Where does damage come from?

General-spoke

Hi every one, I've been wondering one thing :
I'm not very into optimisation mechanics and all but i'm starting to and as i wander around the internet, i find videos showing builds and almost every time, the skill's descriptions anounce much more damage than mine does. And that, even if they are upgraded at the same level, same passives and i have as much weapon damage on my stats page. Is there any way to up the skills damage except with up weapon damage?
https://imgur.com/ApXFNDc
for exemple, here, cutting dive deals 10 238 dmg, for me (with the same stats, even more weapon dmg), it deals around 6 500... can someone tell me why?

raj72616a

what's your max stamina and weapon damage?
skill damage scales on both of these stats.

and champion point allocation?
cutting dive damage is buffed by two cp stats, one for physical damage, one for direct damage.

davey1107

I have a cold...let me try to answer this without getting arcane or obtuse, lol.

Damage depends on a very complex formula. When you proc an attack, in order to determine how much it hits for the system looks at:

- the baseline damage value for that ability, then altered by
- The damage rating of the slotted weapon, then altered by
- Your characters weapon damage at the time of proc, altered by
- Your character’s max value of that resource, altered by
- if it’s a crit strike, and a whole series of calculations here, altered by
- all skill and armor passives in play, altered by
- all buffs and debuffs in play, altered by
- Champion points and all the calculations here.

That gets the attack out the door. It will then smack into an opponent and do all of those calculations in reverse, determining how much they can mitigate. (For more info, see ESO Academy, “damage in eso”)

If you are consistently hitting for less than you think you should be, several things could be occurring. We really don’t have enough info to determine, but suspects are:

- are we talking pvp? Because the damage in pvp is scaled differently and with other players’ mitigation you’re going to see lower numbers.

- are you vet or under level 50? If you’re not vet, I could see some weirdness with damage values. But the screen shot makes me think you’re vet.

- could be a gear issue. Like your tool tip will list the same damage value regardless the quality of your weapons, but going from purple to gold gets a lot more damage out of them.

- I am unclear if you’re saying your tool tip says 10,500 for dive then You’re hitting for 6,500, or if you’re saying an online screen shot says 10,500 and you’re hitting for less. I mean...it could be an issue of lots of little things. You don’t buff, you’re not on food, you’re hitting a heavy armor monster.

This info is maybe a start. If you want to troubleshoot it some more, let’s look at it. If you have more info for us to go on, or questions, reply in this thread...BUT make sure to use @davey1107 in the post so the system flags me and I knowmto come back.

General-spoke

@davey1107 and @raj72616a thank you for that, i think my problem should be the max stam difference. The build i found is going to 40k stam and i only have 27k, do you think this difference could be what makes me loose this amount of damage?

the_broo11

13k max stam could easily account for the difference in tool tip. I believe the stam-to-weapon damage ratio is ~ 10.4:1. So that would mean you're running ~1250 less "equivalent" weapon damage than the referenced build.

Edit: see thread below for updated ratio:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/387735/typical-weapon-and-stamina-ratio

General-spoke

Wow ok thanks didnt know the ratio was so high

davey1107

I’m going to also say the stamina is an issue. I don’t think it accounts for the entire shortfall...you probably have some tweaking to do on several stats, and because these all multiply and stack when calculating damage they’re adding up to a lot.

To help with the stamina as a first step, things to check:

- always run with food, either blue stam and health or purple tri-stat. Or dubious Cameron.
- All attributes should be in stamina. If you’ve blended them, recast. You can fine-tune your resources with enchants if you need to...attributes you can just dump into the one resource and forget about them.
- Most of your gear should be stam enchants. You shouldn’t need much health as a warden.

You would get more damage from medium armor...if you’re running heavy it could be bringing your damage down.

General-spoke

Well thank you very much, i understand all that much better now i'll work my ingame skill and builds to get better thx