The most fundamental concept of any ARPG is dealing damage to enemies. Without damage enemies don't die, experience isn't gained, loot doesn't drop and players don't progress. Similarly, doing more damage means killing faster, getting experience quicker and dropping more loot. It's not surprising that so many players want to know how to maximize their damage.

In this guide, we'll cover the basics of dealing damage in Last Epoch, including the fundamental equations behind the big numbers you see on your screen. Understanding the concepts presented here will better prepare you to make the most of the damage options at your disposal.

(Base + Added 1 + Added 2... )*(Increased 1 + Increased 2...)*(More 1)*(More 2)*...

(Base + Added 1 + Added 2 + Added 3)*(Increased 1 + Increased 2 + Increased 3)*(More 1)*(More 2)*(More 3)

While the equations used in the above section hold up under typical circumstances, there are some major factors we need to consider. The first one is Added Damage Effectiveness on skills. It would be reasonable to assume that all skills apply Added Damage the same way, but this is not the case. Some actually give a larger amount than expected, while others give a smaller amount. Here's how it works: Let's say I have 50 Added Damage being applied to three different skills. Those skills have Added Damage Effectiveness of 50%, 100%, and 200%. Here's how these 3 skills play out:

50%: 25 Added Damage

As you can see, we have a new multiplier, but this time it is specifically for Added Damage. The equation is very simple, and looks like this:

(added)*(Effectiveness)

In this case, 100% Added Damage Effectiveness is the baseline, unlike increased and More Damage, where it was 0%, so we don't need the extra '1' in this equation. If we plug in the above example at 50% Effectiveness, it looks like this:

(50)*(0.5) = 25

(((Base + ((Added 1 + Added 2...)*(Effectiveness)))*(Increased 1 + Increased 2 ...)*(More 1)*(More 2)*...

If this looks confusing to you, it can be summed up like this: Add together all of your sources of Added Damage, then multiply those by Effectiveness. Now add that number to your Base Damage. From here, follow the original equation.

Just like in many other games in the genre, Last Epoch has a variety of Damage Types and Ability Types to choose from that allow for a large number of tastes and play styles. Anything from Physical Throwing Attacks, to Fire Spells or Poison Melee Attacks are possible. Having so many options to combine can be fun, but also confusing for players that are trying to figure out how they all fit together. Let's start by looking at all of the different Damage Types and Ability Types that exist.

Once you know whether your damage is a Hit or a DoT, it's now time to determine what Damage Types and Ability Types you are using. Here is a full list of each:

All of these types can be combined in different ways, but most skills have only one Ability Type (although there are a number of notable exceptions) and several Damage Types to choose from. A Damage Type can also be added through gear and passives, but if it's not supported by a skill you might find difficulty in properly scaling the damage. Let's look at some examples of combining Damage Types and Ability Types to see how it plays out.

Let's start with an easy one. You're a Hit based Throwing Attack build, which means you're only using Throwing Skills without any DoTs, and you have Increased Throwing Damage, as well as Increased Physical Damage. All of your Base Damage is Physical, so how do you determine how the Increased Damage is applied? Since all of your Base Damage is both Throwing and Physical, and all of your Increased Damage also falls under these two categories, you can simply add the Increased Damage together and then multiply it against your total Base Damage, like in the original examples.

For our second example, let's assume you're now a Hit based Melee Fire build. You only use a Melee Skill. You use added Fire Damage whenever you can, but the weapon you're using has some Added Physical Damage. You also have Increased Melee Damage and Increased Fire Damage. In this case, you're going to apply all of your Increased Melee Damage to all of your Added Damage, but are only able to apply the Increased Fire Damage to the Fire portion of your Added Damage. Note: Using a Fire Skill does not alter the Physical Damage in any way, so it applies that portion of your damage as Physical to the target unless the skill has Damage Conversion (more on that later). If you have Adaptive Damage (Example: The base damage on most weapons where a damage type is not explicitly listed) it always converts to the Damage Type of the Skill you're using.

For the last example we're using Fireball; this is a Hit based Fire Spell, but we're also applying Ignite on Hit. Ignite is an Ailment that does Fire Damage over Time (is a DoT). We have Increased Fire Damage, Increased Spell Damage, and Increased Damage over Time. Here's how it plays out:

There's a multitude of ways that a player can combine different kinds of damage, but this can also create problems for players who aren't considering how each kind scales. A key to maximizing your damage is understanding how to synergize everything so that you don't miss out on scaling benefits.

Critical Strikes are another way to improve Hit damage, and can be very powerful when scaled properly. DoTs cannot be Critical Strikes, so any build that relies on Damage over Time should avoid scaling Critical Strike Damage. At baseline, skills (with a few exceptions) have a 5% chance to be Critical Strikes and deal double damage. Note: The character sheet is currently very misleading by showing base Critical Strike multiplier at 200%, making it seem like Critical Strikes start at triple damage, which is not correct and not how the other stats on the character sheet function. We have to account for this discrepancy in the way character stats are handled whenever we do calculations that include Critical Strikes.

There are generally three ways to scale your Critical Strike damage. Two of them (Added Critical Strike Chance and Increased Critical Strike Chance) increase your chance to successfully land a Critical Strike and work in tandem, while the third (Critical Strike Multiplier) increases the amount of damage you do when a Hit succeeds in being a Critical Strike.

This is a straight numerical increase on your chances to score a Critical Strike. It always has a '+' in front of the stat, and it never says 'Increased'.

Example: If you have a weapon with '+5% Melee Critical Strike Chance', then you increase your chance to get a Critical Strike by 5%. If you have no other sources of Critical Strike Chance, then you would just add this to your base crit (5%) for a total of 10% chance to Critically Strike on Melee attacks.

Example: We still have the +5% Melee Critical Strike Chance on our weapon, but we also have 50% Increased Critical Strike Chance. We would calculate our chances to get a Critical Strike as follows:

(5+5)*(1+.5) = 15%

Critical Strike Chance caps at 100%, where you are guaranteed a Critical Strike against any enemy that does not have Critical Strike Avoidance. Overcapping Critical Strike Chance beyond 100% does not provide any benefit, even against Critical Strike Avoidance. However, the Rogue does have access to Critical Strike Vulnerability, which increases the chance that an enemy receives a Critical Strike and does help negate Critical Strike Avoidance.

This works similar to Increased Damage. Whenever we have a Critical Strike, we multiply our damage by our crit multi and any additional sources of Critical Strike Multiplier are added together. Example: If we have a Hit that would normally do 100 damage, but it is also a Critical Strike, and we have two sources of 50% Critical Strike Multiplier, the calculation would look like this:

(100)*(2+.5+.5) = 300, where '2' is our baseline Critical Strike Multiplier before the additional sources are added.

(((Base + ((Added 1 + Added 2...)*(Effectiveness)))*(Increased 1 + Increased 2 ...)*(More 1)*(More 2)...*(2 + Crit Multi 1 + Crit Multi 2...)

These are the stats that increase the rate you can use a particular skill. Almost all skills can scale Attack or Cast Speed, but there are exceptions (i.e. Disintegrate only scales the initiation of the cast, not the speed at which it applies DoT damage) as well as skills that convert Attack/Cast Speed to another stat (i.e. Dancing Strikes converts Attack Speed to More 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.

When attempting to calculate speed, a different equation must be used for Attack Speed vs Cast Speed. This is due to cast speed not scaling off of a weapon's base Attack Speed, while all attacks do scale off it.

Damage over Time (DoT) consists of any damage that is spread out over a period of time. This is in direct contrast to Hits that deal all their damage at once. DoTs can either be from Ailments (i.e. Ignite, Poison, Bleed) or skills that have the 'Damage Over Time' tag (i.e. Disintegrate, Maelstrom). Since DoTs cannot Hit, they cannot crit or apply 'on Hit' effects (i.e. Chance to Poison on Hit).

DoTs all share the same tick rate (the rate to which DoT damage is actually applied) that cannot be increased. Instead many DoTs (specifically Ailments) are primarily scaled by increasing the chance to apply that Ailment on every Hit. As noted previously, this chance can go above 100%, allowing the player to apply multiple stacks of an Ailment on each Hit. Example: If you have 250% chance to Poison on Hit, then for each Hit you are guaranteed to apply two stacks of Poison and have a 50% chance to apply a third stack. Some Ailments (i.e. Time Rot) have a cap on how many stacks an enemy can have on them and that number cannot be exceeded, not even by your application chance or how many skills you use to apply the Ailment. However the major DoT Ailments (Bleed, Poison, Ignite, Frostbite, Electrify) have no cap, meaning the player is only limited by how quickly they can apply stacks to an enemy and their Ailment duration.

Shred and Penetration reduce the defenses of an enemy, causing them to take Increased Damage. Because they are calculated after all player damage calculations (since they increase how much damage an enemy takes instead of increasing your damage directly), Shred and Penetration act as de facto damage multipliers. How they reduce defenses is a little different for each, so let's cover them separately.

There are two kinds of Shred, Armor (or Armour) and Resistance. In both cases, they are applied in stacks to the enemy, similar to Ailments (in fact, Shred is technically a type of Ailment).

Enemies generally have no Resistances or Armor by default, but both defenses can go negative which causes the enemy to take increased damage from that source. This makes Shred very beneficial to damage output regardless of the enemy and their own defenses.

Resistance Shred and Penetration are additive with each other since they both reduce the resistance of the enemy. Example: If you have 10% Fire Penetration and 4 stacks of Fire Shred on a non-boss enemy, you have reduced their Physical Resistance by 30%. Armor is a different defense type altogether which makes it multiplicative with Shred and Penetration. Armor Doesn't help with DoT builds since armor only protects from Hits, while Shred and Penetration do. If you're running a Hit build find some room for both, but if you're a DoT build you only want Shred/Penetration.

It is generally challenging to scale for more than one Damage Type in Last Epoch. This means that having mixed Damage Types on a build can result in a significant loss of output. One way to combat this problem on some builds is through Damage Conversions. These are generally nodes in Skill Trees or Unique items that can convert one or more Damage types to another. An example of this is Acid Rain within the Hail of Arrows skill tree that converts all Base Damage and swaps the skill's tag from Physical to Poison and also changes all sources of Bleed Chance to Poison Chance. This powerful node allows for much more scaling of Poison damage for Hail of Arrows builds.

The moral of the story is: if you're thinking about doing a conversion you need to know exactly how it works. Read the description carefully. Conversions aren't handled consistently and misunderstanding a conversion can be a costly and time consuming mistake.

Everything up to this point has been focused on the player and increasing the power of your own character. Minions, however, are treated much differently than the player and require different build making strategies. Here we discuss what you need to know in order to properly scale your Minions, what exceptions there are to Minion scaling, as well as a unique mechanic called Minion Power.

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:

Minions have their own unique way of scaling that's based directly on player level. Starting at level 26 your minions begin to gain 0.6% Minion Power per character level. Minion power increases the damage they do while also decreasing the damage they take, and this damage is multiplicative with other sources. At max level (100) your minions deal 45% More Damage and take 45% less damage. This is a powerful scaling mechanic that makes leveling even more powerful for Minion builds than most others.

When calculating your damage, it becomes clear that the actual damage you do to enemies in game doesn't add up to expectations. This is for two reasons:

In this section we've provided three case examples where we put everything together and calculate the expected damage. We employ most of the concepts in this guide, so make sure you have a solid understanding of what we've covered before diving in. Note: This is not meant to reflect a real build in its entirety. These examples are just meant to show how all of the concepts fit together. Actual builds are generally significantly more complex than this. We also aren't considering Attack/Cast speed in these examples, since we're just looking for the damage of a single attack, not our DPS.