Damage Scaling

Do you find yourself killing mobs too slowly and don't know why? Or perhaps you are trying to simply squeeze out more damage for your Endgame build? Then you've come to the right place. Understanding how damage scaling works helps you make better builds, improve your clear speed, generate more currency, and kill bosses more easily. First, learn how to recognise what actually scales your builds damage and then employ advanced tips and tricks to efficiently scale your DPS.

Skill Tags

Before you can start scaling your skills, you need to know which modifiers apply to them. That's what skill tags are for! Each skill gem has tags below its name that tell you if it's an attack or spell, and which modifiers apply to it.

The tags above show that Spark is a spell that is affected by Spell, Projectile, and Lightning Damage modifiers. Cold, Fire & Lightning tags also let skills get affected by Elemental Damage modifiers. Spark additionally has a Duration tag allowing it to be scaled by #% increased/reduced Duration modifiers. Hold your extended description button to get a detailed tooltip for each tag.

Scaling Your Damage

• Base Damage: Most attacks deal damage based on the damage of your weapon, with some exceptions such as Shockwave Totem which uses its own weapon. Spells (and a handful of attacks) on the other hand deal damage based on the level of the corresponding skill gem. Level up your Gems by using a higher level Uncut Skill Gem on your existing skill to raise their damage. Spells generally gain flat damage per level while Attacks increase how well they scale with your Weapon Damage.
• Added Damage: Additional "flat" damage can be added to your skills through a variety of sources to supplement their base damage, regardless of whether you deal damage with an attack or spell. A ring with the stat "Adds 7 to 13 Physical Damage to Attacks" would add that damage to your attack before it is multiplied by the the Skills Attack Damage Multiplier.
• "Increased" Damage: "Increased" damage modifiers give you great returns for relatively low investment, however all sources of "Increased" damage applicable to your skill stack additively with each other, giving them diminished returns. E.g. 20% Increased Fire Damage increases your damage multiplier for Fire Skills to 1.2. Adding 20% Increased Elemental Damage raises it to 1.4, which effectively is only a 16.67% increase.
• "More" Damage: "More" damage multipliers are multiplicative and mostly gained from support gems. If we replace the modifiers from the previous example with 20% more Damage, they multiply your damage by 1.44 (1.2*1.2 instead of 1+0.2+0.2). More damage mainly comes from Support Gems so gaining additional sockets on your Skills is very valuable.
• Hit Rate: Increasing your skills' hit rate is another way to improve your damage, commonly done through attack or cast speed. You need to be careful with this however, as too much can cause mana issues. Additionally, attacks rely on accuracy to hit while spells aren't affected by it. In general, try to keep your Chance to Hit as close to 100% as you can. Keep in mind your Chance to Hit goes down the further you are away from the enemy.
• Critical Strike Damage: If a hit deals a Critical Hit, its damage is multiplied by your Critical Damage Multiplier. By default your Critical Damage Multiplier is 200%, causing your hits to deal double damage. Regular hits are scaled by Added Damage, Increased Damage and More Damage. Critical Hits function similarly and are scaled by " +#% to Critical Damage Bonus (the equivalent of flat damage), Increased Critical Damage and More Critical Damage Bonus.
• Critical Strike Chance: Increase your chances to deal a Critical Hit with "Increased Critical Hit Chance". Spells have an inherent chance to Critically Hit based on the skill and can also be scaled with "Increased Critical Hit Chance for Spells". Attacks use your Weapons local Critical Hit Chance and can also be scaled with "Increased Critical Hit Chance with Attacks".
• Gained Damage: "Gain #% of Damage as X Damage" modifiers grant a percentage of your base damage as extra damage. Gained damage is additive with other sources of Gained Damage but multiplicative with the rest of your damage scaling. Keep in mind as it adds Base Damage (meaning before any damage multipliers) only modifiers of the new damage type apply to it.

Damage Formula Example

Now that you know the variables of damage scaling, here's an example with a simplified formula to visualize them.

Using simplified values and a small selection of possible scalers:

• 100 Cold Damage from the Skills inherent base damage
• 50 Cold Damage from Added Damage
• 300% damage = 200% total "increased" Damage from Passives & Gear added to the 100% default damage
• 40% "more" Damage from the Hourglass Support Gem.
• 20% "more" Damage from Skullcrusher or another Support Gem.
• 2 Casts per Second

The resulting DPS gets affected by the enemy's Cold Resistance and any other buffs or debuffs on them.

Enemy Mitigation

Enemy Monsters can have Resistances that reduce your Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos damage as well as Armour which reduces your Physical Damage. Reduce monsters defenses with the following:

• "Damage Penetrates #% of X Resistance" to reduce the resistance of the mob on hit damage calculation, down to 0%. Penetration cannot reduce Monsters to below 0% Resistance.
• Fire/Cold/Lightning Exposure which reduces a monsters resistance by 20% for 4 seconds by default. This effect cannot stack but can be scaled with increased Exposure Effect.
• Curses that reduce Enemy Resistances
• Setting the Enemies Resistance to a certain value with Doryani's Prototype
• Sources of Armour Break to reduce the Enemies Armour, making them take more Physical Damage. Armour cannot be reduced to below 0 unless Warbringer's Imploding Impacts is allocated.
• Bosses and Rares have higher values of Armour and Resistances. Mitigating them increases your damage output substantially.

Persistent Buffs

These reserve some of your Spirit to grant damage buffs. Click here for an in-depth Spirit Guide.

• Examples of Persistent Buffs that raise your damage are Attrition, Archmage or Berserk.

Curses and Marks

Curses apply strong debuffs to enemies. Only one curse can be applied to an enemy by default. This limit can be raised through specific gear and passive tree points. Help with scaling your damage by:

• Curses: Curses (e.g. Flammability, Vulnerability apply a debuff to all enemies within their radius after a short delay, applying various debuffs that cause them to take more damage. Socket your Curse into Blasphemy to instead turn it into a Persistent Buff at the cost of Spirit.
• Marks: Marks (e.g. Sniper's Mark, Voltaic Mark) can only be active against one enemy and grant miscellaneous effects. Regardless of your curse limit, you can only apply one Mark to an enemy.

Temporary Buffs

Temporary Buffs are ways to amplify your skills for either a set amount of time or for a certain number of Skill uses.

• Mana Tempest grants massive Gained Damage while you are inside it but quickly drains your mana.
• Barrage empowers your next Bow Attack to repeat itself multiple times but incurs a large cooldown.
• Pain Offering grants a large amount of bonus DPS to your minions.
• Seismic Cry causes your next attack to create a guaranteed Shockwave if the Warcry hit a heavy stunned enemy.

Debuffs

Make the enemy take increased damage with these options. Keep in mind that sources of "increased damage taken" are additive with each other meaning stacking too many of these modifiers reduces their effectiveness diminishingly.

• Exposure reduces enemy resistances to the according element and can come from various sources such as Frost Bomb or Lightning Exposure
• Wither stacks up to 10 times for a duration, with each stack increasing the Chaos Damage an enemy takes by 5%.
• Shock by default increases the damage an enemy takes by 20%. The chance to shock an enemy scales based on the size of your hit. Increase your chances to shock with #% increased chance to Shock and increase the 20% baseline with increased Magnitude of Shock you inflict.
• Intimidate (e.g. from Blackheart) causes affected enemies to take 10% increased damage.

Mechanical Damage Increases

The following mechanics add to your damage output without explicitly scaling your tooltip DPS:

• Extra Projectiles that cause enemies to be hit multiple times. This is commonly referred to as Shotgunning.
• Chance to Chain an additional time from the terrain. This also has the potential to generate extra hits onto enemies that are near walls.
• Using "Payoff Skills" that rely on a certain condition to be met in order to gain extra effects. For example Boneshatter when hitting an enemy that's primed for stun.

Mixing Multipliers

You now understand all the different methods of increasing you damage. But thoughtlessly stacking those increases generally results in a sub-optimal damage profile. Scaling damage in Path of Exile 2 generally follows the mantra of not putting all of your eggs in one basket, but instead finding a healthy balance between all the different methods of damage scaling. Let's find out why.

1. You take a Skill that deals 1.000 DPS and get 1000% increased damage from various sources. Your skill now deals 11.000 DPS
2. You take the same Skill but you instead go for a mix of 300% increased damage, two sources of 30% more Damage, 50% increased Cast Speed, 30% Gained Damage, Crit for 300% and apply a shock of 30% to the enemy. Your Skill now deals 51.409 DPS. That's almost 5 times as much despite missing 700% increased damage.

The reason for that is Diminishing Returns. Damage modifiers of the same group (e.g. Shock + Wither) are additive with each other. For example having two sources of 80% increased damage causes your 1.000 DPS Skill to deal 1.000*(1+0.8+0.8)=2600 damage instead of 1.000*(1+0.8)*(1+0.8)=3.240. The only exception to this are sources of #% more Damage which are always multiplicative with each other.

As you can see overinvesting in one form of scaling is vastly inferior to finding a good mix between different methods of damage scaling. Remember: The more you stack the same multiplier the less impact it has.

Compounding Damage Upgrades

Perhaps as important as properly mixing multipliers is not undervaluing small but frequent damage upgrades. Getting a 5% DPS upgrade might not sound very exciting, but it compounds. The first time you upgrade your 1.000 DPS Skill by 5% you gain 50 DPS. The 20th time you do it you gain 150 DPS. It's like interest for your damage, the more damage you have from previous small upgrades the more you stand to gain on the next.

The Passive Tree for example grants you a total of 123 Points. Assuming an average expected damage increase of 3% more damage per node, removing the last 24 points would cut your DPS in half. And that is despite it only being a 5th of your total passive nodes.

Be Careful

• Minions don't scale with your damage. They have their own modifiers that state that modify minions without affecting you.
• Totems aren't minions. They do scale with your character's damage in addition to applicable Totem modifiers. They also count as Allies.
• Some skills convert your damage from one type to another. Damage modifiers only affect the final damage type. Meaning if a skill fully converts its Physical Damage to Cold Damage increases and reductions to physical damage do NOT apply.
• Flat damage on a weapon is added to the weapon's base damage and doesn't affect spells.
• Increased Physical Damage on a weapon increases the weapon's base damage and doesn't affect spells. Increased Global Physical Damage however affects attacks and spells.

Summary

Check your Skill Tags in order to figure out what's scaling your damage and understand how the Damage Formula works to properly mix various multipliers efficiently. Combine Persistent Buffs, Curses, Temporary Buffs, and Debuffs with a good grasp on how compounding damage works to snowball your DPS substantially. Be careful to not fall victim to common scaling misconceptions.

Credits

Written by Cptn Garbage
Reviewed by Tenkiei