the 50% increase to dmg from crit is just the base, that can be increased

penetration can help increase dmg, but only if the enemy has armor to penetrate

if the enemy has 0 armor, then penetration does absolutely nothing to increase dmg

enemy armor is equivalent to dmg reduction, which reduces your dmg, penetration and resistance debuffs allow you to overcome the armor, effectively increasing your dmg by reducing their potential dmg reduction

this basically has a cap though where if the enemy is at 0 armor (between armor debuffs and your penetration) further increases to penetration will be doing nothing and just a wasted stat

all of your skills though, scale your actual dmg done from the weapon and spell dmg, but penetration does not increase the dmg your skills do, just reduces how much the enemy mitigates your dmg

The base is 50% if you have 100% crit chance.

Otherwise you must multiply % chance by the % increase

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the 50% increase to dmg from crit is just the base, that can be increased

penetration can help increase dmg, but only if the enemy has armor to penetrate

if the enemy has 0 armor, then penetration does absolutely nothing to increase dmg

enemy armor is equivalent to dmg reduction, which reduces your dmg, penetration and resistance debuffs allow you to overcome the armor, effectively increasing your dmg by reducing their potential dmg reduction

this basically has a cap though where if the enemy is at 0 armor (between armor debuffs and your penetration) further increases to penetration will be doing nothing and just a wasted stat

all of your skills though, scale your actual dmg done from the weapon and spell dmg, but penetration does not increase the dmg your skills do, just reduces how much the enemy mitigates your dmg

Let me further my thought in here for us to mull over... When an enemy takes damage its a combination of all the things you just said, absolutely. "Damage Done" as a buff meaning 5% from Minor Berserk, and 10% from Major Berserk, as well as 50% from Critical Strikes. So "Damage Done" has an increasing effect on all those things used to calculate the damage number that pops up on our screens. So effectively its increasing your spell/weapon damage and increasing our pen or reducing their armor, "retroactively". The "Damage Done" buff is retroactively affecting all those factors.

I feel like "Damage Done" is more closely associated to the idea of "Penetration" because it won't buff your heals like "Spell/Weapon Damage" will. "Damage Done" will change the number on your damage skills tool tips though.

The damage done in ESO is a flat multiplier. It has no effect on the weapon damage or crit damage values. It gets calculated per cast of an ability and has absolutely no influence on your character stats.

Also, all active damage done multipliers are additive with one another and get applied before Damage mitigation.
These multipliers include Slayer, Berserk, the blue slottable CP stars and many more.

Penetration is part of the mitigation calculation and reduces the mitigation by 1% per 500 pen.
A Boss monster in ESO has 18200 armour, which gives him a mitigation of 36.4% of all your damage. Your pen reduces the monsters armour value and such increases the final damage number. After that the game rolls the RnG to see first IF you do a critical hit or not. And if so, sums up all your crit damage bonuses with a minimum of 50% to a maximum if 125% and multiplies it with your previously calculated damage number.
That is the dumped down damage calulation in a nutshell. The actual math behind all that is quite complex, but not complicated.

For reference I always recommend the excellent character creator of UESP.net That's the one all the cool kids use.

You can find all relevant data for every known ability in game (including how it scales with max ressources and weapon/spell damage) and most importantly the complete damage formula.
You just need to take some time, read, dig yourself in and ignore the fancy pictures. 😉

I am on mobile atm, so here is the Link: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor

Just generally speaking, the easiest way to increase your damage is to increase your spell/armor peen. Outside the Infinite Archive, the most heavily armored opponents have 18,200 armor, and so to strip away all of their armor, you need 18,200 armor pen. However. If you run with a well equipped tank, the tank will be providing at least 11,000 armor pen (and really good ones will strip it down to 15,000). So if you incorporate at least 5-7k pen into your build, then you are usually built to maximize damage within decently set up group. If your group is well coordinated, then you can get away with 2-3k pen.

Zama666 wrote: »

look at https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/651841/penetration-vs-critical-damage-in-2024

there might be some info there.

I have the same question. To Crit or not to Crit. To Pen or not to Pen?
Is the Pen mightier than the Crit?

generally speaking the absolute "ideal" situation is 100% crit, 125% crit dmg (cap), and enough pen to ignore 100% of the enemy armor

its not usually possible to get 100% crit without using a set such as mechanical acuity, but capped crit dmg, enough pen to ignore armor (but not too much over), and around 50% crit chance seems to be the happy medium that can be obtained

at least in pve, overland enemies and most things in the archive only have 9100 armor, the rest of pve (dungeons/trials/arenas) usually have 18200 armor

so generally you want to get as close to the 18200 between penetration + armor debuffs (major/minor breach, and other unique debuffs such as crimson oath or tremorscale), because going too far over is wasted potential because you could be using that focus in other areas

pvp is a different ballgame though as many players will run 33k+ armor, so really hard to get enough pen to ignore that unless you use something like onslaught (2h ult), or corrosive to straight up ignore it

I usually aim for 10k pen and 40% Crit Chance although my Crit Chance is usually lower than I'm actually able to achieve.