How damage is calculated in Elden Ring? This guide is an important precursor of some basic information that you need to know before you move on to optimizing the different weapons and builds. 

Elden Ring Damage Calculation - Split Scaling, Stats, Negation Explained

In Lost Ark, many of you even don't know how the damage is calculated, although with the best Elden Ring weapons on hand. In other words, you may not know exactly what factors affect the weapon and the damage you build. With this guide sorted from Chrightt's video, we aim to help you know the damage calculate formula in Lost Ark better!

Armor and Negation

In the bottom right of your status page, you see your defensive attributes, but these attributes can be quite confusing. For resistances, the right side shows how much resistance you’re getting from your armor while the left side shows you your total resistance. But it doesn’t work the same way for defense and damage negation. In fact, your defense and damage negation isn’t even tied to each other. Your negation is tied to your armor while your stats and levels increase your defense. Negation (or Absorption) is multiplicative while the defense is a flat damage reduction.

Let’s start with the armor first because we think you’re wondering what multiplicative means for negation right now. Using the veteran’s chest piece as an example, on the left, we see the negation attributes it grants you:

The values are split into two types: 4 types of physical and 4 types of magical. It can sound confusing because you would think VS strike/slash/pierce are all physical negation, but why is there a physical category? This physical category encompasses any physical attack that doesn’t fall into one of these three categories. Here, you see the amount of negation you get for your character is exactly the amount the armor states:

For example, you take 100 physical damage from an attack without any armor on. With Veteran’s Armor on, you would be taking 81.3 points of physical damage because it reduces damage taken by 18.7%.

• 100 x (1-0.187) = 81.3 damage

Next, let’s take a look at a different piece, and keep using the veteran’s set here with the veteran’s helm.  Similarly, we should be expecting 93.2 points of damage taken. But what happens if we wear both the veteran’s helm and the veteran’s armor? If we add 6.8 to 18.7, we get 25.5.

Are the two pieces of equipment going to negate 25.5% of the damage taken? We can see from the character planner, that it doesn’t work that way: 24.228 is less than 25.5 Why is that the case?

81.3 damage x (1-0.068) = 75.772 damage

100 - 75.772 = 24.228

That is because negation stacks multiplicatively. Recall the veteran’s armor reduces damage to 81.3 points. Now, the veteran’s helm further reduces 81.3 by 6.8%. Doing the math, we get 75.772 damage taken. If we were originally going to take 100 points of damage, it is now reduced by 24.228%.

Stack Multiplicatively Wet from Water + Raining

• 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.81 (19% reduced lightning negation)

• 1.1 x 1.1 = 1.21 (21% increased fire negation)

You probably already know being wet or walking in a body of water reduces your lightning negation by 10% and increases your fire negation by 10%. However, what you probably didn’t know is they also stack multiplicatively. So, if you’re wet and walking in the rain, your lightning negation is reduced by 19% while your fire negation is increased by 21%. 

Because negation is hard to come by, talismans like the scorpion charm or the Radagon’s Soreseal are actually a large tradeoff to consider especially in PVP. For meta levels 125 and anything above that, we don’t suggest running the Soreseals because it’ll do more harm than good. You rather have fewer stats, whatever the stat is.

Leveling, Stats, and Defense

Let’s check what stats we’re actually getting out of leveling up and the 8 attributes. We will be using a wretch as our base class so it is easier to see. Keep your eye on the defense and resistance section. If we pump 50 vigor into our wretch to level him up 50 times, these are the new stats:

Taking the difference, we have 20 points of difference in all defense stats except fire which went up by 73 points. Robustness, focus, and Vitality went up by 10 points while Immunity went up by 50. 

But we have to keep in mind, that just leveling a character 50 times already gives us stats. Reaching 51 from level 1 gives us these stats. These stats aren’t linear though, so the next 50 levels don’t look like this. Anyway, we discover that vigor itself gives us 53 fire defense and 40 immunity, which is 1.06 and 0.8 per level respectively. There is actually a curve here on defense too. You aren’t actually getting exactly this amount of fire defense and immunity per level, but we are going to present it in this format because it gives a general idea. 

If we repeat the experiment for the Mind here, we can see the major difference comes from focus. Subtracting the bonus we would get from the first 50 level-ups, we get 40 focus or 0.8 focus per mind. Repeating this for Endurance, the major difference comes from Robustness. 40 Robustness translates to 0.8 robustness per endurance.

• Strength - All physical defense stats went up by 46 points. Essentially, we’re getting 0.52 points per physical defense stat per point of strength.

• Dexterity - Now, if you read the description of dexterity before, you will see that it provides no bonuses to defense or resistances. Indeed, it doesn’t but it clearly shows you the stats you’ll be getting for just leveling up.

• Intelligence - Upgrading intelligence gives us 60 magic defenses instead of 20, which is 0.8 magic defense per level.

• Faith - Like dexterity, Faith does not give any bonuses.

• Arcane - It gives 40 holy defense and 30 vitality, putting it at 0.8 holy defense and 0.6 vitality per point of arcane.

So from what we can see, the stat point investment themselves don’t actually give a whole lot of stats. But attribute points also perform other functions like weapon scaling, but in terms of defense and resistances, your biggest source is leveling.

Level 125/Level 150 Additional Stats

These are the stats from leveling everyone gets at level 125. Compared to level 1, we see a significant difference:

You also see the resistances catch up to the defense bonuses. The weird numbers here and there is only because of the level we stop at. Level 126 gives 1 more point of fire resistance while level 127 gives 1 more point in all physical defense. The big takeaway here is at level 125, you’re getting a bonus to all stats about evenly. The same thing happens for 150. All the stats are just a tad bit higher, but you’re pretty much getting it evenly. 

How Negation and Defense Ties Together?

So what exactly is the difference between defense and negation, and how exactly do they work together? 

• Negation = Multiplicative

• Defense = Flat Damage Reduction

Negation reduces the damage you take by a percentage. And then defense reduces it by a flat value. As for how exactly the flat value works. Well, that is a bit complicated, just think of it as a flat value. That was a lot of information about damage calculation for not a lot of practical use for the average player, but it certainly is important to explain the underlying mechanics first in order to discuss split scaling and stat skew.

Split Scaling and Takeaways

Next, use the Nightrider Glaive as an illustration of the point because it is one of the few weapons that scale to S in strength when Heavy infused. We will be comparing it to the fire-infused version which has its damage split into physical and fire with only a B scaling in strength. Using a weapon damage calculator at the 80 point strength mark, the nightrider glaive has 720 AR.

However, even with a weaker B scaling, we are still getting 769 AR with the fire infusion. Even a S rated strength scaling weapon cannot beat the fire counterpart.  Does that mean the fire version is straight-up stronger because it has a higher attack rating? The answer is: no. 

Lost Ark Damage Formula

Let us recall the damage calculation formula:

Heavy: 

• 720 x (1 - vs slash damage negation) - vs slash defense

Fire:

• 381 x (1 - vs slash damage negation) - vs slash defense

• 388 x (1 - vs fire damage negation) - vs fire defense

Let’s say the glaive does slash damage. We first reduce the slash damage by the target’s slash negation and then reduce it by a flat amount from the defense. The fire version has two types of attack (aka split scaling). We need to reduce both of these attacks by their respective damage negation.

So far, things are multiplicative, meaning if the damage is only calculated by negation, fire infusion will indeed always be stronger. However, defense is the flat damage reduction component, and BOTH of the attack types must be reduced by their respective flat defense. Assuming the target’s fire defense and slash defense are the same, they have twice the amount of flat defense versus your attack. In fact, in most cases at 80 strength, the fire-infused weapon will be weaker, but it still obviously depends on what you’re hitting. Remember flat defense raises as your level increases? This makes the game favor single scaling the higher your level is. 

Some Other Key Points of Damage Calculation

Since vigor is likely to be a highly invested stat, you should expect your fire defense and immunity to being particularly higher.

Lightning will almost always be your lowest defense because there is no way to buff it through stats.

As you level up, your Robustness will likely be high as well because you will invest in some endurance, and heavier armor tends to have high robustness.

Elden Ring Damage Calculation: Why Does a Lower Number Do More Damage?

This is a classic case of split damage and 2 different resistances for the enemy:

Split damage is going to do less most of the time because it passes through two damage thresholds, whereas with the standard one, it's only one. You would need a situation where the two damage types are ones that the enemy is weak against so that the net value is higher than if it were just one damage type.

Best Elden Ring Damage Calculator

If you want to check the weapon damage and AR stats, we recommend you use the complete and accurate Elden Ring Weapon Calculator in Google Sheets which was created by u/TarnishedSpreadsheet on Reddit. This calculator is so accurate since it keeps updating the weapon stats changes, that you can even select the "Boss" you wish to battle and determine how much damage each weapon will deal based on the boss's vulnerability and other stats.

How To Check Your Weapon Damage with This Calculator:

1. Access To Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xLMP8BXDFdl1A1TbttVzdBr2Je-WNVQ9y6_HqIMymXI/copy, and make a copy of the sheet

2. Input your stats, your weapon of choice, the weapon's upgrade level, and the weapon's affinity into the top row to see the resulting damage numbers in the darker brown cells. 

3. You can double-click the weapon cell (G2) to type and search for the weapon of your choice.

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