decrease the Armor/Protection values of the enemy. Torments stack up to 5 when applied again, increasing the benefit linearly with each stack. After reaching 5 stacks, each additional application of the debuff will refresh the duration. Again all 3 of them can be on at the same time. However unlike Invulnerability, Mitigation does not go below zero.

Physical Torment is -900 armor per stack for 30 seconds. Fully stacked is -4500 armor.
Spiritual Torment is -250 Holy and Unholy Protection per stack for 30 seconds. Fully stacked is -1250 Holy and Unholy Protection.
Elemental Torment is -250 Fire, Electric, and Cold Protection per stack for 30 seconds. Fully stacked is -1250 Fire, Electric and Cold Protection.

Every single one of these 9 primary debuffs have a unique (if hard to distinguish) icon.

Here's a list of who can do what:
PHYSICAL RUIN:
Conqueror (Breach), Guardian (Guard Destroyer), Bear Shaman (Rune of Aggression)

PHYSICAL WRACK:
Bear Shaman (Mani. of Forest), Assasin (Grim Corruption), Necromancer (Gangrenous Stench), Conqueror (Feint Attack), Ranger (Armor Ripper)

PHYSICAL TORMENT:
Bear Shaman (Crush Armor), Assassin (Burden to Bear), Barbarian (Wreck Armor), Conqueror (any banner or technique), Ranger (Armor Ripper)

SPIRITUAL RUIN:
Priest of Mitra (Avert Thines Eyes), Dark Templar (Dread Shadow), Necromancer (Frenzy)

SPIRITUAL WRACK:
Priest of Mitra (Rebuke), Assassin (Grim Corruption), Dark Templar (Unhallowed Blight)

SPIRITUAL TORMENT:
Necromancer (Bligthed One pet, Grim Hunger, Lifestrike), Assasin (Miasma: Soul Toxin, 2 stacks), Priest of Mitra (Wandering Disciple)

ELEMENTAL RUIN:
Tempest of Set (Curse of Set), Herald of Xotli (Inferno Curse)

ELEMENTAL WRACK:
Tempest of Set (Lightning Sparks), Demonologist (Chaotic Blast), Herald of Xotli (Molten Steel Slash)

ELEMENTAL TORMENT:
Tempest of Set (Storm Throne), Necromancer (Deathly Blizzard), Demonologist (Blazing fire, Soul Resonance), Conqueror (any banner or technique)
So let's see what these do (again ignore small fraction errors):
Remember the soldier? Imagine we inflict full debuffs on him. Now his Armor value is 4500 lower thanks to 5xTorment, which means his physical mitigation is screwed. He'd need 8800 Armor for 40% mitigation and when torment drops his Armor to 4300, he'll have 20,5% left (I've checked these specific values). He also got -25% Invul from Wrack and Ruin. 100 damage comes in again, gets mitigated to 79,5 but then Invul layer increases that by 25% so soldier takes 99,37 damage (up from 60).
He goes defensive stance, so his invul is now -%18. 100 physical damage comes again, 79,5 damage passes through Mitigation layer again, then Invul layer increases that by 18% so finally soldier takes 93,81 damage (up from 55,8).
Before the next 100 damage comes, soldier stacks all his shields to left so he'll take only 1/3 from melee attacks on left. Shields drops the incoming 100 damage to 33.3, then Mitigation reduces it by 20,5% so 26,47 damage passes that layer, then Invul adds %18 to it so finally soldier takes 31,23 damage (up from 18,58).
If this attacker had Armor Penetration, such as a BS with 5/5 Slaughter (+700 AP), the soldier's Armor would've counted as 3600, crushing his Mitigation even more (something like 13-16% I think).

As can be seen, debuffs make a pretty dramatic difference. If this wasn't a soldier, his Armor would've likely dropped to 0 and he'd be screwed even harder. Now this example assumes full debuffing, which may not always be possible in a group but debuffing is overall pretty nice for damage.
TLDR, debuff the **** out of your enemies.

FINALLY DAMAGE ITSELF

Melee Damage

When you do a combo (or a normal hit), you'll usually deal damage to all enemies in a cone in front of you. There are some combos that deal damage to everything nearby but that's not default. The size of this hit cone depends on your weapon. Daggers are tiny and polearms are gigantic, one handed weapons are medium and two handed weapons are larger. Your targeted enemy takes the full damage but any other enemies you happen to hit takes 75% damage (some classes have AA that makes certain combos hit more than one target for full damage but they're not exactly common).

Whether you do a normal directional attack ("white hit" cos the number that flies up is white) or a combo (the numbers flying up is orange), the basic formula holds:
Damage = dps number x animation length

Your dps number in the character sheet has two parts: DPS from Weapon and DPS from Combat Rating. First one is quite easy to understand, but Combat Rating is your bonus damage that comes from everything else. You can see Combat Rating and its breakdown in the other tab of your character sheet. CR comes from items and stats. 1 Strength or Dexterity adds 3 CR (Dex for daggers and bows/xbows, Str for everything else). Items can have generic CR bonus or a specific type of CR bonus. Specific CR can be either types of magic damage or weapon types. So CR(dagger) will only increase your dps when using daggers and CR(cold) will add cold damage to your melee hits (which will ignore enemy's armor and be stopped by cold protection instead). Regardless of its breakdown, CR will increase your melee damage as:
36.6 CR = 1 dps
All CR is good (unless it's not for your weapon), get as much CR as you can regardless of its type.

A combo is comprised of a Starter and a Finisher with extra white hits in between. There are some "combos" which are just a Finisher (like Slam you got on the Beach). You'll see a red +x dps for Starter and Finisher on a combo's tooltip, these show how much doing this combo will add to your basic dps in your character sheet.

Combo = Preparation + Finisher
Preparation = Starter (1st Hit when you press the button) + extra white Hits
Finisher = X Hits starting from last Hit of preparation sequence

Finisher has a single animation of fixed duration, hence the Finisher "cast bar". Finisher Duration is usually larger than a single hit animation but faster than X times the animation of 1 Hit for a X-Hits Finisher. So when you do a combo and see 3 orange numbers flying, that means its Finisher hit 3 times and the Finisher animation took less than 3 white hit animations. This is the whole point: Finishers hit for (a lot) more damage than white hits and they deal that damage in a shorter time.

The damage a combo deals is:
Combo Damage = [StarterDPS x Starter hit animation time] + [DPS x white hit animation time] (repeat this for every combo step along the way) + [FinisherDPS x Finisher animation time]

DPS = the number you see in your character sheet
StarterDPS = DPS + combo's Starter DPS bonus
FinisherDPS = DPS + combo's Finisher DPS bonus

White hit animation times depend on hit directions since directional attack animations aren't equal, but Finishers have specific animation times. (Tul has done some detailed analysis for DT in the link above).

The combos you got in Tortage are generic archetype combos and they're all terrible once you're out. Never ever use any of them after lv25.
(I know slam is exception with vom for dt, shut up, that’s not newbie info...)

You'll sometimes see various buffs and feats and such that says something like "+x% to weapon damage". This means they only increase the "DPS from your weapon" part of damage equations.

special edit for ranger: I don't even pretend to understand wtf is going on with rangers since its revamp.

extra special edit for assasin, barbarian and conqueror: When you fight with two weapons, your every white hit has a chance of doing an instant second hit. You can see your chance of getting an offhand attack on your character sheet (this is increased by offhand rating stat from items). An offhand hit will do %50 damage of a normal hit if both weapons have the exact same DPS number. DPS of your left hand weapon affects the damage of your offhand hits in some roundabout what that I'm not entirely clear on, but higher number = more damage as always.
(also ranger's offhand hit chance is a flat zero as far as I know, so even though they can use the most dashing of weapon combinations in sword and dagger, it's for nothing)

Magic Damage

The formula for magical damage is:
Damage = Base + Coefficient x Bonus Spell Damage

Your Bonus Spell Damage for every type is listed on your character sheet. This stat comes from your items as +Magic Damage or +Magic Damage(type) and your Intelligence or Wisdom. Intelligence adds to mages' damage, Wisdom adds to priests' (and templar's) damage.
1 Wis/Int = 0.6 Bonus Spell Damage

DTs use unholy, poms use holy, tos use electric, hox use fire, necro use unholy and cold, demo use fire and electric. And all of them use generic +magic. Keep that in mind when looking at items.

There are certain feats that give an increase of Base damage, which then becomes Feated base damage for the corresponding power. This boost is always a %-gain to base damage, such as +400% to Dark Hand for DTs.

Every spell has a Coefficient. This is a hidden number (far as I know) but it's possible to calculate this (which I won't do here). This number determines how much your damage will scale with Bonus Spell Damage (aka items). Low Coefficient means it won't get much better and high Coefficient means it'll get a lot better. The better gear you collect, the more important Coefficients become. High base and bad scaling spells makes for good damage when you're a dirt poor green 80, but low base and great scaling spells surpass them better once you get enough shinies.

CRITICAL HITS

Sometimes you’ll deal more damage than normal. It’s called a critical hit and happens for both melee and magic damage. A critical hit does %50 more damage than a normal one.

Critical Chance stat you see on your character sheet shows what your odds for getting a crit is, hover to see both melee and magic. This has a base value: 5% for daggers, 2.5% for all other weapons and spells. Critical Hit Rating bonus from your items (and possibly feats) improves this as:
36.6 Critical Hit Rating = +1% critical chance (at level 80)

Critical Bonus Damage you see on your character sheet under Critical Chance shows how much more damage you’ll do on top of the base 50% when you do get a crit. This is increased by Critical Damage Rating stat from items (and possibly feats) as:
36.6 Critical Damage Rating = +1% bonus damage (at level 80)

Crits are countered by Critigation and Critigation Amount. These also use the same 36.6=1% (at 80) formula. This is a "seperate roll" that kicks in after a crit happens and it reduces only the extra damage caused by the crit. So if a normal hit does 100 while a crit does 175 damage, a target with 53% critigation chance and 40% critigation amount will take (75*0,4=30 less damage) 145 damage on 53% of crits.

You’ll have no critigation until 80.

(There's also something called Tenacity, which lowers the target's critigation amount. It's only found on pvp items.)

HIT RATING

This is another important thing. You need hit rating or your attacks will miss and your spells will be resisted. You (and enemies) have a base %5 chance of completely missing with every attack or spell. The levels also effect the "to hit roll" by changing miss chance 1% per level difference.

You also deal half damage sometimes. This is called a glance and is the opposite of a crit. This happens because your Hit Rating stat isn't as high as it should be for the enemy you're fighting. The amount of damage you lose increases very fast with the level difference. The reason it becomes virtually impossible to kill a mob 6 levels higher than you is lack of hit chance (at least while leveling, only lv80 items have enough bonus hit chance that allow you to fight 85+ mobs with any chance of success).

Hit Rating will decrease this miss chance. It counters both evasion/immunity bonuses and the base 5%. You can see this as Hit Bonus Chance on your character sheet. So for example if your enemy's stats give it a +2.4% evade chance bonus and it's 3 levels higher than you, your total chance to miss will be 10.4%. Then if your Hit Bonus Chance is 6.4%, you'll have a 4% chance to miss with your attacks. You might've heard somewhere that you need at least 10% hit bonus. This is true: you need 10% bonus to overcome the base miss chance of a level 85 mob. This "mandatory" hit chance increases even more for higher tiers of raiding.

Once your Bonus Hit Chance reduces enemy's miss chance to 0, it will start reducing the glance chance. [no one really knows exactly how this works]

Once again, the formula for Hit Rating, Evade Rating and Immunity Rating values is:
36.6 = 1% (at level 80)

A final note on hit rating is that there's a certain debuff type called "miss chance/fizzle chance" and these will directly lower your chance to hit with attacks or spells by a flat percentage. Luckily these aren't very common (noteworthy exceptions would be Vayaspârâ in DMH who can stack 80% permanent miss chance on you or the Bewilder combo from shamans that inflicts 95% miss chance for a few seconds).

Note: When you tap a movement button twice quickly in combat, you'll make a little jump in that direction. If you do this to left or right, you gain a 10% increase to your Immunity Chance for a few seconds. If you do this towards back, you gain a 25% increase to your Evade Chance for 1.5 seconds (if you time this right you can prevent yourself from getting a knockback). This has nothing to do with damage but it's a little trivia that might or might not save your life someday.