Damage Types

## Character's Damage Type

Before considering effects that influence damage type, you'll need to know the damage type that you need to affect. To find your character's damage type:

* Open your character's page. It should look something like the image to the right with the red box around the words "ENERGY ATK" directly below the character level. Whatever is in that spot is the damage type that all your character's attacks scale based on. So, even if a particular attack isn't that type, increasing your damage in that type will still scale it up.

If you're looking for effects to buff your damage, you're looking for one of the following:

* Anything that buffs your **character's main damage** type as established above.
* Anything that buffs "**All Attacks**".
* **If** your attack's damage type is ***neither*** physical ***nor*** energy, then anything that buffs "**element damage**" or that specific type of damage.

   In practice, buffs that only affect a small number of attacks or even only one attack aren't going to be very efficient, so care should be taken to establish how many of your character's attacks will be affected by any particular damage buff. For instance, a buff to lightning damage for Black Widow (a Physical Attack hero) would, as you can see from the excerpt from her skills page (to the right), only buff the damage of one of her attacks.

It should be noted that there appears to be some sort of cap to the degree to which damage can be buffed, thus the use of characters like Red Hulk (who buffs fire damage) will have diminishing returns if stacked with other similar buffs.

#### Hulk with the Immortal Hulk uniform and Victorious

These are special cases, which do not work in the above manner, and how they do work won't be covered here.

## Incoming Damage Type (Resists and Defense)

Unless you know what type of damage you're going to be facing, there's not much you can do to manipulate this without a brute force approach.

#### Specific Resists

In practice specific resists, e.g. Lighting, Mind, Poison, Cold/Chill, Fire, are going to be of negligible use on an ongoing basis. Anything with a buff to any of those written in orange (i.e. unchangeable) could well be disposable, and anything with a buff to any of those written in blue could be considered for a reroll. There is one possible exception to this, which could occur at some point in the future and might be worth looking out for. If at any point the dominant PvP character in Timeline does a single type of damage, there may be a use for a Guard Break/[insert relevant resist here]/Invincibility obelisk.

#### Physical Defense vs Energy Defense

Energy defense or physical defense are both significantly better than any specific resists. A quick sample of the first 50 characters showed they're split 21 Energy Atk to 29 Physical Atk. Without statistics on the damage from minions it seems likely that they are going to do more physical attack through a lack of access to high tech weaponry and, frankly, super powers, so it would seem that physical defense will be far more useful than energy defense. It could be speculated that the damage split overall could be **2:1 in favor of physical defense**, making it twice as effective as energy defense and ⅔ as effective as the following, which avoids the issue of type completely:

#### All Defense

All Defense buffs are not uncommon and this is the brute force approach to reducing incoming damage. However, it's far from the only way to reduce incoming damage and is directly in competition with any opponent's Ignore Defense percentage. However, it's unclear whether that percentage is subtracted or applied as a percentage of the percentage. e.g. If your defense is 20% and your attacker's ignore defense is 20% either you'll effectively have no defense or you'll have (80% of 20%) = 16% defense. Greater HP may be a more reliable defense.

#### Dodge

Dodge does not interact with the incoming damage type, and for this reason **Dodge is generally considered a far superior method of damage reduction to any of the above**.