Damage Formula

Darkspire resolves damage in ordered stages. Understanding the order matters because different modifiers enter different buckets.

Physical hit pipeline

For the physical portion of a hit:

$$\begin{aligned} W &= \operatorname{roll}(W_{\min}, W_{\max}) \\ B_{\text{skill}} &= W \times C_{\text{effective}} \\ A &= \operatorname{roll}(A_{\min}, A_{\max}) \\ D_{\text{pre-crit}} &= (B_{\text{skill}} + A)(1 + I_{\text{damage}}) \\ D_{\text{final}} &= D_{\text{pre-crit}} \times M_{\text{crit}} \times M_{\text{triple}} \times M_{\text{double}} \end{aligned}$$

Critical, triple-damage, and double-damage rolls are independent. If more than one succeeds, their multipliers stack multiplicatively.

Triple damage currently has no ordinary gear source. The formula supports it for Discipline and future-system hooks.

Effective skill coefficient

A skill begins with its base coefficient and grows with effective gem level:

$$C_{\text{level}} = C_{\text{base}} \left[1 + g(L_{\text{effective}} - 1)\right]$$ $$C_{\text{effective}} = C_{\text{level}} \times H \times (1 + I_{\text{gem}}) \times (1 + I_{\text{delivery}}) \times \prod_j M_{\text{Discipline},j}$$

Effective level includes the gem’s XP level, the gem’s own level affix, and matching all-skill, attack, spell, or damage-school level bonuses from gear.

Multi-hit skills fold their listed hit count into the coefficient. The coefficient shown in the compendium is the level-1 per-cast starting point before character modifiers.

Elemental and chaos portions

Added elemental or chaos damage uses its own rolled range:

$$D_{\text{element}} = \operatorname{roll}(E_{\min}, E_{\max}) \times C_{\text{effective}} \times M_{\text{shared hit}}$$

The shared multiplier includes generic increased damage, critical damage, and successful double or triple damage. School-specific and generic elemental increases are folded into the elemental range before the hit is rolled.

Skills may convert part of the physical portion:

• attack-scaling elemental skills do not automatically convert physical damage;
• hybrid skills convert 50% to their listed school;
• spell-scaling skills convert 100% to their listed school.

Critical strikes

The character starts from a 5% base critical chance:

$$P_{\text{crit}} = \min\left( 95\%, \left(5\% + P_{\text{crit,flat}}\right) \left(1 + I_{\text{crit}}\right) \right)$$

A gem’s flat skill critical chance is added after the character sheet calculation, with the same final 95% cap.

Base critical damage is 150%. Dexterity, equipment, gem affixes, and Disciplines can raise the multiplier.

Defender mitigation

After a hit is rolled, each damage portion is mitigated separately:

• physical damage uses Armour;
• fire, cold, lightning, and chaos use Resistances;
• evasion and block can prevent a hit before mitigation;
• spell suppression can halve an unblocked spell after normal mitigation;
• energy shield absorbs the remaining total before life.

Worked example

Assume a skill rolls 20 weapon damage, has a 1.5 coefficient, adds 5 physical damage, and has 40% increased damage:

$$\begin{aligned} B_{\text{skill}} &= 20 \times 1.5 = 30 \\ D_{\text{pre-crit}} &= (30 + 5) \times 1.4 = 49 \\ D_{\text{critical}} &= 49 \times 1.5 = 73.5 \end{aligned}$$

If the defender’s armour reduces that $73.5$ physical hit by $20\%$, roughly $58.8$ damage reaches energy shield or life.

This example omits conversion, additional elemental portions, penetration, Discipline conditions, ailments, and damage-taken modifiers.