Season 1 replaces the original damage formula. This page describes the new model. The live game still uses the old one until Season 1 ships.
The old problem
The original formula subtracted armour from attack:
damage = attack − defence
Subtraction has a cliff. A few points of armour either side of your attack value swings damage from "fine" to "almost nothing", and once a monster's defence approaches your attack, damage collapses to a floor value regardless of how much gear you're wearing.
That's why late zones felt slow rather than hard.
The new model
Damage is now a ratio, not a difference:
mitigation = armour / (armour + k × attackPower)
damage = attackPower × (1 − mitigation) × critMultiplier
Mitigation approaches 1 but never reaches it. There is no cliff and no floor hack: more armour always reduces damage, and more attack power always increases it, at every scale.
Where attack power comes from
attackPower = gearPower × (1 + Σ flat bonuses) × Π(1 + each multiplier)
Three layers, in order:
- Gear power — the sum of your equipped items' power (see Item power and rarity).
- Flat percentage bonuses — added together, then applied once.
- Multipliers — each one multiplies the result independently.
The third layer is why numbers grow the way they do in an incremental game. Two separate +50% multipliers give ×2.25, not ×2. Stacking different kinds of bonus beats stacking more of the same kind.
Critical hits
Critical chance keeps a soft cap. Critical damage does not.
The base critical multiplier is ×2, and critDamage bonuses add to it without
limit. Once your crit chance is high, further investment is better spent on crit
damage — the two multiply.
Growth
Monster health, monster power and item power all scale on the same per-level constant. Because content and gear grow together, an on-level fight feels the same at level 10 and level 110.
That is the point. Progress doesn't come from the base numbers — it comes from the multipliers you accumulate, and from Ascension.
What survived from the old system
Not everything was thrown out:
- Weapon-type resistances on monsters still apply.
- Race bonuses (+% damage vs animal, undead, devil, and so on) still apply, and are now one of the multipliers in the product above.
- Class-vs-class bonuses still apply in PvP.
Those all become terms in the Π(1 + x) product rather than special cases.