MapleStory Classic World Damage Formula Explained - MapleStory Classic

The MapleStory Classic World damage formula is the equation behind every yellow number that pops off a monster when you hit it. Understanding it tells you why polearms hit harder than 1H swords, why weapon mastery is the biggest single damage jump at second job, why 1 point of W.ATK is worth about 10 points of secondary stat on 2H weapons for warriors, and why a level 30 warrior's Power Strike can roll anywhere from 153 to 449 against the same target. Below: the formula line by line, real weapon data, and a worked level 30 warrior example.

Contents

1. What the damage formula calculates
2. The formula (physical attacks)
3. Component breakdown
4. Weapon multipliers: swing vs stab
5. Mastery: why your minimum jumps at second job
6. Worked example: Power Strike at level 30
7. Polearm vs 2H Sword vs 1H Sword
8. Stat valuation: what +1 W.ATK is really worth
9. Magicians use a different formula
10. Lucky Seven is the other exception
11. Crit: every class has a 5% / 20% base
12. After the range rolls: the post-formula pipeline
13. Practical takeaways

What the damage formula calculates

Every physical attack in Classic World rolls a random number between a MIN and a MAX. Those two numbers are your attack range, the values you see on the character stat window next to W.ATK. The formula below builds MAX and MIN from your stats, your weapon, and your mastery level. Everything downstream (critical hits, the elemental multiplier, the level-difference penalty against over-leveled mobs, monster defense, skill-specific effects like the Iron Arrow pierce falloff) modifies the rolled result after the attack range is set. Those post-formula steps have their own section below. If your attack range is wrong, everything downstream is wrong too, so this is the layer to understand first.

The formula (physical attacks)

Two lines drive every physical hit. Read the parentheses carefully: they matter.

Component breakdown

• PrimaryStat: your main damage stat. Warriors use STR, Bowmen use DEX, Thieves use LUK, Magicians use INT.
• SecondaryStat: your off-stat. It adds to the inner expression at a 1:1 ratio with AttackPower. Warriors use DEX, Bowmen use STR, Thieves use DEX, Magicians use LUK. It does not get multiplied by the weapon's Mult, so a single secondary stat point adds much less damage than a single primary stat point.
• MaxMult / MinMult: the weapon's damage multiplier. For almost every skill both values are the same, read from the weapon's swing or stab column based on the skill's animation. Skills that alternate animations per cast (Power Strike, Slash Blast, most Final Attacks, Steal) read a 60/40 weighted average of swing and stab: `0.6 × swing + 0.4 × stab`. The full swing/stab table and the derivation of the 60/40 ratio are in the next section.
• WeaponAttack: the weapon's listed W.ATK stat, the "Attack" number on the weapon tooltip. Scimitar = 50. Lion's Fang = 70. This is the outer multiplier on the entire formula, which means every primary stat point, every secondary stat point, every flat AP buff, and every mastery level you earn gets multiplied by WeaponAttack at the end. This is why 1 point of W.ATK is so much more valuable than 1 point of any other stat.
• AttackPower: flat attack-power bonuses only. Rage +35, Claw Mastery's +20, Blunt Weapon Mastery's +20. Goes into the inner additive slot alongside SecondaryStat at 1:1. Does NOT include the weapon's base W.ATK stat, that slot is WeaponAttack.
• SkillPercent: the skill's damage coefficient divided by 100. Basic attack is 1.0. Maxed Power Strike is 2.6 (260%). Maxed Slash Blast is 1.3 (130%). Maxed Double Stab is 1.6 per hit (2 hits per cast). SkillPercent is applied as a separate outer multiplier on top of WeaponAttack, so both outer multipliers stack.
• MasteryLvl: your weapon mastery skill level, from 0 (1st job, no mastery) to 10 (maxed 2nd job Weapon Mastery). Scales MIN only, never touches MAX. At mastery 0, your PrimaryStat contribution to MIN is 8% of its MAX contribution. At mastery 10, that rises to 88%.

Weapon multipliers: swing vs stab

Every weapon type in Classic World has two multiplier values: one for swing animations and one for stab animations. The skill you press determines which column the game reads. For most one-handed and two-handed weapons the swing and stab values are the same, so the distinction only matters for spears, polearms, and daggers, where the numbers are dramatically different.

• Alternation ratio is 60/40 swing to stab (updated 2026-04-23). Community theorycrafter Littlefoot back-solved it from the in-game basic-attack AVG column in his ODS spreadsheet: dagger averages `0.6 × 1.0 + 0.4 × 2.0 = 1.4`, 1H BW/Axe averages `0.6 × 2.4 + 0.4 × 1.2 = 1.92`, symmetric weapons (sword, bow, claw) average to their single column regardless of weighting. This site's simulator previously used a 50/50 EV assumption; every mixed-tag skill was retagged to 60/40 on 2026-04-23. The 60/40 ratio is directly observed for basic-attack animations only; extending it to Power Strike / Slash Blast / FA / Steal is an inference that hasn't been controlled-tested. If a future test proves mixed-tag skills use a different ratio, the site's simulator and this guide will be updated.
• Polearm pulls ahead of spear on every Spearman mixed skill. Under 60/40, polearm Power Strike reads `0.6 × 3.5 + 0.4 × 1.5 = 2.7`; spear Power Strike reads `0.6 × 1.5 + 0.4 × 3.5 = 2.3`. That's a ~17% gap on the inner-term multiplier in polearm's favor on Power Strike, Slash Blast, Final Attack: Polearm, and Final Attack: Spear. Basic-attack animations still expose the raw columns (polearm-swing 3.5, spear-stab 3.5), but every 2nd-job skill rotates through both. An earlier version of this guide called them "mirror-equivalent" under a 50/50 assumption; that's no longer true.
• Dagger stab (2.0) is what Savage Blow and Double Stab use. Both are pure-stab skills that always read the 2.0 column; this is why Bandits get real single-target burst despite dagger's miserable 1.0 swing. Steal, by contrast, is mixed, so it reads `0.6 × 1.0 + 0.4 × 2.0 = 1.4` under 60/40.

Mastery: why your minimum jumps at second job

At 1st job you have no weapon mastery skill, so your MasteryLvl is 0. Plug that into the MIN formula's mastery term: (0.1 + 0/10) × 0.8 = 0.08. Your PrimaryStat's contribution to MIN is only 8% of the value it would contribute at full mastery, which is why 1st job damage swings wildly and every fight feels inconsistent.

At 2nd job, every physical class gets a Weapon Mastery passive that caps at level 10 for the base formula effect. (Some classes get a mastery-boost passive that raises the cap higher, but the core mastery contribution plateaus at level 10.) At MasteryLvl 10: (0.1 + 10/10) × 0.8 = 0.88. Your PrimaryStat contribution to MIN is now 88% of what it is to MAX, and in the worked example below your attack range tightens from a ~2.9:1 spread down to roughly a 1.16:1 spread overnight. The exact ratios depend on your stats, weapon, and flat AP, but the shape of the jump is the same for every physical class.

Worked example: Power Strike at level 30

Real numbers: take a level 30 warrior at roughly a 4:1 STR/DEX ratio, STR 90, DEX 20 for this worked example, wielding a Scimitar (2H Sword, W.ATK 50), no buffs active. They press Power Strike at level 20, which is 260%. Power Strike is tagged as a swing skill, so we read the 2H Sword swing column: both MinMult and MaxMult are 2.5. The formula is computed in two steps: first the attack range, then multiply by SkillPercent (2.6) for the final Power Strike damage.

MAX calculation:

MIN calculation (1st job, MasteryLvl 0):

So at level 30, just before 2nd job, this warrior's Power Strike rolls 153 to 449. That's a 2.94x spread between floor and ceiling, and it's why 1st job damage feels wildly inconsistent on every swing. Now fast-forward a few levels into 2nd job, max Sword Mastery to level 10, and recompute MIN with MasteryLvl 10:

MAX is still 449 (mastery never touches it), but MIN jumped from 153 to 387. Damage stability went from 34% of MAX to 86% of MAX. Average Power Strike damage (assuming a uniform roll between MIN and MAX) goes from (153 + 449) / 2 = 301 pre-mastery to (387 + 449) / 2 = 418 post-mastery, a 1.39x gain or roughly +39% DPS. Your gear, stats, and skill haven't changed, only your MIN stopped being a coin-flip. That's the mastery payoff, and it's why you rush mastery to 10 the moment you advance.

Polearm vs 2H Sword vs 1H Sword

The same warrior (STR 90, DEX 20), same Power Strike (260%), just swapping weapons. All three are level 30 items pulled straight from the equipment database. All numbers assume 1st job (MasteryLvl 0), no buffs, so the MIN column reflects pre-mastery output. Power Strike is a mixed skill, so the Mult column shows each weapon's 60/40 weighted average of swing and stab.

	Weapon	Effective Mult	W.ATK	MAX	MIN
	Scimitar (2H Sword, 2.5 / 2.5)	2.5	50	449	153
	Mithril Pole Arm (Polearm, 3.5 / 1.5)	2.7	52	491	161
	Gladius (1H Sword, 1.8 / 1.8)	1.8	47	345	138

The polearm's MAX is 9% higher than the 2H sword's (491 vs 449) on Power Strike, and the 1H sword's MAX is 23% lower than the 2H sword's (345 vs 449). The polearm gap is a lot smaller than it looks from the raw 3.5 swing column because Power Strike is mixed, and the 1.5 stab column drags the effective mult down from 3.5 to 2.7. Polearm still wins, but the margin on standard skills is single digits. The raw column implies 30%+. The 1H-vs-2H-sword gap holds up because both weapons are symmetric (swing = stab), so mixing doesn't change anything there.

For the full weapon upgrade path with every variant level 10 through 30, see the Warrior Leveling Guide. For the 2.5x claw and bow equivalents, see the Thief Leveling Guide and the Bowman Leveling Guide.

Stat valuation: what +1 W.ATK is really worth

A common misconception is that +1 DEX from a green armor variant is about the same as +1 W.ATK from a scroll. That's wrong, and the reason is subtle. SecondaryStat and flat AttackPower go into the inner expression at 1:1 with each other, so gaining 1 of either gives the same damage bump. But the weapon's base W.ATK goes into the outer `WeaponAttack` multiplier, which compounds with every other stat you have. One more point of W.ATK is worth several points of any inner-slot stat.

Here's the actual per-point valuation for a level 50 character with standard stats (200 primary / 50 secondary, no buffs) on a lv 50 weapon with W.ATK 70 (the baseline used here is Lion's Fang; other lv 50 weapons land in a 67 to 73 W.ATK band and shift the numbers by only a percent or two). 2H weapons (Mult 2.5, like Lion's Fang or the 2H axes and blunts):

The common rule of thumb "4 primary = 1 W.ATK, 10 secondary = 1 W.ATK" is exact at W.ATK 65 and about 7% off at the real Lion's Fang W.ATK 70. Treat it as "roughly 4:1 / 10:1" for napkin math. The exact ratio scales linearly with W.ATK: `primaryPerWatk = WATK / 260`, `secondaryPerWatk = WATK / 650` on 2H Mult 2.5.

1H Swords (Mult 1.8, e.g. Jeweled Katar; note that in Classic World you will find "Katar" under 1H Swords):

1H Axes and 1H Blunts sit in a third bracket. These are the only asymmetric warrior 1-handers (2.4 swing / 1.2 stab). On a pure basic-attack swing the mult is 2.4, but every standard warrior skill (Power Strike, Slash Blast, Fighter Final Attack: Axe, Page Final Attack: Blunt) is mixed, so the effective mult on those skills is the 60/40 weighted average `0.6 × 2.4 + 0.4 × 1.2 = 1.92`. That puts them just above the 1H Sword bracket (1.8) and well below 2H (2.5) on the skills you press most of the time.

What this means for scrolling and gear priority:

• +W.ATK scrolls on your weapon are by far the best damage-per-slot upgrade you can make. One WATK line from a Greater or Intermediate weapon scroll beats +3 Primary or +10 Secondary on any single gear piece, slot for slot. Always prioritise weapon scrolling over armor scrolling if you have to pick one.
• Primary stat scrolls are the second-best source. +1 STR on a warrior is worth 0.25x a +1 W.ATK, which is still meaningful. Stack primary on every armor slot that supports it.
• Secondary stat is a distant third for raw damage (for warriors that's DEX, for bowmen STR, for thieves DEX). On 2H weapons you need 10 points of secondary stat to match 1 W.ATK. Scrolling secondary purely for damage is a bad trade. Do it only to clear gear requirements or when no +primary option is available in the slot.
• AttackPower from buffs (Rage +35, Claw Mastery +20, Blunt Mastery +20) adds real damage, though it enters the formula on the secondary-stat scale. Rage's +35 AP is good simply because it's free.
• On 1H Swords, secondary stat is slightly more valuable than on 2H weapons (7.3:1 instead of ~9.3:1), because the primary multiplier is lower so the gap tightens. 1H Axes and 1H Blunts on swing (2.4 multiplier) are now almost identical to 2H at ~9.0:1, so for those weapons you can use the same "4 primary / 9 to 10 secondary per W.ATK" heuristic the 2H bracket uses. All three still lose to W.ATK badly.

Magicians use a different formula

Everything above describes physical attacks that scale off W.ATK. Magicians run their own formula. Spells scale off Magic (the stat-page line: your wand or staff's Magic Attack stat plus INT/2 plus +Magic Attack scrolls plus Meditation), with INT as a secondary additive inside the multiplier. W.ATK does not appear anywhere in the spell formula. LUK does nothing for spell damage at all in Classic World: magicians cannot miss, so LUK's usual accuracy role is moot, and it has no slot in the spell formula. That's why there's no lukless-mage damage meme the same way there's a dexless-assassin meme for thieves.

• BasicAttack is the flat Basic Atk number from the spell tooltip (not a percent). Maxed Magic Claw is 30 per hit (two hits per cast), maxed Fire Arrow is 130, maxed Cold Beam is 120, maxed Holy Arrow is 40.
• Magic is your stat-window total, labeled "Magic" in-game on the stat page. It rolls up wand or staff Magic Attack + scrolled +Magic Attack lines + Meditation (+25 party buff at max) + INT/2. No W.ATK term appears anywhere in the spell formula. Scrolling +W.ATK on a wand does nothing for spells.
• INT is the flat additive in the inner multiplier. It does NOT get multiplied by the mastery factor, so mastery only tightens the `Magic × 2` term.
• MasteryLvl comes from the spell's own level. There is no Wand Mastery skill in the magician tree. Every offensive spell carries its own built-in mastery that scales with the spell's level. A maxed Magic Claw at lv 20 reads MasteryLvl 10 and enjoys full 0.88 stability immediately, no separate 2nd-job passive needed.
• Elemental multiplier is applied post-formula: mob is Immune (×0.0), Resist (×0.75), Neutral (×1.0), or Weak (×1.25) to the spell's element. Non-elemental spells (Magic Claw, Energy Bolt) ignore this multiplier regardless of mob resistance.

Worked example: Fire Arrow at level 50

Lv 50 F/P Wizard, INT 200, Cromi wand (wand Magic Attack 83), no Meditation active. Stat-window Magic is `floor(200/2) + 83 = 183` because every 2 INT auto-grants +1 Magic. Maxed Fire Arrow (BasicAttack 130, MasteryLvl 10, Mastery factor 0.88).

Fire Arrow rolls 971 to 1040 per cast at this baseline, a 1.07x spread, about as stable as physical damage gets at full mastery. Against a fire-weak mob that becomes 1214 to 1300 (×1.25). Against a fire-immune mob, 0 damage regardless of roll. Check elemental tables before picking spells for a given map.

Stat valuation for mages

The scaling shape inverts from the physical formula's ~4:10:10 ratio (1 W.ATK = ~4 primary = ~10 secondary = ~10 AP). For mages:

• Magic is the dominant gear stat. It appears twice in the formula: once as the outer `Magic/7` floor, and again inside the inner multiplier as `Magic × 2`. At the lv 50 anchor (stat-window Magic 183, INT 200) +1 Magic moves Fire Arrow MAX by about 4.1 damage. Scroll +Magic Attack on your wand and armor before anything else. Magic is sourced almost entirely from gear and scrolls, so every extra point is one you can't get from AP.
• INT is nearly as valuable as Magic per point, because every 2 INT auto-grants +1 Magic. That is the magician's flywheel. +1 INT adds ~1.6 damage directly through the formula's `+ INT` additive slot, and every second INT also adds +1 to stat-window Magic (worth another ~4.1 damage). Averaged across the integer boundary, +1 INT is worth about 3.6 damage per cast, roughly 88% of a Magic point. Every AP dumped into INT pays out twice, and it clears gear stat requirements on the way up.
• LUK does nothing for damage. It does not appear in the formula. LUK gear exists purely to hit the wand, staff, and robe LUK requirements, which climb with level from LUK 20 on the lv 30 Mithril Wand up to LUK 40 on the lv 50 Cromi and lv 45 Arc Staff. The 4 INT / 1 LUK AP split is a pure gear-req tax.
• AttackPower buffs do nothing for spells. Rage, Claw Mastery's +20 AP, Blunt Mastery's +20 AP, +W.ATK scrolls: none of those stats appear in the magic formula. Magicians don't have access to Rage anyway, but the implication matters for cross-class thinking: the only "damage buff" magicians care about is Meditation (+25 Magic party buff at max).

See the Magician Leveling Guide for practical stat, gear, and skill recommendations, and the DMG Simulator for a live Magician panel with mob elemental-tier toggle and Meditation buff.

Lucky Seven is the other exception

Lucky Seven on the assassin side of Thief uses the same physical formula as every other skill, with two overrides baked into the skill itself (worked out from damage data Slash posted on the community Discord: first confirmed 2026-04-20, weapon multiplier corrected 2026-05-09 from his spreadsheet). Both overrides are fixed constants the skill carries; neither depends on the player's Claw Mastery level:

What follows from this:

• DEX (and STR) contribute. Assassin's primary is LUK; STR and DEX both sit in the secondary slot alongside flat AP. Worth far less than LUK per point (LUK carries a 2.6x weapon multiplier on top of itself), but not zero.
• Attack Power works. Rage (+35 AP), Claw Mastery's passive +20 AP, and any +W.ATK scroll lines on gear all feed L7. This was the big 2026-04-20 correction to an earlier provisional formula that assumed AP was ignored.
• Leveling Claw Mastery does not tighten L7's spread. The mastery factor is locked at 0.5 by the skill itself, so raising Claw Mastery changes nothing for L7 damage range. It still helps the basic attack and Drain (those read your actual Claw Mastery level), and its +20 AP line still boosts everything including L7.
• Dexless is still the right call for pure damage. DEX-from-AP is inefficient compared to dumping those points into LUK. Dexless assassins use gear and scrolls to cover claw/armor DEX requirements. Caveat: stat-derived ACC is `floor(DEX/3) + floor(LUK/6) + 5` (universal across every class and weapon), so leaning too far dexless still hurts hit rate on high-avoid mobs even with LUK contributing. A few DEX points, or ACC-scrolled gear, usually does the job.
• The MIN/MAX stability ratio. With mastery locked at 0.5 and WeaponMult 2.6, L7's MIN inner term is `(LUK × 1.3 + STR + DEX + AP) / 100` and MAX is `(LUK × 2.6 + STR + DEX + AP) / 100`. At typical Assassin stats this sits in the ~55-65% range: better than a 1st-job warrior's ~34% floor but worse than a mastered 2nd-job class's ~86%. Only LUK (and, to a tiny degree, STR + DEX + AP) tightens the spread.

Bandit skills (Savage Blow, Double Stab) use the normal physical formula with the dagger stab multiplier of 2.0. Bandits are NOT special, they use SecondaryStat and they scale with Dagger Mastery. The bandit skill build and stat split look nothing like the assassin one. The full dexless vs standard discussion with gear thresholds is in the Thief Leveling Guide.

Crit: every class has a 5% / 20% base

Every class in Classic World has an innate +5% crit rate and +20% crit damage bonus. Passive crit rate from class skills (Bowman's Critical Shot +20%, Assassin's Critical Throw +15%, Bandit's Dagger Mastery +20%) and passive crit damage (Critical Shot +15%, Critical Throw +35%) both stack on top of these bases. Warriors can pull extra crit rate from Precise Strikes (1st-job passive, up to +5% at 15 SP), but the standard warrior build only flexes 3 SP into it for +1% on top of the 5% innate, since Power Strike, Slash Blast, and Max HP Increase eat the rest of the SP budget. Magicians have no crit-rate passive at all, but they still crit 5% of the time off the innate base for a small but real damage boost.

When a hit crits, the normal rolled damage is multiplied by (1 + total crit damage %) where total = 20 base + any passive bonuses. Crits do NOT force a MAX roll in Classic World, they scale the random rolled value. The expected average damage per hit works out to:

The `/10000` is just bookkeeping: both critRate and critDmg are percents, so you divide each by 100 to convert them to decimals, and `100 × 100 = 10000`.

Per-class crit sources and effective boosts at max passives. All totals include the 5% innate base crit rate and 20% innate base crit damage:

The Damage Simulator applies this crit model in its Avg w/ crit column and propagates the multiplier through the vs 1T / 4T total-output columns. The raw Min/hit, Max/hit, and Avg/cast columns stay unchanged so they're still hand-verifiable against the formula above.

After the range rolls: the post-formula pipeline

The attack range formula gives you a MIN and a MAX. On every hit the game rolls a random number between them and then runs that number through a short pipeline of multipliers and dividers before the final damage lands on the mob. Slash worked out and confirmed these steps. The order is fixed:

Level-difference penalty

When a monster is higher level than you, the game divides your damage by a penalty factor. There are two branches: a soft quadratic one while the gap is under 10, and a harder linear one once the gap hits 10 or more. The formulas:

Plugging real numbers in, the damage you deal against over-leveled mobs looks like this:

There is no symmetric bonus for fighting under-leveled mobs; the formula only applies a penalty when LevelDiff is positive. Once a mob is below your level the multiplier is a clean 1.0x, which makes greying mobs the most efficient per-hit targets (though their EXP drops off sharply, so grind efficiency still lives near your own level). The full EXP curve is in the EXP table guide.

Elemental multiplier

Element-tagged attacks (the four elemental magician spells plus Cleric's Holy Arrow vs undead) read a four-tier multiplier off the target mob's element table. Physical attacks are always neutral and never read this table.

An older version of this guide described elemental advantage as "a flat +25% multiplier." That was only the top row of this table. Resist (0.75x) and Immune (0.0x) are real tiers too, which is why some mobs eat an F/P mage's Fire Arrow for full damage while others shrug it off or no-sell it entirely. The Damage Simulator has a mob elemental-tier toggle on its Magician panel so you can see the multiplier applied live.

Monster WDEF (outgoing damage, shape only)

On the outgoing path, the monster's own physical defense divides your rolled damage. The current best read of how it works:

Incoming damage: player WDEF vs mob attack

Everything above is about outgoing damage: the hit you land on a mob. The reverse direction (a mob hitting you) uses a completely different formula, since confirmed by testing. It's subtractive: every 5 WDEF shaves exactly 1 damage off each hit.

Monsters don't hit for a fixed number: each hit rolls between 1.0× and 1.5× their displayed attack, so a mob with 100 ATK can land anywhere from 100 to 150 before your defense subtracts. And the reduction has two branches that meet exactly at mob level 14:

Because the game floors at every step, WDEF 145 and 149 give identical reduction (both `floor(x / 5) = 29`). Even WDEF 148 rounds down to 29, not 30. If you're gearing for defense, rounding down to the nearest multiple of 5 tells you exactly how many points are working for you.

A worked example: mob `pdmg = 100`, mob level 14+ (hard cap branch). Your WDEF determines the worst-case hit you'll ever take (the 1.5× roll):

Past ~5× the mob's max-roll damage, extra WDEF is wasted; hits already land at the 1-damage floor. That's the practical case for Iron Body, shields, and Magic Armor: they only pay off up to a ceiling that depends on what you're fighting. The Training Advisor in the character builder uses this exact formula to tag each mob as safe / caution / danger / lethal relative to your current HP, and magic defense is assumed to follow the same shape (MDEF vs mob `mdmg`) pending a magic-attacker test pass.

Iron Arrow pierce falloff

Crossbowman's Iron Arrow fires a piercing line that can hit up to four enemies, but the damage drops off with each mob it passes through. The falloff formula is:

Effective output over four targets is 2.8x a single hit, not 4x. The Damage Simulator now reflects this in its vs 4T column for Iron Arrow; earlier versions multiplied by a naive 4x and overstated Crossbowman AoE by about 43%.

The damage clamp

After everything else, damage is clamped between 1 and 700,000,000,000 (seven hundred billion). The floor matters if every other multiplier stacks to effectively zero; the ceiling is trivia at lv 50 gearing and only shows up in late-game showcase numbers.

Practical takeaways

• W.ATK on your weapon is the biggest lever on your damage. It's the outer multiplier on the entire formula, which means every stat point, every flat AP buff, and every mastery level you earn gets multiplied by it at the end. 1 W.ATK is worth about 4 primary stat, 9-10 secondary stat, or 9-10 flat AP on 2H weapons, roughly 4 primary / 7.3 secondary / 7.3 AP on 1H Swords, and roughly 3.75 primary / 9 secondary / 9 AP on 1H Axes or 1H Blunts after the Classic World multiplier rewrite. This is why +WATK weapon scrolls beat every other source of damage per slot.
• Weapon multiplier is the second biggest lever on MAX, ignoring attack speed. On Power Strike, the effective mult after the 60/40 mixed-animation weighting is 2.7 for polearm, 2.5 for 2H sword, 1.92 for 1H axe/blunt, 1.8 for 1H sword. Going from a 2H Sword to a Polearm is a ~9% MAX damage increase in our worked example (491 vs 449), and a 1H Sword is 23% lower than the 2H Sword, all with nearly identical base W.ATK. The raw 3.5 polearm swing column looks like a 40% advantage but only surfaces on the basic-attack animation; every standard skill is mixed. Second-job weapon choice still matters, but remember the polearm is Slow (speed 8) and the 1H sword is Fast (speed 4), so per-hit gains translate to less DPS than the per-hit numbers suggest.
• Mastery is the single biggest lever on MIN. Your MIN at 1st job is roughly 34% of your MAX. Maxing Weapon Mastery to level 10 at 2nd job pulls that up to about 86% within the first few 2nd job levels, which is the single strongest argument for rushing mastery before any other 2nd job skill.
• SecondaryStat and flat AttackPower ARE 1:1 with each other, just not with W.ATK. Rage's +35 AttackPower is worth the same as +35 DEX from gear and scrolls. Neither is worth as much as adding W.ATK to the weapon directly.
• SkillPercent multiplies everything at the end. Maxed Power Strike (2.6x) is 2.6x a basic attack (1.0x). Every stat point, every W.ATK, and every mastery level you earn gets a flat 2.6x boost whenever you press the button. This is why you sink the first SP into your damage skill at level 10.
• Everything post-formula happens in a fixed pipeline. After the range rolls, the game runs the number through WDEF mitigation (a divisor), the four-tier elemental multiplier (0 / 0.75 / 1.0 / 1.25), the level-difference penalty when you fight above your level, the crit multiplier if it rolls, and the Iron Arrow pierce falloff if that's the skill you pressed. The level-difference penalty is the one most players can feel without a spreadsheet: fighting a mob 10 levels above you already strips a third of your damage, and at 20 levels up you're hitting for half. Understanding the formula gives you the base layer; the post-formula section above has the rest.

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