Cat Fantasy – Damage Calculation Formula

Damage Calculation Formula Guide

By Keripo.

Crits

Non-crit hit dmg:

Regular Hit Dmg = Attacker ATK * Skill Multiplier - Target DEF

Critical hit dmg:

Critical Hit Dmg = (Attacker ATK * Skill Multiplier - Target DEF) * Crit Dmg

Like with most games, Crit Rate is chance-based. The higher your Crit Rate, the more likely you’ll land a Critical hit. Ideally you want 100% crit rate or as close to it. Anything above 100% crit rate doesn’t actually do anything (unless you have a 5-star Asura who converts excess crit rate to crit dmg)

For PvE, if you’re thinking about “average damage over time”, to maximize your DPS, you actually want to aim for a balance between Crit (Rate) and Crit Dmg – 100%. For example, 75% Crit + 175% Crit Dmg, 100% Crit + 200% Crit Dmg, etc. For PvP, you want to get as close to 100% Crit as possible to ensure you crit.

In PvP:

Critical Dmg = Max ( Regular Hit Dmg, Critical Hit Dmg )
Effective crit rate = Crit Rate - Crit Rate Res
Effective crit dmg = Crit Dmg - Crit Dmg Res

This means that if you stack Crit Res or Crit Dmg Res, you can effectively make all their crits hit the same as regular hits. In other words, aim for 50%+ Crit Res or 50%+ Crit Dmg Res on your tanks. To counter this, focus on increasing your base ATK

Armor Pen

Penetration damage is actually dealt as a separate additive hit:

Pen Dmg = (Attacker ATK * Skill Multiplier * Armor PEN) - (Target DEF * Endurance)

Both DEF and Endurance contribute to reducing Armor Pen dmg. Contrary to in-game description, Armor Pen has nothing to do with shields. Derp.

Crit vs Pen

Depends on your unit’s skill effects. Crit and Pen are calculated separately and independent of each other (e.g. increasing your crit/crit dmg won’t affect your Pen dmg).

For DPS that deal Sunder Dmg, focus on Crit Dmg over Armor Pen. For DPS that deal Jab Dmg, focus on Armor Pen.

For attacks that are neither, you can use this handy reference:

Total Dmg = Regular/Crit Hit Dmg + Pen Dmg
Non-Crit Dmg = (Attacker ATK * Skill Multiplier - Target DEF)
Crit Dmg = (Attacker ATK * Skill Multiplier - Target DEF) * (Crit Dmg - Crit Dmg Res)
Pen Dmg = (Attacker ATK * Skill Multiplier * Armor PEN - Target DEF * Endurance)

Because ATK and DEF are multiplier for all 3 components, its never bad to go ATK/DEF. But for Sunder/Jab Dmg units, prioritize those.

DMG Modifiers

Some units such as Asura Forest Ranger, Echo Perfect Pitch, and Shiro Combat Maid have a modifier attached to their skills. Skills with these modifiers will 2x the respective base values when doing the damage calculations.

• If you have 150% crit dmg, it will be calculated as 300% crit dmg for attacks with the Sunder modifier. Note that Asura’s excess Crit -> Crit Dmg is added on to this after the 2x, not before.
• If you have 75% armor pen, it will be calculated as 150% armor pen for attacks with the Jab modifier.
• If you have 75% crit rate, it will be calculated as 100% crit rate (capped at 100%) for attacks with the Savage modifier.
• If your target has a debuff applied, skills with Dire modifier will have its regular hit dmg multiplied by 2.5x.

Luck

Luck is a crap stat. It gives your units a chance to spawn 2-star cards instead of 1-star cards. While this sounds amazing, its a multiplier against a very low base (from testing, its 5%). Even if you roll full Luck and get +100% luck, you are still gambling against a 10% chance of a card upgrade. Way too RNG to be reliable. Just don’t do it.

RNG Factor

There is a +/- 5% RNG factor in all damage calculations. This is why your numbers will vary a bit.

Armor Pen vs Crit Dmg

A quick explanation of why Armor Pen is better than Crit Dmg in PvP

In PvE, enemy mobs (without buffs) have effectively zero defence, zero endurance, zero crit res, and zero crit dmg res. As such, you can ignore the defence parts of the equation and focus on min maxing the attack side.

In PvP, however, player units do have a non-trivial amount of defence. Support and tank units also tend to have some base endurance and crit res/crit dmg res, but DPS will almost always have 0% for all 3 stats (unless obtained from gear stat lines or the crit dmg res set bonus)

If you look at the crit damage formula, you will notice that the defence value is subtracted away from the critical hit damage. All player units have defence stats (which also gets boosted by their assist and party resonance buff), so you will always deal less crit damage to player units in PvP than to mobs in PvE.

If you look at the pen damage formula, however, you will notice that the def value is first multiplied by the endurance value before subtracted from the pen damage. But most DPS units have 0% endurance, meaning they will take the entire full damage value in PvP, their defence stat doing nothing to reduce the pen dmg side of the total damage.

Another thing that makes armor pen better in PvP is the presence of the unit Scarlett. Scarlett’s passive gives a portion of her armor pen stat (up to 38%) to her team members (including herself oddly) as a passive buff at the start of the battle. This is extremely powerful and there is correctly no crit damage equivalent passive buffer (Viola has something similar but it’s an active card skill that needs to be used and the buff only affects one ally target).

When it comes to PvE though, crit damage wins out slightly due to the better multiplier when considering average high end gear rolls. If you were to wear a full cdmg gear set with all purple or gold crit/cdmg stat lines, you would likely end up with 100% crit and 350% cdmg. On the flip side, if you were to wear a full armor pen set with all purple or gold armor pen stat lines, you would only end up with 150% armor pen. 350% dmg from a crit is more than 250% dmg from normal dmg + pen dmg, so in PvE scenarios where the enemy target’s defence is zero or negligible, crit damage wins out.

Do note that crit damage percentage is doubled with the Sunder modifier and armor pen percentage is doubled with the Jab multiplier. This means that even though armor pen is “better” than crit damage, you will still get higher numbers stacking crit damage on units who have the Sunder modifier. That said, the current PvP meta is AoE spam, and there are currently no units with AoE Sunder skill cards, but there are units with AoE Jab cards (Scarlett and Halloween Minami).

TLDR: Armor pen is a better offensive stat to build for PvP than crit damage due to effectively ignoring the defence of enemy DPS that have 0% endurance. Crit dmg is better in PvE though and still very usable in PvP (just not as optimal) so it’s still acceptable to use cdmg gear on your DPS in PvP.

For reference, here’s the in-game stats of my Scarlett, who is wearing a full armor pen set with almost all red armor pen lines, during PvP combat. She is sitting at roughly 45k HP, 15k atk, 7.7k def, and 280% armor pen while giving all her team mates a passive +77% armor pen buff.