Damage for Beginners in Last Epoch

In this Damage for Beginners guide, we'll cover the basics of dealing Damage in Last Epoch. Doing more Damage means killing faster, getting experience quicker and dropping more loot. Understanding the concepts presented here will better prepare you to make the most of the Damage options at your disposal.

Skill Tags

To start scaling your Damage, first you need to familiarize yourself with the Skill's scaling tags. These tags are what determine which stats will scale your Damage.

The tags below show that Hammer Throw is a Throwing Attack that scales with Physical modifiers, Strength and Dexterity. As a Throwing Attack, it's not affected by Melee or Spell modifiers.

Scaling Your Damage

• Base Damage: All Skills have some amount of Flat Base Damage, however for some Skills it's very small.
• Added Damage: This Damage is added to your Base Damage. It's always a flat amount (never a percentage), and can be a particular Damage type, or Adaptive Damage which adapts to the Damage type of the Skill you're using.
• Added Damage Effectiveness: All Damage dealing Skills have a specific Added Damage Effectiveness, which is a multiplier for Added Damage. A Skill with 100% Damage Effectiveness has no change to the Added Damage. If you have 50 Added Damage and use a Skill with 50% Added Damage Effectiveness, the resulting Added Damage would be 25. The same Added Damage with a 200% Effectiveness Skill would be 100 Added Damage.
• Increased Damage: This Damage type multiplies off of Added Damage. All sources of Increased Damage applicable to your Skill stack additively with each other. E.g. if you have 4 Adaptive Spell Damage and two sources of Increased Damage (150% Spell, 150% Fire, and you're using a Fire Spell, these would add together (300% total increased), and then multiply the Added Damage (4*(1+3)), so your 4 Spell Damage is now increased to 16.
• More Damage: More Damage modifiers are multiplicative and different sources of More Damage multiply off of each other. If in the previous example you had two sources of More Damage instead of Increased Damage, the Damage calculation would be as follows: 4*(1+1.5)*(1+1.5) = 25.
• Attack/Cast Speed: Increasing your Skills' hit rate is another way to improve your Damage. Generic Attack Speed applies to all attacks, while Cast Speed applies to all Spells. There are also more specific versions of Attack Speed (Melee Attack Speed, Throwing Attack Speed, Bow Attack Speed) that apply only to skills with the appropriate tag.
  • Almost all skills can scale Attack or Cast Speed, but there are exceptions, e.g. Disintegrate only scales the initiation of the cast, not the speed at which it applies DoT damage.
  • Melee Attacks scale their Attack Speed off of the base Attack Rate of the Skill, the base Attack Rate of the weapon, and Increased Attack Speed. Spells and Throwing Attacks scale similarly, with the exception that they do not scale off of a weapon's base Attack Rate. For dual wielding, the base Attack Rate is the average of both weapons.
• Critical Strikes:  If a hit deals a Critical Strike, its damage is multiplied by your Critical Strike Multiplier. There are generally three ways to scale your Critical Strike damage.
  • Critical Strikes have a base multiplier of 100%, causing you to deal double Damage with them if you have no other sources of Critical Strike Multiplier. Any additional sources are added to your base multiplier.
  • All skills that can Critical Strike have a base chance of 5%, but there are two ways to increase your chances to Critically Strike. Added Critical Strike is a straight numerical increase on your chances to score a Critical Strike. It always has a '+' in front of the stat. Increased Critical Strike Chance is a percent increase on your total base and added Critical Strike Chance. So if you have 5% Base and 5% Added (10% total), 100% Increased Critical Strike Chance will double your Chance to Critically Strike from 10% to 20%.
• Resistance Shred: Decreases the amount of resistance to a particular Damage Type (i.e. Physical Resistance Shred) per stack of Shred (5% for non bosses, 2% for bosses). Caps at 10 stacks. Each stack lasts 4 seconds. Resistances can go negative, meaning this is a damage increase to enemies even if they have no Resistance to your damage type.
• Penetration: Penetration does not need to be applied and it only exists for Resistances. Multiple instances of Penetration add together. Resistance Shred and Penetration are additive with each other since they both reduce the resistance of the enemy.  Resistances can go negative, meaning this is a damage increase to enemies even if they have no Resistance to your damage type.
• Armor Shred: Each stack of this Ailment reduces enemy Armor by 100 for 4 seconds and stacks infinitely. Enemies have 0 Armour by default and it can go negative, causing enemies to take increased damage. However, Armor is subject to diminishing returns.
• Increased Damage Taken: Increased Damage Taken is effectively a multiplier to your Damage. Multiple instances of it stack additively.

Damage Types and Ability Types

• Damage can be either a Hit or Damage over Time (DoT). Hits do all of their Damage at once, can be Critical Strikes and can apply Ailments. DoTs do their damage over a period of time instead of all at once, cannot be Critical Strikes, and typically cannot apply Ailments or 'On Hit' effects.
• Ailments themselves can be DoTs (Bleed, Ignite, Poison, etc.), but not all Ailments are DoTs (Chill, Shock, etc.). Ailments are usually chance based, and having higher than 100% chance to apply an Ailment applies multiple stacks at once.
• Increasing the duration of an Ailment that deals Damage affects the total amount of Damage it will deal, but does not affect Damage per second (DPS). This results in its increasing the total Damage the Ailment deals over its duration.
• Damaging Ailments have a base Damage that is independent of the Skill that applies it. Damage modifiers from a Skill tree affect the Damage of Ailments applied by that Skill, unless otherwise specified (i.e. ‘more hit damage’ will not affect DoTs).

Here is a full list of Damage Types and Ability types:

Minions

Minion damage scales independently from the player. This means they have their own set of stats and affixes that a Minion player needs to add to their build instead of traditional damage stats. If the stat doesn't fall under this list, it doesn't scale with Minions:

• Minion (e.g. Minion Damage)
• Companions (For Primalist Pets)
• Totems (For Primalist Totems)
• Allies
• Shared
• For You and Your Minions
• Is a primary attribute that the Minion skill is tagged for

Summary

• Added, Increased, and More Damage are your foundational damage stats.
• More Damage is a powerful multiplier that is necessary in pretty much all builds.
• Be aware of Added Damage Effectiveness when trying to determine the value of Added Damage.
• Stack multiple different Damage bonuses to scale your Damage efficiently.
• Damage Types and Ability Types determine how you can scale your damage.
• Minions do not scale with your own stats. They have their own that you need to focus on with Minion builds.

Credits

Written by Volca.
Reviewed by McFluffin.