Physical Defense

Physical Defense (abbreviated WDEF, and shown in the client as Weapon Def.) is the stat that reduces physical damage. It works in both directions: yours cuts what monsters take off you, and a monster's cuts what your swings take off it. The two directions do not use the same math, and only the incoming one has been confirmed in testing.

Defense never prevents a hit. That is avoidability's job, and the dodge check happens first. Defense only shrinks what a hit that already landed does.

Your physical defense

When a monster's physical attack connects, your defense is subtracted from the rolled damage:

Reduction = floor(min(WDEF x monsterLevel / 70, WDEF / 5))
Taken     = max(1, floor(monATK x dmgRoll) - Reduction)

dmgRoll is a random number between 1.0 and 1.5. The first branch of the reduction only applies against monsters below level 14, because WDEF x level / 70 is the smaller term only while the level is under 14. From level 14 upward the mitigation settles at WDEF / 5.

The practical rule is that every 5 points of physical defense removes about 1 damage from each hit. That is a flat subtraction, not a percentage, so defense matters most against monsters that hit often for small amounts and least against the heavy, infrequent hits of a boss. A landed hit always deals at least 1 damage no matter how much defense you stack.

Physical defense comes from armor and shields, from scrolled bonuses on them, and from buffs such as Iron Body.

A monster's physical defense

A monster's defense works differently. It is a divisor rather than a subtraction: your rolled damage is divided by a factor that grows with the monster's defense. That shape means defense shaves a larger share off small hits than off large ones, so a high Weapon Attack weapon punches through it better than a pile of small stat bonuses does.

Effects that ignore defense shrink that factor. Threaten lowers a monster's defense outright, some scrolls carry defense ignore, and crossbows have a defense-ignore proc.

The exact coefficients of this outgoing reduction are not confirmed. It is the one step of the damage pipeline that has not been verified in game, which means the damage figures quoted elsewhere on this wiki are pre-mitigation: the real number against a defended monster is somewhat lower.

How much monsters actually have

Median physical defense by level band, across every released monster.

This is the surprise in the data. Monster physical defense barely moves with level. Between the tens and the nineties the median sits between 10 and 20 the whole way, while Weapon ATK over the same span grows from 54 to 441. Thirty of the 107 released monsters have no physical defense at all, most of them on Maple Island and in the earliest Victoria Island fields.

The consequence is that a monster's defense is almost never what makes it hard. Level gap, HP and accuracy do that work. Defense-ignore effects are correspondingly less valuable here than the same effects would be in a game where defense scaled with level.

The exception

Iron Hog breaks the pattern completely. At level 28 it carries 500 physical defense, fifty times the median for its band and ten times the next-highest monster in the game.

	Monster	Level	Physical defense
	Iron Hog	28	500
	Jr. Boogie 1	35	50
	Curse Eye	33	30
	Stone Golem	56	30
	Wraith	48	30
	Yeti	65	20
	Wild Boar	25	15
	Snail	1	0

Its magic defense is 100, high but far less extreme, so a magician has a much easier time with it than a warrior of the same level does. It is the clearest case in the game of a monster built to be fought with the other damage type.

Confidence

The incoming formula is confirmed by in-game testing and is the same one quoted on Avoidability. The outgoing direction, your damage against a monster's defense, is known to be a divisor but its coefficients are unconfirmed, and this article does not guess at them. The monster values are the figures published on each monster article and shown in its infobox.

See also

• Damage: where defense sits in the pipeline
• Magic Defense: the same stat for spells
• Avoidability: the dodge check that happens first
• Weapon Attack: what defense is subtracted from
• Iron Body and Threaten: skills that move defense