Trying to crack the damage code

Didz

Trying to crack the damage code.

Nothing seems to occupy players time more when it comes to builds than the issue of damage. So, I've thought I'd try and understand exactly where damage comes from and how it is recorded in the game.

The official formula (courtesy of Asayre) is:

(Gear + Apprentice Mundas Bonus(if Any)) x Skills
Where 'Skills' refers to stat boosting skills.

This is Rosy, my test subject, completely naked of all gear and skills.

Notice how she still retains 73 x Spell Damage and 73 x Weapon Damage, even though she current has no weapon or spells.

Why?

I have no idea, I assume it's some sort of base damage determined by a characters level, but it's not mentioned in any damage calculation. The first of many mysteries, I have yet to unravel.

Combat Metric's

Here is Rosy again. This time she is fully geared up she attacks an innocent Mudcrab with a light attack from her Magnus' Restoration Staff just to see what damage it does.


Damage done?

So, the staff says its does 1,335 damage but actually did 1,730 damage. In addition, the enchant which says it deals 1754 Magic Damage only delivered 1,438. Total damage was 3.168?

No idea how or why the game came up with these numbers.

If one takes the damage value printed on the staff (1,335), and adds a bonus for Rosy's Max Magicka of (Max.Magikca/10.54 which is the figure quoted by the ESO Build Planner) then the damage output for the staff should be 1.335 + 1,917 = 3,252 plus the enchantment damage of 1,754 making a grand total of 5,006.

But it clearly wasn't that, so I'm confused.

To complicate things still farther the ESO Build Editor states that Rosy's Spell Damage is calculated as follows:

Where 525 is the unscaled damage value quoted on the staff. So, based upon this Rosy's Spell Damage should be 1,335, the scaled damage quoted on her staff. But as you can see its 1,788 and I have no idea where that figure comes from, nor does it seem to match the damage actually delivered by the staff.

Further Testing
Still trying to make sense of the Spell Damage and Weapon Damage numbers on Rosy's Character Sheet.

Even when completely naked she has 73 Spell Damage and 73 Weapon Damage, and nobody seems to know why. Perhaps even more puzzling is that as soon as she picks up her staff, Spell Damage jumps instantly to 1,788, even though the staff only deals 1,335 damage.

So this is the issue:

[th]Source[/th][th]Value[/th]
Unknown+73
Staff Damage+1,335
Unknown+ 380
TOTAL Spell Damage+1,788

As you can see there are two values that seem to contribute to total Spell Damage, but don't have any known source.

To try and identify the source of the mysterious +73 value, I got Rosy to attack a deer naked and with her bare hands. This is the result after one light slap killed the deer.

Interestingly the damage done bares no resemblance to either the Spell Damage, or Weapon damage of +73. But as you can see it seems to match 10% of Rosy's Max.Stamina. Which might be her Stamina bonus being used to boost her damage output, but if so it has ignored the +73.

Hmm! Perhaps not. Attacking a mudcrab she only inflicted 1.114 damage, which was consistent but not obviously derived from her Max.Stamina, unless the crab has some sort of damage mitigation.

Any thoughts on what's actually going on here, because I'm out of idea's.

Alanar

Not sure on the spell damage numbers. For the light attack with a restoration staff, you need to take armor / penetration into account. In this case the mudcrab should have 8100 spell resistance, and your character has a base penetration of 100, leaving 8000 effective spell resistantance. Divide that by 500 (10 x monster level of 50), for 16% decrease in damage done.

Also, light and heavy weapon attacks scale differently than most abilities, with a Max Magicka divisor of around 40 instead of 10.5. With those taken into account, the observed damage gets more closer to the predicted damage.

Didz

So, the damage on the Mudcrab (being magic damage) is only 84% of the actual damage output.

e.g.
Staff Damage was 2.060 reduced to 1,730
Absorb Magicka was 1,712 reduced to 1.430

Like you say the numbers still don't quite add up, but are closer.

However, the Max.Magicka bonus of 20,214 /40 = 505, which if added to the staff tooltip damage of 1,335 = 1,840 less the crabs spell resistance of 16% gives us 1,550 which is still less than the 1,730 recorded.

THEDKEXPERIENCE

This is why I just stack on max Magicka and call it a day.

SodanTok

https://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkillCoef.php

the residual weapon/spell damage is bug (and imho only tooltip one). During testing on PTS it happened to me few times that I had weapon damage without any gear, cp, skill and was forced to create new character to be sure my testing is still pure.

Reorx_Holybeard

Just a note that our build editor (http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor) is really only valid for max level (CP160) builds. Lower level characters in-game are autoscaled to CP160 which is where I'm guessing the 73 Weapon/Spell damage is coming from. Assuming you are indeed naked you should have 0 Weapon/Spell damage.

If anyone happens to know or can figure out the autoscaling formulaes we can work to get the editor working for lower levels too.

Looking at it in more detail, most of your confusion probably comes from autoscaling so the stats you see on the item before or after it is equipped are irrelevant....what only matters are the overall stats once you equip it.

In order to calculate the damage done by a Light/Heavy attack you need to look at the relevant formulas down a ways on the right side of http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor. They are complex and approximate but work relatively well (at least at CP160).

If I use the Restoration Heavy Attack calculation (as it is currently, I think I need to move it to Light Attack and remove the HA as there is technically no damage related to a full Restoration HA) I get a damage of 2421 using your magicka of 20214 and Spell Damage of 1788. If I factor in the 82% mitigation by the mudcrab (1438/1754 = 0.82) this is 1985 dmg which is "close" to what you're getting. Some of the difference may be due to the approximations in our formula and some might be due to you being level 20 and autoscaling coming into play.

Didz

Well, I've just concluded that both the Spell Damage and Weapon Damage stats on the In-Game character sheet are utter twaddle, and should just be ignored.

As far as I can tell all the code is doing is copying the damage recorded on the weapon in hand into both stat boxes.

So, if you're staff says it does 1,000 damage then your Weapon and Spell damage will be set to 1,000.

If you are holding a dagger with 1,300 damage then your character sheet will read 1,300 Spell and Weapon Damage.

It doesn't take into account the type of weapon you are holding, nor does it consider any bonuses from gear, skills or even enchants on the weapon itself, The only modification is the battle scaling, which as SodanTok correctly surmised looks like it's bugged.

But, to be fair, given that outgoing damage can come from a variety of sources including skills as well as weapons, any value published in Weapon or Spell Damage would be nonsense anyway.

I'm just going to ignore them both.

SodanTok

Didz wrote: »

Well, I've just concluded that both the Spell Damage and Weapon Damage stats on the In-Game character sheet are utter twaddle, and should just be ignored.

As far as I can tell all the code is doing is copying the damage recorded on the weapon in hand into both stat boxes.

So, if you're staff says it does 1,000 damage then your Weapon and Spell damage will be set to 1,000.

If you are holding a dagger with 1,300 damage then your character sheet will read 1,300 Spell and Weapon Damage.

It doesn't take into account the type of weapon you are holding, nor does it consider any bonuses from gear, skills or even enchants on the weapon itself, The only modification is the battle scaling, which as SodanTok correctly surmised looks like it's bugged.

But, to be fair, given that outgoing damage can come from a variety of sources including skills as well as weapons, any value published in Weapon or Spell Damage would be nonsense anyway.

I'm just going to ignore them both.

But it does into account everything you said it does not. Having weapon with 1000 damage that has passive from its skill tree +5% weapon damage? The stat on character sheet will say 1050 damage. Having gear like hunding rage (julianos)? You will get 299 in tht stat. Having enchantment on weapon/jewelry will too increase it.

K4RMA

many reading, much words

Ultimate_Overlord

If i were to find a comparison to the op, it would be this:
In 2017 some guy decided to swim across the atlantic ocean, starting in Spain. Afterwards, he returns and tells everybody that theres no India on the other side.

Merlin13KAGL

Best of luck re-reverse-engineering the wheel. @Asayre 's had this wrapped up for longer than most of us can remember.

The 73 damage you see is likely that of your fists...some courtesy given by ZoS so your don't die to skeevers and mudcrabs, should you lose your mind and proceed out into the world this way.