Hey guys.

Thought it might be useful to try to break down the damage formula. I've tried to summarise or simplify some parts, and maybe provide some easily reference-able material in the process. But it still ended up pretty wordy overall.

Most of the info I've gleaned from looking at the damage formula posted at https://nao-romasaga.github.io/damage.html.

If you like you can play with this sim (compares skill spamming strategies) and damage calc/comparer here. You'll have to make a copy (File->Make a Copy) to change any values.

Some of the take-ways, if you can't be bothered to read everything:

• Skill Rank is not an equal percentage increase in damage (99 Skill Rank < 99% damage, much less). The stronger the skill, the more damage it gains from Skill Rank increases. Right now the damage increase at Rank 99 vs Rank 1 can range from as little as ~5% to as much as ~40%, depending on the skill.
• Increasing your Damage Stat and WP are both important. Your Damage Stat overcomes your enemy's Def stat, and WP and Skill Power are multiplied to the result (sort of). Increasing one too much at the cost of the other will give you a lower result.
• The higher the enemy's Defense stat (END or WILL), the more important your damage stat is.
• The weaker the effective SkillPower of the skills you use, the more important WP is.
• By corollary of the above, if you are choosing between more WP or more Stats, the stronger the skill you spam the more likely you are to favour Stat.
• Formation multiplier applies to your base stats only.
• Resistances are really important!
• No really, they're pretty important, stop blindly focusing on maxing out your damage stat!
• Ok fine, you know what, just go look at the table in the Resistances and Bonuses section.
• Resistances tend to follow a rock paper scissors pattern. Slash > Pierce > Blunt > Slash. Since enemies can have skills of differing damage types you can't use this as more than a rough rule of thumb.
• If a battle is throwing many types of damage at you in equal amounts, you'll gain the most from covering your weakness.
• Even though there is some diminishing returns on Resistance, if a battle is mostly weighed to one or 2 types of damage, it can still be worth bringing naturally resistant characters and stacking the resist further with eq.
• Mastery bonus and passive damage bonuses are added together. A 4% mastery increase could result in less than a 4% increase to damage, depending on characters' (and later on holy stones) passives.
• A random percent from -5 to 5 is also added to your bonuses. Interestingly, because its addition, this effectively means the higher your mastery and passives % the less random your damage.

Here be dragons.

The rough damage formula (taken from here) is:

• [WP and SkillPower] * [Base Stats] * [Reduction from Resistance] * [Bonuses from Mastery and Passive] * [Scaling Factor of 0.1]

The exact formula for most weapon types and spells is:

Common Formula

For the less mathematically inclined, a % increase/decrease in each factor (each section in square brackets) would have the same % increase/decrease in total damage. Eg, if you increased the result of [WP*1.5 SkillPower] by 20%, that's 20% more damage. The likely easiest way to breakdown and understand the formula is to look at each factor separately.

• [WP*1.5 eSkillPower] * [1 DamageStat*4 - TargetDefStat*1.5] * [1/(1 0.008*Resistance)] * [1 MasteryLevelBonus PassivesDamageBonus] * 0.1

Martial Arts

Notably, Martial Arts have a similar pattern, but different co-efficients for WP, DamageStat and TargetDefStat. They gain less from WP, but more from the Stats Factor. They gain less from increasing just AGI than other Weapons do from increasing their single main stat, but because of the strong base, and that they ignore/pierce END a bit more than other weapons, they generally end up dealing more damage.

• [WP eSkillPower] * [1 STR*2 AGI*2.5 - TargetEND*1.2] * [1/(1 0.008*Resistance)] * [1 MasteryLevelBonus PassivesDamageBonus] * 0.1

Guns

Guns, which we don't have any yet, are also different. This info dump has gotten pretty long already, so I won't discuss them much after this. Most noteworthy Guns depend more on WP and less on base stats than the other weapons.

• [WP*1.9 eSkillPower] * [1 DEX*3.6 - TargetEND*1.25] * [1/(1 0.008*Resistance)] * [MasteryLevelBonus PassivesDamageBonus] * 0.1

The Rest

The following are some observations, mostly on the Common Formula. Remember that since we're looking at parts of the equation instead of the whole, numbers we calculate won't always be the actual damage you'll get, but are still useful for comparing adjustments to the stats involved.

The whole thing actually ended up kind of long, so I think it's better to break it up into separate posts, to follow at your own pace.

• Weapon And Skills
• [Attributes]() - WIP, probably next weekend
• Resistances and Bonuses

Addendums

• Understanding Attributes and Resistances Usage

Discussion and corrections welcome.