Spell Penetration Vs. Spell Damage vs. Spell Crit

phbell · October 2015

Can to community please help me understand the relationships here? I have been at this game a long time and am still not completely clear.

Thank you in advance.

Asherons_Call · October 2015

Good question. I never fully understood spell penetration. If one was to focus on one or the other which would be best?

Deheart · October 2015

Isn't spell damage effected by the points you put in for magic/stamina/health, and Penetration is how much spells bypass armor/spell resistance, and spell crit is like a random damage bonus?

Please correct me if I am wrong, I actually also want to make sure I understand this better.

Merlin13KAGL · October 2015

Think of it as anti-armor for spells.

It negates some of the other guy's spell resist. This generally will not have a large effect on its own, especially after they made spell resist go up 1:1 with armor, and that's before any Spell Resists CP bonuses kick in.

What they should have done was make it a true "Weakness to Magicka" instead, like in the standalone games.

The caveat is that someone with a large spell resist will see the most 'reduction' from this, but it will have little effect, as they had a large number to start.

Someone with a low spell resist will still see the same percentage, but it will have even less effect as they don't have as much to lose in the first place.

If someone had zero spell resist (which is basically not possible, as I understand it - think old version armor only physical mitigation, zero spell mitigation), it would have no effect at all. Maxed CP's = 25% more penetration: 0 - 25 % is still zero...

(In the standalone's, it would make you more susceptible to magic damage, vice ESO which makes you less not-susceptible. The two are far from equal.)

Short version, while good with sharpened traits, as it's quick and essentially free, save the CP's for that start as the last one you bother with.

Another thing to consider, if someone's counter-sinking points into increased Spell Resist, it will effectively almost negate your penetration.

You're better off adding more raw damage, then crit damage, and hitting spell penetration as the last on the list.

tunepunk · November 2015

I think it depends a bit about your skill setup as well. For a Sorcerer using skills depending on crits like Critical Surge high crit would make a lot of sense. Let's say if you exchanged the Critical surge to Degeneration which gives a constant 15% chance to heal for 115% of the damage done i would say penetration/higher damage would make more sense, since no matter how high your crit chance is it's still 15% chance to get the healing.

I think the best way is to pick what skills you use mostly, that is your main source of damage, or healing, passives or whatever you want to focus on, then chose based on that.

My main character is a Sorcerer, which get a lot of % bonus to mana regeneration from light armor, class and race passives, so for me neither spell crit, spell damage or penetration made more sense than focusing on regeneration. Instead of tossing 1 high damage spell, i use the same spell more often due to high regeneration, and low spell cost. I can pretty much spam any skill without worrying to run out of mana. So this build is more of a pressure build than a high damage build.

With a high regen i can pretty keep those spells going without worrying to run out.

Regen bonuses:
28% bonus (Full light armor passive)
15% Bonus (Willows path set bonus)
10% Bonus (Storm calling Passive)
10% bonus (restoring twilight)
9% Bonus (Altmer passive)

Cost reduction.
21% bonus from (Light armor passive)
5% bonus from (dark magic passive)

So for every 100 mana regen i add in glyphs, or set bonuses, etc you could ge att least 72% increased mana regen.
and 26% lower cost to cast.

You could probably bump it up even more with other skills, and champion points etc.

Waffennacht · November 2015

First off you have spell damage (not the tooltip number) this is just how much dmg your ability does.

Second spell crit is how often you will achieve a critical attack, a critical attack deals a standard 50% damage increase. So with 50% spell crit, half of your attacks will deal 50% more damage

Third, spell penetration. This is how much of your opponent's resistance is ignored when calculating how much damage your ability deals.

All numbers can be changed by passives, gear etc.

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Think of it as anti-armor for spells.

It negates some of the other guy's spell resist. This generally will not have a large effect on its own, especially after they made spell resist go up 1:1 with armor, and that's before any Spell Resists CP bonuses kick in.

What they should have done was make it a true "Weakness to Magicka" instead, like in the standalone games.

The caveat is that someone with a large spell resist will see the most 'reduction' from this, but it will have little effect, as they had a large number to start.

Someone with a low spell resist will still see the same percentage, but it will have even less effect as they don't have as much to lose in the first place.

If someone had zero spell resist (which is basically not possible, as I understand it - think old version armor only physical mitigation, zero spell mitigation), it would have no effect at all. Maxed CP's = 25% more penetration: 0 - 25 % is still zero...

(In the standalone's, it would make you more susceptible to magic damage, vice ESO which makes you less not-susceptible. The two are far from equal.)

Short version, while good with sharpened traits, as it's quick and essentially free, save the CP's for that start as the last one you bother with.

Another thing to consider, if someone's counter-sinking points into increased Spell Resist, it will effectively almost negate your penetration.

You're better off adding more raw damage, then crit damage, and hitting spell penetration as the last on the list.

Excellent point. The larger their resistance the more effective the spell pen, however the damage itself will still be reduced by a greater amount, if they have low resistance the worse spell pen is.

Spell crit, as shields don't crit, and every class has shields this (and spell pen has no effect against shields) this means most of the time these numberz will be ineffective.

This again means maximizing magicka (has an effect on spell damage not shown in tooltip) and maximizing spell damage (tool tip number)

However this is most important for PvP