Happy New Years everyone, buckethead here. Multi-hit skills, like Rain’s Soul Prominence or Dualgunner’s Quadruple Shot, are now much common compared to the early days of wotv where we had to chain stone throws to complete chaining missions. So how does these skills work and interact with the various other mechanics in the game?

Warning: there will be a lot of words in this post, so read TL:DR if you only want conclusions

At first glance it seems rather simple, it is a skill that hits for X amount of times instead of just once. However, since attacks that has the same dmg type or element will chain and increase the dmg, it makes it a bit more complicated, for example, Lucia's Quadruple hit, if used on a target without any preexisting chains, will in 1x, 1.4x, 1.8x and 2.2x of the dmg of the first hit of the skill. This will give rise to a question, what does the skill modifier of them actually mean?

Since I'll be using several technical terms a lot in this thread, I'll be using abbreviations instead.

• Multi-hit skills=MH,
• single-hit skills=SH,
• displayed skill modifier(the one shown in wotv-calc)=DM,
• actual skill modifier(the mod of the skill without accounting for chaining bonus)=AM,
• chaining modifier=CM,
• effective chaining modifier(how much the chain effectively increases your skill dmg)=ECM
• effective skill modifier(the effective mod resulted from the actual skill modifier and effective chaining modifier)=EM

Skill modifier

I'll assume you guys are already familiar with how dmg calculations work in this game. If you aren't. u/MACHSHO has a graph on it that you can read.

obviously, the actual skill mod for the skill is not available in the game yet, thx gumi. But it is available in wotv-calc.

Ok, now that those are out of the way, time to put on my calculator glasses and lets get into it.

For example, Lucia's Quadruple shot has 121% skill modifier at max level, what does this mean? Well, it means that assuming there is no pre-existing chains. This skill will roughly deal as much dmg as a single hit skill with a 121% skill modifier. So how much does each hit actually deal? It's a simple calculation, the total dmg is 1 1.4 1.8 2.2=6.4x of the dmg of the 1st hit, while the 2nd, 3rd and 4th hit does 1.4x, 1.8x and 2.2x of the dmg of the 1st hit. So the dmg of the 4 hits are calculated roughly as follows:

But why did I highlight the roughly part? Well, the actual mod for each hit without the chain modifier should be 1 / 6.4 = 15.625% of the DM but gumi decided to round the number down to a 15% instead in dmg calculations, as a result, the skill only deals 15% x 6.4 = 96% of the DM's dmg.

Here's a table showing how much % of the DM multi-hit skills actually do. I wont take into consideration MH that dont normal or elemental chain since they are not affected by this at all and are extremely rare (only bahamut's summon skill). Note that some of them are hypothetical since these skills(4 hit skills that can only NC or EC) dont exist in game.

NC = normal chain, EC = elemental chain, per hit is the actual mod of each hit and total is the sum of all the actual mod of the skill

example: how to calculate Lucia's Quadruple Shot dmg

AM = 121%(DM of Quadruple shot) * 60% (from chart above) = 72.6%

ECM = (1 1.4 1.8 2.2)(the sum of the CM for each hit) / 4 (the # of hits) = 1.6

EM = AM * ECM = 116.16% = 96% of 121%

does that mean I can just use the 96% of the dmg of SH to calculate the dmg of MH skills? well, no.

So assuming the enemy was already hit with a Quadruple hit so has 4x NC and EC, if we were to follow up with a SH like Rapid Fire. the ECM goes to 2.6x from 1x, resulting in a 2.6x increase in dmg. However for another Quadruple hit, the ECM goes to (2.6 3 3.4 3.8)/4 = 3.2x from 1.6x, which is only a 2x increase from 0 chains. So as chains get longer, you start to see a significant drop in dmg for MH compared to SH. The most extreme example being after 10 NC EC where the chaining mod no longer increases, and Quadruple Shot will only do 60% of Rapid Fire's dmg. This is why you cannot calculate MH dmg by simply multiplying the skill mod with chaining modifier. That will result in overestimating the dmg MH can do. This is why I posted a calculator here a week ago designed to specifically calculate MH dmg on a chain.

That above is why the ai will in almost any circumstance choose to use Rapid Fire over Quadruple Shot. However, does this mean that MH have no merit? Obviously not. Even though Quadruple Shot only gets 2x from the chain, it is still significantly higher than the 1.4x if you use 2 Rapid Fire in a roll. MH can rack up the chain count while SH are better at utilizing the high chain to deal massive dmg. In other words, this game has a working chainer/finisher system.

TL:DR MH has lower dmg in general and benefits from longer chains less than SH, but can rack up chains quickly for the chaining modifiers.

Mechanic Interactions

OK, now that boring math stuff is out of the way, lets talk about the interactions of MH with other mechanics in this game.

First of all, Multi-hit skills are still 1 instance of a skill. it will not give you multiple chances to apply debuffs/status ailment or proc reactions. If paladin's dmg reduction reaction or ranger's reflex gets proc'd, it applies to all hits of the MH

Dmg boosts

dmg boosts simply increases the DM of the MH so it goes thru the same shenanigans as just skill modifiers.

Crit

If a hit in a MH crit, the crit dmg bonus is added to the whole skill and retroactively calculated for that hit. For example, if the 2nd hit of Quadruple Shot crits, it adds only 15% of the 25%(crit dmg bonus) to that specific hit, then calculate the CM for that hit for the dmg of that hit. Therefore, crits aren't really much more effective for MH compared to SH

Dmg Cap

As most ppl know, there is a maximum amount of dmg a single hit of a normal skill can do. Without other modifications, most skills can only do up to 9999 dmg for each hit. This can be increased by multiple sources like the 2HD VC etc.

This drastically limits the amount of dmg that SH can do, extremely on high chain counts. However, since the dmg cap works for each hit instead of each skill, MH can work around this mechanic much easier, as the lower dmg per hit makes it less likely that you will lose dmg due to the dmg cap, and allows you to be able to squeeze out more dmg from each turn, which is very important in turn limited content like Raid and box events.

TL:DR Dmg cap severely limits the amount of dmg that SH can do, making MH more effective in raids and box events in comparison

Barrier

Remember when I said the ai will use Rapid Fire over Quadruple Shot in almost every circumstances? This is an exception. Skills that applies a barrier has generally 2 types, one that applies it for a certain amount of turns(Ayaka tmr), and another one that works for a certain amount of hits(Paladin's Saintly Wall). MH skill will shred multiple layers of the 2nd type of Barrier. For example, Lucia's Quadruple Shot will completely remove Saintly Wall and the last hit wont be reduced by the barrier, the ai does recognize this and as a result will use Quadruple Shot over Rapid Fire against an enemy with a 1-3 hit barrier. However, the problem is that the ai does not inherently value breaking the barrier. If the enemy has a 10-hit barrier, the ai will use Rapid Fire instead of Quadruple Shot since that would do more dmg, despite Quadruple Shot being more useful for getting rid of the barrier to do more dmg in the long run.

TL:DR MH are great counters for hitcount based barriers, but ais dont always know to exploit this.

Evasion

if the enemy dodges 1 hit of the MH skill, no matter which hit the enemy dodges, they will always effective dodge the last hit. For example, if the enemy dodges the 1st hit, since the 1st hit no longer adds to the chain, the 2nd hit becomes the 1st, 3rd becomes the 2nd, ... and you lost the the dmg from the last. As a result, Evasion is slightly more effective against MH in terms of reducing dmg. However, for MH that applies debuff or status ailment if landed, as long as 1 hit lands, it will apply the debuff or status ailment. As a result, MH will be slightly better at landing the debuff/status ailments than SH.

TL:DR MH tend to lose out on more dmg to evasion in the long run, but are more consistent in dmg dealer or applying debuffs/status ailments

Guts

Guts block off all the hits from MH. even if you drop the target to 1 hp with the first hit of the MH, the following hits will not be able to kill off the target.

Reraise

Reraise does not come into effect until all hits are done.

Thx meow(Desusnow) for explaining to me the unintuitive reason why MH deals less than SH skills that have the same mod at 0 chains.

I am going to start working on a guide on preparing for the next Porcelain tower, hopefully that takes slightly less time than this one(totally not cuz my procrastination). However, JP got a update last month changing how some skills that applies debuffs interact with evasion, if you guys want to know what that is about, I can quickly explain that as well.