Weapon damage

Version 0.28: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Weapon damage is your base weapon damage, multiplied by strength modifier, multiplied by weapon skill and fighting skill modifiers. Slaying bonuses and weapon enchantment are added afterwards. Actual damage components are randomly rolled in four places: 1d(Base * Strength modifier), Weapon skill modifier and Fighting modifier.

Damage formula

Damage = uniform(Base damage * Stat modifier) * Skill modifier * Fighting modifier + Misc modifiers + uniform(Slaying bonuses) + Stabbing bonus - AC damage reduction

As a shorthand uniform(x) = 1d(x+1)-1 or a roll from 0 to x inclusive.

• Base damage:
  • Unarmed combat: 3 + UC (can be changed by some spells and the claws mutation, see Unarmed combat)
  • Using a weapon: Base damage of the weapon
• Stat modifier:
  • 0.75 + 0.025 * Stat
  • The Stat is your Strength. There is a minimum modifier of 0.01 (1%).
• Skill modifier:
  • 1 + uniform(Weapon skill)/25 (not applied to unarmed combat)
  • The main advantage to raising a weapon/unarmed skill is decreasing your attack delay.
• Fighting modifier:
  • 1 + uniform(Fighting skill)/30
• Misc modifiers:
  • Might or Berserk: +1d10
• Slaying bonuses:
  • Weapon enchantment bonus
  • - Corrosion penalty
  • + Slaying bonus from rings or artifacts
  • + 3 * Augmentation mutation level
  • + Sharp Scales mutation level
  • + Wereblood slaying bonus
  • - Penalty from being horrified
  • + Wu Jian Council heavenly storm bonus
  • + Infusion bonus.
• Final multipliers:
  • If it is an additional cleaving attack: Multiply by 0.7
  • Statue Form: Multiply by 1.5
  • Shadow Form: Multiply by 0.5
  • If the player has the Weak status effect: Multiply by 0.75
• Stabbing bonus: See stabbing.
• AC damage reduction: See AC.

Some considerations:

• The main contributions to weapon damage are: base damage, weapon skill (Maximum of +108% at level 27) and fighting skill (Maximum of +67.5% at level 27).
• Effect of weapon and fighting skills is random. Linear distribution between 0 and the maximum.
• As you can see, at very low skill levels, the value of base damage and enchantment is approximately the same, but for skilled characters base damage is much more important than enchantment.
• Weapon brands that use multiplicative bonuses, calculate the additional amount of damage as a percentage of the damage described in this page (including AC damage reduction). This additional amount of damage ignores AC, but it can be affected by resistances or vulnerabilities.
• Each term in the formula is calculated in sequence and is rounded down to an integer. This rounding down is worse with a weapon with low base damage. For an example, lets look at a player with a Stat of 12 and a Skill of 12 in short blades. With no slaying bonuses, a +0 dagger with a base damage of 4 cannot do more than 5 damage. The same player wielding a +0 rapier with a base damage of 8 can do up to 13 damage. So a dagger's damage increases by 25% while a rapier's damage increases by 62%. The damage per 10 aut is now a max of 10 for the dagger and a max of 20 for the rapier. At this stat and skill level a +5 dagger would be inferior to a +0 rapier except when it comes to stabbing.

History

• Starting in 0.29 launcher, long blade, and short blade damage will scale with Dexterity rather than Strength.
• In 0.27, the strength modifier was simplified and made nonrandom.
• In 0.13 the effect of stats on melee was doubled.
• Between 0.8 and 0.13, melee weapons of speed suffered a -10% penalty to damage.