Power

In order to be successful in Paragon, a team must have a hero or two that excel at dealing damage. Every unit has the ability to inflict damage to a certain extent. Minions, Structures, Neutral Monsters, Towers and Heroes can all inflict damage, and can potentially kill their targets.

Damage in Paragon can be increased with **Power**.

## Damage Sources

There are two types of damage:

* Basic Damage
* Ability Damage

All basic attacks and some abilities deal Basic Damage, while most abilities deal Ability Damage. When receiving damage from an enemy, an indicator will pop up on the HUD that's either red for Basic Damage, or Purple for Ability Damage.

Having a variety of Damage sources on a team can greatly improve its damage output. Since Armor is always either Basic or Ability, it will always only mitigate one type of damage. In order for a unit to be highly resistant to both types of damage, one must build armor for both types, which can be a time-consuming and expensive process.

## Damage Types

There are two ways to inflict damage with abilities.

* Single Target
* AoE - Area of Effect

Single Target damage is incurred on a single target, while AoE damage is incurred on any units that are within a specific area.

Most abilities are either only Single Target or AoE, but there are abilities that have a mix of both. For example, a Fighter's basic attack deals it's full damage amount to a single target, while also dealing a smaller portion of that damage in a cone in front of the hero in an AoE, usually referred to as "cleaving". Carry's basic attacks are single target.

## Increasing Damage

Damage can be increased by Power. Power affects both Basic and Ability types of damage.

Damage gained from Power on an ability depends on it's Scaling. All basic attacks have 1.0 Scaling, but abilities have varying amounts of Power Scaling.

## Calculating Damage

All damage is calculated by a formula.

D = AoER x {BD + (ARC x AR) x [1 + (DBS - 1) + (DBT-1)] x [100 / (100 + FRR)]}

Where:

* BP = Base Damage
* ARC = Attack Rating Coefficient
* AR = Attack Rating
* AoER = how much an attack is reduced by AoE
* DBS = Damage Bonus Source
* DBT = Damage Bonus Target
* FRR = Armor - Pen

The first portion of the formula ( BD ​ + ( ARC​ \* AR ) ) pretty much determines the raw amount of damage that an attack would do. Everything to the right of that is a number that will modify that damage amount. These numbers are usually between 0 and 1, and will reduce the overall damage to varying degrees.

The other 2 terms that need to be touched on are “DBT” and “DBS”, these stand for Damage Bonus Source and Damage Bonus Target. These effects are similarly applied before Defense is factored. A Card like Heavy Hitter will give your basics a +15% DBS as it’s a personal buff to yourself, where a Gem like Amplify Aura puts a +10% DBT on every enemy in the radius when calculating Ability Damage.

A simpler formula would be:

***Health Lost = Damage Taken x [100/(100 + Defense after Penetration)]***

Keep in mind any Defense you have is specific to a type of damage you may take. Basic Defense will protect you from only Basic Damage and vice versa. If you wish to increase your survivability against all damage types simultaneously you should look to build Health.

Certain Cards like Yomi Guardian provide flat ways to mitigate damage. These modifiers are applied before your Defense Ratings are taken into account.

## Example

To show an example of this, if another Hero is about to hit you with a basic attack for 300 damage and you had 100 Basic Defense, it would look like this:

300 x [100/(100 + 100)] = 150 Basic Damage

If you used a Card beforehand to reduce the damage by 100, it would change to this:

(300 - 100) x [100/(100 + 100)] = 100 Basic Damage

As you can see, with higher Defense Ratings this type of mitigation does less, but it’s extremely effective for non-Tanks who aren’t building into that type of survivability.

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