Damage mechanics

Captainfez3 · June 2015

Hello all,

I currently am a level 32 magicka based Templar. I'm using a destro staff main hand and a resto staff off hand. I plan to heal end game, but as of right now, I find that I can wreck people with the Aedric line having built full magicka (mostly). My basic understanding of the game mechanics was that people who wanted to do melee/bow built stamina and people who wanted to do magic built magicka. I feel like that is overly simplistic though.

For instance, I noticed that when I equipped a two handed sword that had higher base damage than my destro staff, all my aedric skill line abilities did more damage. A lot more. So I'm assuming that weapon damage affects all baseline skill damage, but it seems to go against what I thought previously. So, if weapon damage governs skill damage, does stamina govern weapon damage at all? Like do I do less damage with a 2 hander because I have no points in stamina, or is that unaffected and the only things weapon do is affect skill damage?

If someone could link me a more thorough explanation or something, I'd appreciate. Also, friendly suggestion to Beth to maybe explain the fundamental concepts of your game better. I feel like a few simple lines of explanation would benefit everyone. Although, hey, maybe I missed it or something. Thanks in advance!

MageStorm · June 2015

Hey Captain, great questions!

I noticed something similar with my Templar Healing/DPS build as well, It turns out there are a few things that come into play here. The main contributes are:

Spell Power
Magicka

Unusually, a two-handed sword provides more spell power than a staff. This is a more recent change but you will often see people embrace it, especially in PvP where magicka DPS will run around with a two-handed sword.

So for spells and abilities that use magicka as their resource (unless stated otherwise), the damage will be primarily calculated by the casters maximum magicka and their spell power.

Weapon damage does not scale to my knowledge with character stats.

I hope that helps!

Tankqull · June 2015

depending if you are aiming to go either stamina or magica consuming abilities their dmg is influenced by either
1. spell or weapon dmg
2. max magica or stamina
3. spell or weapon crit

the problem you are observing is that in former times all class abilities were magica based but had a quite ununderstandable distribution of reliance in regards of weapon and or spell dmg respectivly crit this got changed to a more understandable way in patch 1.6aka 2.0 to magica =spelldmg/crit and stamina =weapondmg/crit.
by an attempt to balance weaponchoices for this former behaviour they came up with an across the board dependency of what a weaponline is capable to deliver in regards of weapon and spell "base"dmg based on its "safetiness" beeing close combeat is more risky than staying at range leading to an increased dmg potential of melee weapons/attacks.
DW>2H>1H/S>staff=bow
this did not get changed during the 1.6 patch wich leads to the fact that a slot of magica userers still are using DW/2H on a pure magica build as it provides alot more dmg than a staff if they do not have to rely on staff skills.