Damage

Damage is the amount of health an attack removes from its target. Every hit rolls a random number between a minimum and a maximum value, so the same attack on the same monster varies from swing to swing. How wide that range is, and how high it reaches, is set by the attacker's weapon, stats, mastery, and skill, and then adjusted by the target's defense, level, and elemental weakness. The smallest damage any landed hit can deal is 1.

Damage range

A single attack produces a minimum and a maximum number, and the game picks a random value between them for each hit. Raising the maximum lifts your ceiling; raising the minimum (mostly through mastery) lifts your floor and makes your output steadier. Internal math is kept at full precision, and only the final minimum and maximum are rounded to whole numbers.

Physical damage

Warriors, bowmen, and thieves deal physical damage. The minimum and maximum come from the same shape: a base, plus a stat-and-attack term, all multiplied by the weapon's Weapon Attack and the skill's damage percentage.

MAX = (1.0 + (Primary x Mult + Secondary + AP) / 100) x W.ATK x Skill%
MIN = (0.8 + (Primary x Mult x MasteryFactor + Secondary + AP) / 100) x W.ATK x Skill%

MasteryFactor = (0.1 + MasteryLevel / 10) x 0.8

Reading the formula:

• Primary is your main stat, multiplied by the weapon's Mult (the weapon multiplier, see below). This is the single biggest stat contributor.
• Secondary stat and flat AP (attack power from buffs such as Rage) are added at a flat 1 to 1 rate, with no weapon multiplier, so each point is worth far less than a primary point.
• W.ATK (the weapon's listed Weapon Attack) multiplies the entire bracket, so it scales every stat point, every buff, and every mastery level at once.
• Skill% is the skill's damage coefficient, applied last (a basic attack is 100%).
• The maximum starts from a base of 1.0; the minimum starts from 0.8 and shrinks the primary-stat term by the mastery factor, which is why mastery raises the floor without touching the ceiling.

Magic damage

Magicians deal magic damage with a different formula. Weapon Attack, STR, DEX, and LUK do nothing for spells; only Magic Attack (here written Magic) and INT matter.

MAX = (BasicAttack + Magic / 7) x ((Magic x 2 + INT) / 100 + 1)
MIN = (BasicAttack + Magic / 7) x ((Magic x 2 x MasteryFactor + INT) / 100 + 1)

BasicAttack is the flat value listed on the spell's own tooltip, and Magic is your total Magic Attack from the stat window (wand or staff Magic Attack, plus scrolls, plus part of your INT, plus Meditation). INT is added on top and is not reduced by the mastery factor. Each offensive spell carries its own mastery level, so casting a spell is what tightens that spell's range; there is no separate weapon-mastery skill for magicians.

Primary and secondary stats

Each class leans on one primary stat (scaled by the weapon multiplier) and one secondary stat (added flat). Putting points anywhere other than your primary stat, beyond the small amount of secondary a weapon requires, is almost always a damage loss.

Weapon Attack and the weapon multiplier

Two weapon properties drive most of your damage. Weapon Attack multiplies the whole formula, so one point of it is worth a lot: on a two-handed weapon it is roughly equal to four primary stat points, or about nine to ten secondary points. When comparing gear, one Weapon Attack line usually beats +3 primary or +10 secondary on the same slot.

The weapon multiplier scales your primary stat and depends on the weapon class and on whether the skill plays a swing or a stab animation. One-handed swords and the ranged weapons use the same number for both; axes, blunt weapons, spears, and pole arms differ sharply between swing and stab. Skills that mix both animations average them as 60% swing plus 40% stab.

A practical result: on the mixed-animation warrior skills, a pole arm averages 2.7 while a spear averages 2.3, so a pole arm hits roughly 17% harder with Power Strike and Slash Blast even at equal Weapon Attack.

Mastery

Weapon mastery raises only your minimum damage, never your maximum, by feeding the mastery factor in the formulas above. Mastery level runs from 0 to 10. At level 0 the minimum is only 8% of what the primary term could give; at level 10 it is 88%, so your hits cluster near their ceiling instead of swinging wildly low.

Because most of a low-level character's damage variance comes from a soft minimum, maxing a weapon-mastery skill at second job is one of the largest single upgrades available, worth roughly a 39% increase in average damage on a typical attack from floor-raising alone. Magicians get the same effect per spell as they level that spell.

Skill coefficient

The skill percentage is an outer multiplier, like Weapon Attack, applied after everything else. A basic attack is 100%. A maxed attack skill multiplies every hit, and multi-hit skills apply the percentage to each line.

Critical hits

A critical hit multiplies the rolled damage (not the maximum, the actual rolled value) by one plus the critical damage bonus. Every class has a small innate critical chance, and several skills add much more.

Accuracy and missing

Before damage is calculated, an attack has to land. Your accuracy is checked against the target's avoidability and level: too little accuracy, or a target far above your level, and attacks miss for zero damage. Bowmen and thieves rely on accuracy heavily, which is part of why DEX is their primary or secondary stat. Raising accuracy does not increase damage; it only converts misses into hits. The full hit-rate formula, including the level-gap term, is on the Accuracy page.

Level difference

Fighting monsters above your level reduces both your accuracy and your damage. The damage penalty grows with the gap.

LevelDiff under 10:   damage / (LevelDiff^2 x 0.005 + 1)
LevelDiff 10 or more: damage / (LevelDiff x 0.05 + 1)

There is no matching bonus for fighting monsters below your level: damage simply stays at full. The penalty is the main reason training on monsters more than a few levels above you is inefficient.

Elemental weakness

Offensive spells carry an element (fire, ice, lightning, poison, holy). When a spell hits a monster, the monster's reaction to that element scales the damage after the formula.

Physical attacks are always treated as neutral, and non-elemental spells such as Magic Claw and Energy Bolt ignore the table entirely, which makes them reliable against monsters that resist a magician's elemental spells. Hitting a weakness is a flat 25% bonus, and Clerics get a large effective bonus against the undead and demon monsters their holy magic is strong against.

Monster defense

A monster's weapon defense reduces the physical damage it takes, and its magic defense reduces magic damage. The reduction is a divisor, not a flat subtraction: your rolled damage is divided by a factor that grows with the monster's defense, so defense shaves a larger share off small hits than off big ones, and a high Weapon Attack weapon punches through it better than a pile of small stat bonuses. Effects that ignore defense, such as certain scrolls, a warrior's Threaten, or a crossbowman's defense-ignore proc, shrink that factor.

The exact coefficients of this outgoing reduction are not yet confirmed, and it is the one step of the damage pipeline that has not been verified in-game, so the damage values shown here are pre-mitigation numbers, the damage before the monster's defense is applied. A defended monster's real damage is therefore somewhat lower than the listed figure.

Your own defense works the other way when a monster hits you: each point of weapon defense cuts a little off incoming melee damage, down to a guaranteed minimum of 1. That incoming reduction was tested separately and does not mirror the outgoing one.

Damage floor and ceiling

After every bonus and reduction, damage is clamped so that a landed hit always deals at least 1, and the engine caps a single hit at a ceiling far above anything reachable with Victoria Island gear. In practice only the floor of 1 ever comes into play, on heavily resisted or badly under-leveled hits.

What raises damage the most

Ordered roughly by value per point or per gear line:

1. Weapon Attack on the weapon, since it multiplies the whole formula.
2. The weapon multiplier, through weapon class and which animation a skill uses.
3. Primary stat, scaled by the weapon multiplier.
4. Mastery level, for the minimum-damage jump at second job.
5. Secondary stat and flat attack power, worth far less and roughly equal to each other.
6. The skill itself, through its damage coefficient.

A useful rule of thumb: one Weapon Attack line on a piece of gear beats +3 primary stat or +10 secondary stat on the same slot.

See also

• Accuracy
• Attack Speed
• Experience
• Critical Shot