Critical and Elemental Damage

You might have noticed that, while attacking or being attacked, damage was either high or surprisingly low. This might come as a result of damage modifiers like armor, weaknesses and resistance (resistant) as well as critical attacks. Below is a primer on the how attack damage is calculated and/or modified based on the variety of things that can impact your final damage amount..

**Attack damage** is calculated in the following order: base attack damage --> subtract regular armor --> add critical damage --> apply multipliers (e.g. backstab) --> add increased damage taken --> subtract damage reduction (e.g. Reynar/Achae abilities) --> apply element effect (weakness/resist)

**Armor** will reduce damage from attacks, but will not reduce damage below 1. Armor does not reduce damage coming from non-attack effects like poison, bleed, blizzard, judgement, vehemence, etc as well as some instant damage spells like Ancestral Wrath

**Resistance** reduces damage by half (rounded up)

**Immunity** reduces damage to 1

**Weakness** adds 4 damage to the attack, and will only trigger once. A multi-element attack that triggers multiple weaknesses in an opponent will still only do 4 bonus damage.

Putting this together, here are some basic examples:

* 10 dmg to 4 armor = 6 dmg
* 10 dmg to 12 armor = 1 dmg
* 10 Fire dmg to 4 armor (no weakness/resistance) = 6 dmg
* 10 Fire dmg to 4 armor with fire weakness = 10 dmg (6 dmg + 4 fire weakness)
* 10 Fire dmg to 4 armor with fire resistance = 3 dmg (6 dmg / 2)

**Critical hits** add 30% of the the attack's base as a bonus *after armor is subtracted* (see above). In other words, the crit bonus damage is calculated based on the attack's initial damage (before it is reduced by armor), but is then added as a bonus after that initial damage is reduced. So:

* 10 crit damage versus 4 armor is: (10 dmg - 4 armor) + (10 dmg \* 0.3 crit bonus) = 6 dmg + 3 dmg = 9 final damage
* 10 crit damage vs 12 armor is: (10 dmg - 12 armor) + (10 dmg \* 0.3 crit bonus) = 1 dmg + 3 dmg = 4 final damage

Note that this attack damage could then still be further increased or reduced based on the parameters outlined above (e.g. backstab multiplier, element effects, or Reynar's Tough ability).

**Same-element modifiers** follow the following formula to determine weakness, resistance, or immunity when multiple modifiers are in effect:.

* Immune + Resist = Immune
* Immune + Weak = Resist
* Resist + Weak = Normal
* Resist + Resist = Resist
* Immune + Resist + Weak = Resist

**Multi-element attacks don't follow the the same-element modifier formulas above**. For example an enemy weak to holy but resistant to fire like some skeletons. If you do a holy+fire damage attack on that enemy, you would think that it comes out as normal damage but in fact it comes out as resist. This is because each individual element is evaluated separately and the highest resistance takes priority over other element weaknesses. This means that if an attack is resisted by *any element,* weaknesses from another element is totally ignored.

This can be seen in the examples below.

* 10 Fire Storm dmg to 4 Armor with fire weakness and Storm resistance = 3 dmg (6 dmg/ 2)
* 10 Fire Storm dmg to 4 Armor with fire weakness, storm resistance, and rogue storm weakness debuff = 10 dmg (6 dmg + 4 fire weakness)

For more advanced principles, including how damage from non-attack cards is calculated, click on the following link: More Advanced Damage Principles