How does max magica/stamina affect spell/weapon dmg?

VikingBerserker · April 2019

What's the deal? For instance does adding more max magicka give more spell dmg?

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO · April 2019

No. Max stats and weapon/spell damage are part of a calculation. They do not impact each other.

In general, looks like this for magic based attacks, using DK whip as an example-

.$1 = 0.09797 Magicka + 1.02992 SpellDamage + 0.90142
Magicka, R2 = 1.00000, Ratio = 10.51

ShadowKyuubi · April 2019

Just to expand on this. No, increasing your max magicka will not give you more spell damage, vise versa for stamina/weapon damage. As these "stats" are independent of each other. However, by increasing either, you are increasing the overall damage that you do to a certain extent. Lightspeedflash put the equation above, but it can be a lot to take in if you don't know what everything is. That being said, I don't want to go into a full discussion as it is a long discussion. However, I will give a couple examples.

First, take a magicka pet sorc. They have relatively low spell damage (2100ish), but they maintain very high max magicka (50k). This is because their damage (in a standard build) primarily comes from their light/heavy attacks and pet attacks. Both of these damage sources scale better by increasing you max magicka, rather than your spell damage.

Now, we can go on the other spectrum and look a stamina sorcerer. Stamina sorcs, or any stamina class really, have extremely high weapon damage (> 4500ish) and relatively speaking, low stamina pools (28-30k). This is because the stamina classes rely on weapon abilities (or non class abilities) as their primary sources of damage (e.g. Endless hail/Rending Slashes/Caltrops) that scale decently with weapon damage (and in all honesty the vMA bow for Endless Hail).

Now, this is a relatively simplistic view of the damage sources. In general though, you usually end up having to sacrifice your resource pool for weapon/spell damage or your weapon/spell damage for your resource pool. Both ideas do damage, but it depends on if you use them correctly.

Here is an older discussion that goes into more detail: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/318595/introduction-to-pve-damage-calculation-homestead. It may not be completely up to date, but should give you a good understanding of damage sources.

Elhan · April 2019

well it's not really because skill scales better with magicka or spell damage, stamina or wep damage.

skills scale the same way:

damage pool = max mag/max stam + wep/spell damage*10.5

that's mean 100 wep/spell damage = 1050 max magicka. but it's before buff and passives

for stamina class your wear medium armor with this passive: +15% wep damage
you also use dawnbreaker +8% wep dmg and every warrior guild skills give you 3% (rearming trap)

that's why stacking weapon damage is better for stamboys.

on the other hand magboys use mages guild skills, like inner light, offer you +7% max magicka.
and no passive to increase you spell damage (except class skills).

that's why it's better to stack max magicka

so if the question was: does adding more max magicka increase dps, it's yes.

Oreyn_Bearclaw · April 2019

I think the easiest way to think of it is that there are basically 4 main stats fore each magic and stam, when discussing damage.

For Stam: Max Stamina, Weapon Damage, Weapon Crit, Physical Penetration

For Magic: Max Magic, Spell Damage, Spell Crit, and Spell penetration.

Increasing one will never impact the value of the other. Not all skills scale in exactly the same way, but as a general rule 10.5 of a max resource is roughly equal to 1 of the corresponding damage type for most things (105 stamina, is roughly equivalent of 10 weapon damage). The critical value doesnt make you crit harder (that's a different modifier that might be number 5), just more often. Penetration, is sometimes very over looked by a lot of players. It has a hard cap in terms of effectiveness depending on the armor/spell resist values of the opponent in question. If you have less pen than your opponent resistance, its generally your best avenue for boosting damage. If it is the same or greater, then increasing that stat is essentially useless. In PVE, its about 18.2k for most stuff.

ShadowKyuubi · April 2019

Elhan is right, I did not use the right phrasing above when it came to damage scaling. I should have said that Magicka builds have an easier time accessing passives that increase their resource pools and hence their damage scales better if they increase their magicka with these passives. While stamina have the exact opposite. They have access to passives that increase their weapon damage. Hence, their damage will scale better by increasing their max weapon damage with these passives active.

However, the original question is if increasing your resource pool, increases your weapon/spell damage statistic (not your damage), and the answer is still no as Bearclaw states. These are independent from one another. The numbers that matter for damage are: Max Stam/Magicka, Weapon/Spell Damage, Weapon/Spell Critical Chance, Weapon/Spell Critical Damage, and Physical/Spell Penetration. Increasing any of these will increase the damage that you do. However, there is usually a trade off for all of these that usually comes from passives and armor sets your wearing. It is up to you to find a combination that works for you. Hence, the two examples that I gave above.

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How does max magica/stamina affect spell/weapon dmg?

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