Explaining Elden Ring's Misleading Damage Calculation System

hi well it's January so that means 2 months of everyone airing out their throwaway ideas they weren't brave enough to upload during the holidays I think I've thrown around enough ranking videos for a while I'm tired so now I'm going to go through the same phase I always do where I suddenly start posting analytical videos about mathematically intensive subjects no one gives a damn about I did it with Hollow night I did it with bloodborne and guess what this game has one of the most dedicated modding bases I've seen in years so you better believe I've got the tools to make the algebraic parts of your brain [ __ ] their godamn pants you ever wondered why weapons like Loretta's warle and the Crystal knife hand out paper cut adjacent damage all the way up to the end game but suddenly start performing miles above most other options a couple new game plus iterations later have you ever asked someone online why you can't get any power out of your Holy Paladin build and they just belch out words like split damage and flat defense at you without any further elaboration because they heard a YouTuber say it once how about why Blood blade dance needs 56 attack IDs well I'm I'm sure going to explain some of that hopefully I'm anticipating this to be a somewhat shorter video and we're [ __ ] yes sorry all right let's just start by outlining all the basic types of damage you're going to find I am not going to be spending a long amount of time on this section because I'm already the 58,000 channel on this Hellbound platform that dares make a number crunching video about Elden Rings damage system so if you know this already just skip to this time stamp here or something I I Don't Really Care physical damage is split into four main categories standard Str slash and Pierce katanas for instance deal slash damage but most have heavy attacks that deal Pierce damage and the general rule of thumb for most common weapons is that if it looks like it deals Pierce damage it does if you're thrusting your sword forward in a stabby motion you're probably dealing Pierce damage not true 100% of the time but we'll unclog that mess later but there are also some less obvious examples like the lucerin and warpick not dealing Pierce damage despite their design and you can even find subtypes of physical damage on certain incantations like Beast claw Elemental types are divided into Fire magic lightning and and and holy I don't don't think I need to explain this part it's a surprisingly convoluted system but again generally if something is on fire throwing a fireball at it probably won't do a lot fire and lightning scale with faith magic scales with intelligence but on weapons the fire Affinity scales with strength lightning scales with X [ __ ] you guys already know this who cares all right this is boring let's talk about flat defense all right so let's take a popular weapon like the nagak keba for instance the Keen nagaa has a scaling of 1.6 which is a moderately High a the coff point between A and S scaling is 1.75 at plus 25 with 60 decks and minimum strength the nagao will do a total of 540 physical damage now the lightning nagako also scales with decks but significantly less so at a scaling of 0.78 which is a moderately low C however even with this lower scaling the nagaa will hand out out 307 physical damage and 3177 lightning damage totaling out to 624 base damage holy [ __ ] that that's a huge gap well [ __ ] the Keen Affinity then why even use anything except the lightning Affinity NP guess what there's an answer to that question and it's perfectly reasonable all enemies in the game have a certain amount of defense against each subtype of damage including Elemental and having two or more damage Types on a single weapon just means you're pushing through two of those flat defense numbers and not just one now this is also something you've heard multiple times from me and many others but I don't think anyone's everever properly explained why that works the way it does how much flat defense are they all the same flat number is there an absolute minimum instance of flat damage where it literally never goes any lower this becomes significantly more important when you're starting a fresh new game take these two long swords for instance one has a fire affinity and the other has heavy Affinity the fire long sword very obviously does more overall damage despite its lower scaling but hitting this grafted Scion with either sword results in the exact same damage number of 52 this is the proof of the enemy's flat defenses working against your weapon and towards the beginning of the game they're extremely difficult to burst through again this isn't new information this is the whole reason why multi-hit spells seem to do very insignificant damage in most early game cases here's a tangible example tree Sentinels have different damage negations for each subtype of damage they have 20% magic damage negation 40% holy 40% fire and 0% light the astrologer staff starts out with a sorcery scaling of 115 I set all enemy defenses to zero in this demonstration with a flat defense of zero and a magic absorption of one which is basically just 0% magic damage negation Glenstone Pebble deals 158 magic damage to this tree Sentinel here and the reason I'm using magic damage is because it kept [ __ ] raining whenever I tried to film this footage and Rain affects both fire and lightning damage and I was too lazy to go and find the special effect and deactivate it so you're dealing with what you got normally the tree Sentinel has a flat magic defense of 100 as seen here and a magic absorption rate of 0.8 this is a multiplicative modifier which means any amount of magic Damage Done to this enemy will be reduced to 80% of its normal value just think of this number as 20% magic damage negation now I'm going to reactivate these one at a time so we can see how each variable affects the final damage of the pebble turning on the defense modifier first the damage of the pebble is lowered down to 107 meaning the tree Sentinel has a flat magic defense of around 51 not including rounding down or up from a certain decimal point turning on the magic damage negation reduces it to 86 which is roughly 20% of 107 it's actually 85.6 exactly which indicates that the game just rounded up now the damage negation is always measured by a percentage of damage you're dealing which means that no matter how many new game plus Cycles you run through you're still going to feel its effects pretty heavily if you don't know which enemies are strong versus which kind of damage 20% of 158 may be a pretty negligible number but 20% % of 19900 means quite a lot when you're trying to beat someone over the head with the elbow of a tree Avatar the defense on the other hand pulls more weight in earlier parts of the game since it is a flat number and therefore unchanging not only does this result in multi-hit spells and weapon skills suddenly getting a massive boost in performance later into the game but some single hit spells and skills you relied on beforehand might even start coming up a bit short for seemingly unknown reasons Canon of HMA does a lot of magic damage at once and it is one of the stronger sorceries in the grand scheme charging it gives a base magic damage of 332 it is not a bad sorcery by any means but like most other single hit abilities they quietly get left behind as the general preference slowly begins to shift over to options like ancient lightning strike and meteorite of aell or weapon skills like a bubble shower and blood Boon ritual it's honestly incredibly rare for a single hit anything to be considered by alen Rings Community as one of the greatest in their categories and if they are it's usually because their motion values are so absurdly high that it doesn't even matter this is a direct result of most single hit abilities suddenly becoming very burdened by an enemy's late game damage negation if we take a look inside Map Studio and we go to NPC params we get a full view of every enemy's damage negation and defense amount one thing you'll notice is that the damage negation multipliers aren't nearly as simple as you would assume it's more than just ones across the board and then maybe 1.2 or something versus a single damage type to indicate a weakness I found a lot of information I just didn't expect to find such as Crucible Knights having 40% magic damage negation or the knights Cavalry having 20% damage negation against light lightning hang on a minute what lightning is supposed to be their weakness right well technically no because they also have 40% negation against all other elements and 35% negation against all physical types of damage except for thrust it's not that Knight's Cavalry units are weak to lightning it's that they're just just so [ __ ] strong against everything else that lightning damage becomes your best option every enemy has damage negation of some sort and even if there's a perceived weakness it's usually just because that percentage is lower not gone entirely and we'll also touch on this a bit later but yes this is also the reason why bosses suddenly start becoming unreasonably tanky around new game plus five or six it barely has anything to do with a massive Health pool their defenses are just that large the phrase motion values has appeared hundreds of times over the past few videos of mine and many others to the point that some might even wonder why the sudden fixation on them came about since any video of mine over a year ago had no mention of them but this is actually not a term exclusive to Elden ring this shit's everywhere Monster Hunter genin it's actually a very common means of calculating damage there are motion values for every single instance of damage in the game blocked attacks parries staff Bonks throwing pots throwing knives torches even falling on somebody's [ __ ] head by complete accident technically has a motion value assigned to it the motion values of most normal attacks are either 100 or really close to it since it's based around a percentage the five hit sequence of light attacks from a straight sword are 100 101 102 103 and then 110 essentially the first hit of the sequence deals the sword's exacted damage the second hit takes that damage and multiplies it by 1.01 then 1.02 so on and so forth A plus 25 heavy broadsword at 60 strength has a total damage of 520 so this will be the exact number of damage the first attack in the sequence will hit for followed by 525 530 and then 536 with the final hit in the sequence hitting for 572 all right seems simple enough well let's take something a bit more complicated like a twin blade for instance Twin Blade motion values specifically its two-handed motion values have a large clump of attacks that are all set with an MV of 50 these attacks deal half of the weapon's total damage and this is because twin blades when two-handed have a noticeable increase in total weapon strikes the first second and fourth animations in the two-handed Twin Blade sequence all have two separate weapon strikes and the final hit even has three the motion values are set this way so that twin blades don't completely dominate the competition like they already sort of do in most cases this is the damage of a plus 25 Twin Blade with its normal mvs and this is the damage of a plus 25 Twin Blade with all its mvs set to 100 a very noticeable difference right underneath the set of attack related motion values you will find a set of status motion values which measure the amount of status any individual hit will count for the same rules apply here where 100 is basically the normal amount of status you can see the same reduced values being used here on the status mvs as well with some of the weapon hits having a status MV of 50 While others are left at 100 this is probably the largest reason why twin blades are so ridiculously efficient at building up status even with its reduced mvs you're still getting 50% more buildup out of each attack in the sequence just because most of the attacks involve multiple hits unlike attack motion values status motion values almost never climb above 100 in any instance looking at each weapon's heavy attacks gives you a good example where most charged Heavies have attack mvs around the 160 to 180 range while the status mvs remain at 100 the attack mvs on weapon skill cover an incredibly large range for obvious reasons almost none of them look the exact same some of them have large mvs by themselves some of them may have multiple hits with two smaller mvs and then a much larger one some of them may have a quantity of attacks that rival the list of rules on the average Discord server with plenty of different mvs that don't even seem to have a recognizable pattern like like blood blade dance okay so let's just look at unath first so we don't give ourselves a headache unath has four IDs in total Each of which are very St straightforward the first and third ID marked here are the stanced light and heavy attacks respectively and the second and fourth ID represent the same attacks when deployed with no FP the stanced light has an attack MV of 190 while the stanced heavy has an attack MV of 235 and I suppose this is also a good time to look at some of the other mvs such as the Poise MV Poise damage alternatively called stance damage or break damage is largely dictated by this motion value a standard long sword deals five Poise damage on basic hits but its Poise damage for certain attacks and skills are enormously increased due to its Poise Envy it's not at all uncommon for heavier attacks to have a poison V of 600 or above and I think the reason they're so comparatively High might have to do with the fact that stance damage is regenerated over time the stanced light and heavy attacks of unath have pois mvs of 300 and 600 enabling you to deal 15 or 30 points of poise damage in a single attack and The Stance attacks on Square Off have Poise mvs of 600 and 800 and considering straight swords deal five Poise damage by default these two attacks are measured at 30 and 40 points of poise damage respectively you generally see higher poison vs on attacks that take a longer time to connect which explains why the poison vs of unath are noticeably lower the weapon skill of the serpent Hunter Sports a poison V of 900 for the first attack and then 600 for the followup great Spears deal a base Poise damage of 5.5 meaning the Great Serpent hunt when deployed in its entirety hands out a total of 82.5 Poise damage which I'm pretty sure can stagger literally anything that isn't a boss all right so now let's look at something a little more confusing ghost flame ignition has 11 different attack IDs in total and because they're all disorganized as [ __ ] I'm going to go through each string and point out which IDs belong to what the initial L2 uses the first fourth and fifth ID the R1 follow-up uses the second 6th and 11th ID and the R2 followup uses the third and seventh IDs none none of this is even remotely important and there's no reason to include this part but it made me upset so I'm leaving it in dl2 by itself when left to expire detonates for 140 magic damage however we're dealing with an entirely different Beast here because this number is not a motion value but rather an instance of flat magic damage the follow-up R2 has a flat damage modifier of 200 and the bullets from the R1 each deal a flat magic damage of 150 the reason this is so important is because this vastly affects how the unique skill scales with certain stats attack motion values are multiplicative and inherently tied to the overall damage of the weapon itself leveling the appropriate stat still makes the skill stronger sure but that's only because scaling affects the entire weapon and not just the skill if a skill has something that is represented by a flat damage value in one of these categories here that means it's independent from the weapon's damage and receives that much more power from leveling the appropriate stat that the damage of ghost flame ignition is almost entirely made up of flat damage numbers meaning a very large chunk of its potential power will be determined by your character's intelligence and this is where I finally get around to contextualizing the video's title the intelligence scaling on death's poker is listed as a d whereas the scaling for strength and dexterity are listed as C and B respectively leading players into believing intelligence is the least important stat for the weapon while never explicitly stating anywhere that the skills damage benefits mostly from high intelligence ghost flame ignition is far from the only example of this Envoy Great Horn owns C's in both physical stats and a D in faith yet its unique skill is represented by a flat damage number the sacred Relic sword only has a c in faith while wave of gold is obviously mostly influenced by the player's Faith stat there's a lot of little instances like this that by themselves are far from a big deal but when it happens multiple times and especially with so many high-profile weapons you start losing trust in the game scaling system and wondering if you're missing out on something even though you're following the game's directions and leveling what you're being told to level and then you have skills like ova's Vortex the skills damage comes entirely from Attack motion values which sort of bottleneck the power of the skill a bit because there aren't any flat damages on the side to help it out but the scaling of the great sword is represented accurately by the weapon requirements strength is its highest requirement and also its strongest scaling which makes the weapon feel very consistent in performance and the extra holy damage feels more like a helpful accessory than it does something you have to pay attention to in the build and this means we can be confident that the scaling isn't trying to pull one over on us it's a simple system but it works I think a great example of a skill that doesn't lie to you is something like Regal Beast claw it has both attack motion values and a flat 186 physical damage that comes from the shock waves making it very friendly towards stat investment but because the flat damage is physical it also scales the way you would assume it would benefiting mostly from strength and then secondarily from decks and Faith this makes it a wonderful weapon to carry into New Game Plus runs because a high stat investment is that much more important and you're going to need an Ace in the Hole because New Game Plus [ __ ] up [Music] everything the modifiers exclusive to New Game Plus iterations are found in clear count correct param where the IDS are sorted neatly into New Game Plus Z all the way up to plus 7 plus Z has everything listed as well zero and plus one has everything listed as one this does result in a pretty noticeable increase to everyone's defenses and damage negation and on a plus 25 weapon you'll notice a general deficit of around 15 to 20 damage per hit at least on a basic enemy heading into new game plus two all defenses are multiplied by 1.025 which is an extremely negligible increase that's barely worth noting you lose out on about three damage per hit here but heading into new game plus 5 is where things start getting interesting because all defenses are now being multiplied by 1.15 that is a 15% increase to all flat defenses and it gets even more ridiculous heading up into new game plus 7 where the defenses are boosted by a full 30% the gap between plus one and plus two is barely 3 to four damage lost depending on which weapon you're using but the difference between plus 6 and plus s is enormous you're losing out on about 10 to 11 damage over a sing game cycle but keep in mind we are talking about a 30% increase to the flat defenses of every enemy not the damage negation 30% more damage negation on everything would would just be it would it would be stupid it would just be [ __ ] stupid new game plus 7 also increases the HP of all enemies by 40% which is really only a huge deal against in-game bosses like fire Giant and btox but in plus 7even even pushovers like godric and renala feel so much sturdier than before however this sturdy is not solely due to the large Health pool it's honestly not even the biggest variable in the equation 30% more flat defense doesn't really sound like a lot but it's enough to force you to pay more attention to the weaknesses of who you're fighting otherwise that 332 base magic damage is going to feel like hitting a brick wall with a toothbrush the Poise multiplier of 1.9 probably doesn't help things either since everything is now staggering significantly less often if at all resulting in less enemy downtime and therefore more time you spend dodging and looking for Windows and whatnot something else I thought was weird about how damage modifiers change through multiple game Cycles was how physical damage is treated not your physical damage but the physical damage inflicted to you by enemies we have to remember that physical damage is kind of its own category of damage with four subtypes this is why in the clear count correct param physical damage is Multiplied more and more with each cycle through the game while strike slash and thrust damage have been unmodified oh only hang on standard damage also gets multiplied okay well there's no way I was understanding this correctly so I went into the game and tested it and well that'll be [ __ ] so intentional or not standard physical damage gets modified twice standard physical damage from any Source including dragons tree spirits and any damage that doesn't fall into the other three subtypes and these modifiers are multiplicative mind you without either modifier the tree sentinel's opening attack upon standing too close to him hits for 223 damage and I'm wearing The Crucible Knight armor set in this example so take armor damage negation into account as well then you turn one of them back on they're the same amount and we're testing the same attack so which one you turn on first shouldn't really matter and the tree Sentinels damage expectedly gets increased dealing 357 on the opening attack then I turned on the standard damage subtype modifier increasing the damage of the opening attack by a second 45% totaling out to 552 damage noticing this made me feel very discomforted because this is the one single reason why everything suddenly gets as strong as it does towards later game cycles and I'm not even sure if it's intentional the standard damage subtype gets modified in new games plus 2 through six as well and I don't know it'd be a little weird to make the same mistake six times so I can only assume this was on purpose resistance multipliers are also here in this param but since status elments can be so quickly applied with so many different builds they're largely unimportant especially since the highest modifier is a 9% increase that that's like one extra hit with a dagger like cool one thing I did notice though near the resistances was an unused section in the params that looks like it was made to modify the Damage Done when Afflicted with frostbite bleed and Madness they're not exactly unused they're like you you're certainly able to modify them by yourself if you want but in every new game plus cycle they all remain set at a one which essentially just means 0% it kind of sucks they didn't use this to be honest like I get ignoring the damage of Madness that'll only help you against NPC Invaders but I think an opportunity was missed here to weaken the frostbite and bleed effects a little in later game Cycles didn't have to be too big of an adjustment but it would certainly help give new game pluss a bit more variety since people tend to gravitate towards status builds in NG plus 7 [Music] anyways I think this might be my favorite section to dive into and I love introducing people to these numbers because it it's just never what you think it is I was curious how the game separated areas by scaling but a little confused when I didn't see a specific param for it all the NG plus iterations got their own so why not area scaling and then I realized they could be found in the special effect params with all the other effects in the game that didn't fit in anywhere else I guess starting at ID 7000 you can see a cluster of effects that are all labeled area scaling followed by a tiered number and again just so we're on the same page this is Map Studio 1.10 I'm working off of here you can find a download link in the description if you want to look at it yourself each area has a parenthetical next to it that highlights what exact area corresponds to a single ID I honestly didn't think storm Veil and weeping Peninsula would have had their own separate scalings looking at them I was surprised by how different they were the enemies in storm Veil Castle are a good deal stronger with around 30% more attack power across the board and it looks like 37% more HP give or take of course most of the enemies you find in these two areas are just soldiers and Kaidens so I suppose it is pretty hard to tell in game sh for River is the sixth tier of scaling with an HP modifier of 1. n53 and if you're confused on what any of that means this basically just means they took all the enemies and boosted their total HP Pools by around 95% base limb grave exploration has an HP modifier of 1.41 so a giant crab found in shra is going to have about an 81% bigger HP pool than the ones in central mrave I also really like all the info in this set of IDs because it gives you a lot of extra perspective on the natural rout of of progression the game ideally wanted players to follow LEL might be the 11th level of scaling but the sudden jump in enemy stats from tiers 9 through 11 is astronomical compared to any tier before it suggesting that heading into LEL was meant to be a pretty large spike in difficulty which it was so that checks out the next big jump is easily seen in the power section of the IDS between ID 7110 and 7120 where the 12th level of scaling has enemies hitting with 267 of their default power and the 13th level where enemies will hit with 324 of their default we aren't exactly where late to endgame damage complaints start popping up but it is around here where the damage taken by your character starts getting a little difficult to manage the next huge jump will be the single largest difficulty check in the game which is found between ID 7130 and 7140 here the enemy HP modifier jumps from 548 per to 656 enemy attack power has also been increased all the way up to 350 52% of their defaults idid 7140 sets the scaling in the far Missoula area and around here is where the late game damage starts getting pretty ridiculous according to most players this is where you'll notice a lot of bigger enemies and especially the trolls and Golems taking quite a bit of time to put down if you haven't made significant build adjustments by this point most scaling tiers after this one are surprisingly linear there aren't any huge leaps or discrepancies and scaling between here and the end of the game but that's not to say it doesn't add up quickly because the areas remaining are significantly smaller and take less time to explore such as the Hal tree and MN Palace respectively represented by tiers 18 and 19 where enemy HP is adjusted to 720 of their defaults and attack power has been boosted to 380 meaning even crowds of Alban orics can now pose a significant threat if you let them the two remaining tiers Encompass all of alile the hel tre's brace and the millenia fight got its own scaling ID for some reason which I thought was really funny the reason this has anything to do with the overall Damage Done by your character is that in each of these scaling IDs there's another set of values a little further below which are defense multipliers these are not damage negation multipliers but rather multipliers to an enemy's flat defense and well just look at how small these are in comparison to everything else the final level of scaling just barely goes above a 23% increase and I can't help but think this set of values has quite a lot to do with the phenomenon I explained earlier where multi-hit spells and abilities just start getting really good out of nowhere in fact I'm getting really curious about this now so I'm just I'm I'm just going to try something let's go back up to storm Veil which I assume will adjust the stats of godric uh H okay these these can go below one right I mean everything else can so far so let's just try [Music] it okay so it didn't make as big of a difference as I was maybe looking for but it did make the adjustment I thought it would I'm Casting Star shower with a plus zero astrologer staff and 16 intelligence so 176 versus 244 damage is actually not a small difference at all this is a further Testament to just what an enormous impact enemy flat defenses have on basically everything at the beginning of the game I have no idea what would constitute a normal looking amount of damage for Star shower or Crystal barrage or something at this point in the game since I never used them but for anyone currently working on a scaling overhaul mod uh start here I guess you're welcome welcome to the final section of the video and probably the shortest one hopefully damage negation from armor fortunately isn't as complicated a subject as New Game Plus modifiers or figuring out an enemy flat defenses but it does have some weird anomalies I wasn't expecting to find first taking a trip to the param labeled equip param protector gives you a list of every single armor piece in the game and some unobtainable ones after highlighing armor piece scroll down a bit in the right hand section and you'll see a set of values named absorption these variables should look familiar they operate under the same rule set by damage negation modifiers which is that a flat 1 equals 0% absorption and zero would mean 100% we know this because the in-game modifiers classify all of these numbers as damage negation just a big big [ __ ] bold-faced heading right at the top of the at the top of the menu you'd honestly be really surprised how many people miss this keeping those rules in mind we can see that the rodent's chest piece negates physical damage by 10.5% SL is negated by .2 and strike and thrust by 10.5% as well this is why so many people tell you that armor matters in elen ring because it does this isn't even one of the heavier pieces wearing some of the heavier armors can function similarly to just having a second dragon Crest GS Talisman if not very close to it the fire pre-laid armor for instance gives you a total of 41.2% physical damage absorption not including subtypes if wearing the full set and during later game Cycles this obviously matters quite a bit in the second clip here I decreased all the physical and holy absorption of the fire prelate set down to zero resulting in over 100 extra damage taken from the exact same attack and these damage numbers may seem negligible but only because I'm testing versus the second boss in the game luckily for us there's another boss we know of who always opens with the exact same attack so let's head to yellow onyx and see what numbers we come up with now this clothing combination offers you the highest possible magic damage negation in the game the mirror Helm offers 6.7 aer's chest gives you 15.4 and the preceptors gloves and boots respectively give 3.6 and 8.3 totaling out to 34% negation exactly now we're pretty late in the game so this is probably going to hurt after taking down all my magic negation to zero this single attack ended up hitting for over 400 more points of damage than it would have normally this doesn't even take into account that we're testing with a level 300 character so my natural def defenses are already very high again when people tell you armor matters listen to them no [ __ ] sorry dozed off uh I I think that's everything if I misinterpreted any variables or params in this video feel free to correct me in the comments otherwise I've laid down all the groundwork I need to confidently assert that Elden Ring's damage system is [ __ ] but it's not irreparably [ __ ] it obviously makes enough sense to work and in most cases that's more than enough you're not really meant to go into the veins of the game like this and dissect which variables lead to which balancing consequences or whatever but I don't know it's just fun to know more about the game I've spent almost 2 years with now there's no shortage of information in these params so anyone worried that I'll run out of idea soon uh don't do do not worry there's plenty to talk about here I promise

Channel: Rusty.

Views: 484,309

Keywords:

Id: uAFWQr08SZE

Length: 30min 47sec (1847 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024