Influence of Weapon Damage and Strength on Damage

The first stage reworking the Damage Formula is to go over and validate all previous Theorycrafting work, which, will decide how I approach data collection. One of the most important things is understanding the influence of Strength on the Damage Formula. Why? Well, according to Valks work, we can still continue to deal damage even with 0 Weapon Damage, meaning Strength on it’s own, directly influences our damage. This also means regardless of our stats, we will always have a base value of damage.

If there is no “0” Weapon Damage value in the game, then we do not have a base damage value. If we do not have a base damage value, then Strength is not, or doesn’t hold any independent properties which can alter the damage formula. This is a very important mechanic, as it absolutely influences how the Damage Formula is shaped.

If Strength doesn’t have its own damage value, then the Damage Formula would simply be something like:

• WD*STR*DTR

If Strength operates how we currently assume it does, then we’ll have a formula which resembles:

• WD+(STR*WD)*DTR.
• or, ((WD*STR)+STR)*DTR

Both formulas allow Strength to be influenced by Weapon Damage, but one makes it so Strength has a base value, whereas the former doesn’t.

Data Collection

One thing I’ll point out now, is that I am not formulating Auto-Attack Damage – Only Action Skills.

The first thing I did was break down one of my Spears (it was my Zeta Spear actually, and I had to break it down at least 3 times because of Raids…). When a weapon breaks in this game, it loses all of its properties and has no stats, but it is unknown what the base Auto-Attack and Weapon Damage is of the weapon. There isn’t anywhere in your Character UI which shows your active Weapon Damage and the Weapon Description is also blanked out

In the table blow, I collected min/max damage parses from 277-560 Strength. Of course, as I’m measuring the influence Strength has on Damage at base Weapon Damage, I’d be keeping Determination constant. It’ll serve as our control.

After collecting 15 Data-Points, I plotted it all into a table which you can see above. Afterwards, I put it into a scatter-graph and included a line of best fit to see the linear gains on Strength.

What you are seeing right now is the result of my data-points.

If you don’t know already, 0.0846x + 4.7483 is the plotted (x,y) co-ordinates of the data-points I collected. R^2 is a statistics value which determines how accurate the linearity of my data is. The closer to 1 this value is, the more accurate my Data is.

This formula calculates what our damage will be, with base Weapon Damage, with varying Strength Levels. So, 0.0846*277 + 4.7483 = 28.1825, which fits in with our table above. Now, this isn’t the end formula, but this is just a proof of concept that we’ll always be dealing a base minimum damage of 4.7483 even with 0 Strength and X/Base Weapon Damage. My objective now was to find out exactly what Base Weapon Damage was. So, this time I collected Data with constant Strength and Determination, but varying Weapon Damage values.

Above is the table of my data and below is the plotted graph. With the data points I collected, with X, or Base Weapon Damage, I was dealing 49.5 average damage with 524 Damage. If I can get a formula which adds up to this 49.5 average damage, then I can observe exactly what the base-weapon damage is in this game.

To calculate our Damage with 0 Weapon Damage, we do 2.1807*0 + 49.618 = 49.618. As it turns out, this is roughly equal to the damage we were dealing with our broken weapon. We can therefore conclude that base Weapon Damage is 0 and that Strength can independently deal damage regardless of our Weapon Damage. Of course, these two charts aren’t even the tip of the iceberg. What I needed to do next was to collect even more datapoints so I can see the influence of WD*AP and AP on their own.

Each of these tables show us our Base Damage with X Weapon Damage. These values above are what will contribute to our Damage Formula and essentially tells us everything we need to know.

What we’ll do first is get our base damage values of 51.998, 49.618 and 47.044 then plot them on a graph like so:

So what does this table tell us? This formula, 0.099*STR-2.3758 is what we’d use to calculate our base damage value with absolutely no Weapon Damage, independent of Determination and Weapon Damage. So if I had 300 Strength and 0 Weapon Damage, this formula will be in function to show that we’re still dealing some sort of damage.

Next, is the influence of Weapon Damage * Strength. Again, using the 3 data-point charts above which has our base damage values, instead we’re going to use the slope of these graphs – The values 2.2839, 2.1807, and 2.11, against the Strength Values used.

So, we now have two formula’s to calculate damage.

• WD*(0.0035*STR+0.3632)
• 0.099*STR-2.3758

Together, the full formula is: (WD*(0.0035*STR+0.3632))+(0.99*STR-2.3758)

Now, before people get all happy and start screaming “yay new damage formula!”… I need to state these few things.

Firstly, this formula was created with very minimal Data-Points – A lot less than what could’ve been used, therefore it is susceptible to errors at high DET/LowSTR Values. Talking of Determination, this damage formula is calculated without taking into consideration the effect of Determination on Damage and thirdly, as you may of seen in one of my previous blogs, the each Job/Class affects the damage formula differently.

The formula above only works for the Dragoon at base 202 Determination. Still! It’s a step in the right direction and will prove very useful later on for when I create a fully working Damage Model.