Weapon Attack

Weapon Attack (abbreviated W.ATK) is the attack rating a weapon carries, and the largest single lever on physical damage. It multiplies the whole damage calculation rather than adding to it, so one point lifts every stat point, every buff and every mastery level at once. Magician spells ignore it completely and run on Magic Attack instead.

What it does

In the physical damage formula, Weapon Attack sits outside the bracket that holds your stats, and multiplies all of it. That position is the whole story: a stat point raises one term inside the bracket, while a point of Weapon Attack raises the result of every term at once. The full formula, with the weapon multiplier and mastery, lives on Damage and is not repeated here.

The practical consequence is that Weapon Attack and your primary stat compound. Neither is worth much without the other, and a character who stacks stat while ignoring weapon upgrades stalls just as hard as one who does the reverse.

Where it comes from

• The weapon's own listed Weapon Attack, the number on its tooltip. This is the bulk of it.
• Scrolled bonuses on the weapon. See Scrolling.
• Attack buffs such as Rage.

Buff attack and weapon attack are not interchangeable. The model on Damage adds flat buff attack inside the bracket, alongside your secondary stat, while the weapon's own Weapon Attack multiplies from outside it. A point of buff attack is therefore worth far less than a point on the weapon.

Why one point is worth so much

On a two-handed weapon, one point of Weapon Attack is worth roughly four primary stat points, or nine to ten secondary points. Comparing two pieces of gear for the same slot, a single Weapon Attack line generally beats +3 primary stat or +10 secondary stat. This is why weapon upgrades dominate the early gear curve, and why a scroll that lands Weapon Attack is worth more than one that lands stat.

A monster's weapon attack

On a monster article, Weapon ATK is the same idea pointed the other way: what the monster hits you with. When its attack is not dodged, your physical defense is subtracted from the rolled value:

Taken = max(1, floor(monATK x dmgRoll) - Reduction)

Here dmgRoll is a random number between 1.0 and 1.5, so a monster's listed attack is a floor rather than an average. See Avoidability for the dodge check that happens first, and Physical Defense for the reduction term.

How much monsters carry

Median Weapon ATK by level band, across every released monster.

The curve climbs steeply through the twenties and thirties and then flattens. A monster in its nineties hits about fifty times as hard as one on Maple Island, but only about 1.5 times as hard as one in its fifties, so the difficulty of late Victoria Island content comes far more from monster HP and from your own accuracy than from raw incoming damage.

Examples

	Monster	Level	Weapon ATK
	Snail	1	3
	Orange Mushroom	8	17
	Ribbon Pig	10	27
	Wild Boar	25	131
	Fire Boar	32	180
	Cold Eye	40	237
	Croco	52	270
	Stone Golem	56	288
	Yeti	65	329
	Taurospear	75	410
	Bain	90	441
	Mushmom	40	532
	Zombie Mushmom	50	642
	Jr. Balrog	80	972

Bosses sit far above field monsters of the same level. Mushmom is level 40, the same as Cold Eye, and hits more than twice as hard.

Confidence

The position of Weapon Attack in the physical damage formula, and the incoming-damage formula above, both come from in-game testing and are treated as confirmed. The gear comparison rules of thumb are derived from that formula rather than measured separately. The monster values are the figures published on each monster article and shown in its infobox.

See also

• Damage: the full formula Weapon Attack multiplies
• Magic Attack: the magician equivalent
• Physical Defense: what reduces a physical hit
• Weapon and Scrolling: where Weapon Attack comes from
• Attack Speed: how often you swing