Damage Calculation

Every hit you land is not one number — it is up to ten. A single attack rolls a Physical hit, up to eight elemental hits (Magic, Water, Fire, Earth, Air, Poison, Ice, Lightning) and a Heroic hit. Each one is calculated on its own and reduced by its own defence, and only then are they added together. The number that floats over your target is the total — you never see the breakdown.

This page walks through that calculation in the order the server actually performs it.

1. DOES THE HIT LAND AT ALL?

Normal attacks and skills use completely different checks. This is the single most misunderstood part of the whole system.

Normal (auto) attacks pass through four gates, in this order. Failing any one of them means exactly zero damage — there is no partial hit and no glancing blow:

• Blind — if you are blinded, every normal attack misses. No roll at all. (Your skills still work.)
• Dodge / Evade — the defender’s avoidance roll.
• Block — the defender’s shield Block roll.
• Hit roll — your Attack Rating against their Defence Rating.

Skills skip all of it. A skill cannot miss, cannot be dodged, cannot be evaded and cannot be shield-blocked. The only thing that stops a skill is Skill Block — and only on skills flagged as blockable. Most heroic-tier skills ignore Skill Block entirely.

Ignore Block Rate and Ignore Dodge do nothing against a skill — only Ignore Skill Block Rate does. And a blocked skill is a total loss: no damage and none of its stuns, slows or debuffs, while still burning the cast and the cooldown.

Dodge and Evade are two different stats, and which one protects you is decided by the attacker, not by you:

Stacking the wrong one does nothing against that attacker.

The hit roll. Your ratings are built from level and Agility:

• Attack Rating = (Level + Agility + 20) × 0.6 + Attack Rating from gear
• Defence Rating = (Level + Agility + 20) × 0.4 + Defence Rating from gear

hit% = AR ÷ (AR + their DR) × 2.9 × your level ÷ (your level + their level) × 100

Your gear’s Hit Rate is then added, and the result is clamped between 10% and 95%. Against an equal-level target with equal Agility and no rating gear this works out to roughly 87%.

Against anything above your level, that entire calculation is thrown away. Your hit chance becomes a flat 90 minus 7 per level of difference. Attack Rating, Agility and gear buy you nothing at all. One level up = 83%, five levels up = 55%, and from twelve levels up you are pinned at the 10% floor permanently. Monsters attacking upward get a gentler rule (85 minus 3 per level, floor 30%), which is why low-level mobs still land hits on you.

2. YOUR BASE DAMAGE

Physical damage starts with your class’s stat contribution plus the flat Damage on your gear. Which stat feeds it depends on your class family, not on the weapon you are holding:

• Minimum = stat contribution × 1.00 + your gear’s minimum Damage
• Maximum = stat contribution × 1.05 + your gear’s maximum Damage

The stat half of your damage only varies by 5% between your minimum and your maximum, so essentially all of the spread you see comes from your gear’s own min/max Damage. An item option reading “Damage +N” adds N to both ends, making it a pure increase rather than a wider spread.

The Damage number on your character sheet is the top of your range, not an average — and it is shown before any enemy Defence or Resistance is taken off. Your actual hits land somewhere between your minimum and that number.

Agility does not raise damage for melee or caster classes. For them it only feeds Attack Rating, Defence Rating and Dodge/Evade. And note that on Archonia the ranged family gets Agility÷4.5 — older Archlord guides quoting Agility÷3 are out of date here.

3. SKILLS MULTIPLY THAT NUMBER

A skill’s listed power is a percentage of your normal attack power, and it is additive on top of a full hit. A skill listed at 110% deals 2.10× your attack power, not 1.10×.

Most attack skills gain +10 percentage points per skill level — Dual Slash runs from 110% at level 1 to 300% at level 20. Your usable skill level caps at 20, counting trained level plus any +skill level from gear, titles and buffs; anything above 20 is discarded.

Because the skill percentage multiplies your attack power, skill level, weapon damage and your main stat all compound with one another.

Under-levelling hurts; over-levelling does not help. Being higher level than your target gives your skills no damage bonus whatsoever. Being lower costs you:

Twenty levels below a monster and your skill contributes nothing beyond the minimum floor. Heroic skill damage always uses the gentler 1%-per-level rule, even in PvE.

4. HOW THE DEFENDER CUTS IT DOWN

There are two completely different kinds of defence, and they are applied in a fixed order:

Because the flat subtraction comes first, Defence is strongest against many small hits and Resistance is strongest against big ones. 100 Defence removes 20% of a 500 hit but only 2% of a 5,000 hit, while Resistance removes the same share of both. That is why flat Defence is disproportionately good in PvE, where you eat a stream of small monster swings, and Resistance rules PvP.

Skills also subtract the target’s Heroic Defence from the physical portion, on top of their Physical Defence.

Two “ignore” options that sound alike but are not:

• Ignore Physical Resistance — subtracted point-for-point from the target’s Resistance before the 80% cap. Works everywhere.
• Ignore Defence — a per-swing chance to skip the target’s flat Defence entirely. Normal attacks only; it does nothing for skills.

5. ELEMENTAL AND DIMENSIONAL DAMAGE

There are eight non-physical damage types, in two families:

• Elemental — Magic, Water, Fire, Earth, Air
• Dimensional — Poison, Ice, Lightning

There is no elemental triangle. Fire is not strong against Ice, Water does not counter Fire, and nothing is “super effective”. Each element only ever meets its own resistance number on the target. Picking an element is purely about what your gear gives you and what the target is missing.

For each element the calculation is:

element damage × (100 − their resistance) ÷ 100, then doubled

That doubling is the whole story of elemental damage:

50 is the neutral point for elemental resistance, not 0. Anywhere below 50 in an element and you are taking more than the attacker’s raw roll. For a defensive build this is the most valuable single fact on this page.

Resistance is subtractive, not multiplicative — two sources of +15% Fire Resistance give you exactly 30, never 27.75.

Player elemental resistance is hard-capped at 80. Monster resistance is not capped, so a monster can sit above 80 and be effectively immune to an element. The flip side is worth knowing: every monster in the game has 0 Poison, Ice and Lightning resistance, so Dimensional damage always lands at the full 2× in PvE.

Normal attacks and skills deliver elements very differently:

This is why elemental attack stats scale far better with a skill rotation than with auto-attacks.

There are three separate “ignore resistance” options and they are not interchangeable. Read the wording closely before you chase one:

On the defensive side the split is the same: All Elemental Resistances +X% covers the five, All Dimensional Resistances +X% covers the other three. Stacking only one side leaves you wide open to the other.

6. HEROIC DAMAGE

Heroic is a separate damage line added on top of everything else. It never replaces your physical or elemental damage, and every landed normal attack carries some — with a floor of 1–2 even if you own no heroic gear at all.

• Heroic damage does not roll. You always deal exactly your Heroic Attack Power, so unlike your physical damage, the character-sheet number is the number you actually deal.
• Heroic damage never critically strikes, and absorb shields never soak it — it passes straight through them.
• Heroic Defence is a flat subtraction; Heroic Resistance is a percentage capped at 80% (raised from 60% in the original game).

Which of your three Heroic Resistances applies is decided by the attacker’s class family, not by their weapon:

Heroic Resistance does nothing in PvE. Monsters have no class family, so when a monster hits you the game applies 0% heroic resistance no matter how much you have stacked. It is a PvP-only defence.

7. CRITICAL HITS

• Criticals only happen on normal attacks. No skill, no heroic skill and no damage-over-time tick can critically strike.
• Critical Hit Rate does nothing on its own. The game only rolls for a crit if you also carry Critical Hit Damage from gear or an active critical buff. Crit-rate gems with zero crit damage give you zero criticals.
• Critical Hit Damage is a total, not a bonus. 250 means the hit lands for 250% of normal (×2.5). Sources add into a single number: a 310 passive + a 250 item + a 50 potion = 610, i.e. ×6.10. That total is the “Critical Damage” shown on your stats overlay.
• A crit only multiplies the physical part of the hit. Your elemental and heroic damage are untouched, even though they all appear inside one number.
• Critical Hit Resistance never reduces the base hit — it only shaves the extra damage the crit added. A 250% crit into 50% crit resistance lands for 100% + (150% × 0.5) = 175%, not 125%.
• Ignore Critical Hit Resistance only pays off against targets that actually stack crit resistance — which in practice means players, since almost no monster in the game carries any.
• There is no crit damage cap on Archonia. The old Archlord system that compressed huge criticals above roughly 8,000 damage is switched off here, so big crits land at full value.

8. LEVEL DIFFERENCE

Out-levelling your target strips their defences. A flat number of percentage points is removed from their Block, Skill Block, Dodge, Evade, Physical Resistance, elemental resistance and Critical Hit Resistance before any roll is made:

A gap of a single level does not count — the penalty only starts once you are two full levels above your target.

Under-levelling costs you in three places at once: your hit chance collapses to 90 minus 7 per level, your skill damage drops 1% per level in PvP and 5% per level in PvE, and in PvP you lose up to 10 points of critical chance.

9. WHERE YOU ARE FIGHTING

These are applied last, as multipliers on the finished number. Zone reductions only ever affect players — monsters are never reduced.

The level-99+ bonus is why skills out-scale auto-attacks so badly at endgame: against level 99+ content every skill hits 50% harder while your auto-attacks get nothing.

Arena, tournaments, death match, race war, guild war and castle ownership apply no damage multipliers of their own beyond the zone setting above.

10. FLOORS, CAPS AND HARD LIMITS

Damage can never be reduced to zero by stacking stats. A landed normal attack always deals at least 1 physical + 1 heroic. A landed damaging skill always deals at least 1 physical + 1 per element (8) + 1 heroic = 10 damage minimum. The only true zeros are a Miss, a Block, a Dodge/Evade, or a damage-ignore proc.

Everything you stack past a cap is wasted, and your character sheet will not warn you — it displays these stats uncapped. If you are already at 80 Resistance, the next Resistance roll is worth nothing to you; spread into a different stat instead.

11. READING THE NUMBERS ON YOUR SCREEN

• The floating number is the sum of every damage type in that hit. There is no way to see the split in combat.
• The number’s colour shows the largest elemental part, not the biggest part overall. Two points of poison riding on a 5,000 physical hit turn the whole number poison-coloured. White means the hit was purely physical and heroic.
• A killing blow’s number is usually larger than the health the target had left. That is overkill — the number shows what you rolled, not what was removed.
• You only ever see numbers for fights you are in. Other players’ fights are silent on your screen.
• Some hits deal damage but show no number: counter-attacks, reflected damage, and absorbed or converted damage. Damage-over-time ticks do show numbers.
• BLOCK covers two different things — a real shield block, and “the hit was reduced to nothing”. The icon is identical, so do not read every Block as your block rate working.
• Left Ctrl + D opens your personal DPS meter. It counts only damage you deal — pet and summon damage do not count towards it. Give it a few seconds of a fight before reading the Current DPS figure.
• The DPS meter and the boss damage board disagree, and both are right: the meter counts your full rolled damage including overkill, while the boss board counts health actually removed from the boss.
• Skill tooltip numbers are raw table values, not predictions. “Increases Attack : 40%” is applied to your weapon damage, not to your final number, and “Extra Damage : 300” is a flat addition made before the target’s Defence and Resistance come off.
• “Damage over time” in a tooltip is the closest thing to a true number anywhere in the interface — DoT ticks ignore Defence and Resistance completely.

12. COMMON MISTAKES