Explaining Elden Ring's Misleading Damage Calculation System 

Take a rest man, u done enough. Dont work urself to death. Would be a shame

I would also like to point out something you didn't cover, likely because there doesn't seem to be any effort to document it. In Dark Souls 3, defense worked in brackets. The calculation for how "flat" defense affects your damage changed depending on how much damage you actually dealt compared to your target's defense stats. This seems to be back in Elden Ring, I haven't tested it extensively but adding fire damage to a fire-infused weapon via Flaming Strike resulted in over 100 more damage on a backstab, but adding even more fire damage to a different weapon without the fire infusion via drawstring grease resulted in less than 50 extra damage against the exact same Godrick soldier.

@@jackdague1792 There are some reddit posts covering this in more detail. Basically lower damage hits are more impacted by defense than stronger ones, which is why multi hit weapons/spells are so weak early. The main breakpoint occurring when damage>defense, so hits less than 100ish dmg early on are going to feel really bad. This is also why early game enemies do much less damage later on, but not NO damage as a "flat" reduction would cause.

could we have graphs for the scalings please...🤣

Have you ranked the OST's yet?

He recorded this in January, like i have videos yet to be uploaded that were recorded in January

lmfao

@@Rusty._ i don't know what that means even though im 6000

@@scarameowSucksAtGaming I know, its just amusing thats all

Laughing My Freaking Ass Off​@@scarameowSucksAtGaming

5th for me, lol

Yes. January 35th for that matter.

😂😂😂

30t of February is mine of March.

lmao

Perfect idea

Axe of Godfrey has to be at least in top 10 for me. I mean, look at Godfrey, look at his weapon, look at his moveset, read his lore. And try to tell me that "C scaling in strength" is not absolutely batshit insane

@@blackflashh i made a dedicated godfrey build and that "C" almost sent me to an asylum

How about area scaling? I'm personally very upset to find out that Dragonbarrow has hihger scaling than FARUM AZULA despite being impossible to tell apart from the rest of Caelid and also allowing you to just walk into it unopposed and with no indication that it's scaling will be different from the rest of Caelid.

@@blackflashhAxe of Godfrey is #1 for most upsetting weapon scaling in all of FromSoft games.

Contrast that wall of numbers with item descriptions that amount to "This talisman increases damage resistance. How much? Idk, trust me bro."

@@Spobblesseriously pisses me off. Dear devs, stop making me google shit.

It's why I just do the funny thing called not worry about armour and just wear whatever I like the look of most. If I die, I just wasn't good enough.

Kinda why I liked armored core 6 they showed some more of the numbers even if they didn't show everything

​@@gregbrown3082it's to discourage minmaxing. Frankly i feel it's entirely normal to have to look up exact percentages. It's not like they don't differentiate between increases and greatly increases.

Yes. He has suffered through ng+7 when many people prefer to do multiple characters and just enjoy certain builds without even beating Radagon with said character. It's a shame there is no incentive to do ng+ other than maybe get 2 of a unique weapon (o get rotten sword insignia and milicent prostesis)

@@calibula95there’s the incentive of self inflicted suffering!

​@@calibula95i missed Alexander questline because i did not know i needed to proceed with sellen quest for him to relocate from that cave where you get moonveil to redmane castle also i accidentally started festival without getting that one gesture,its unfortunate he does not move there or left his weaker talisman like in Bloodborne where you can ignore bowblade questline and still get that one key that is needed to trigger npc invasions

@@yarro7428 thanks man

​@@calibula95 since I got almost every item in the game with one character at NG+10, I just upload the save file and drop what I need to my friend then he returns to me on the new characters I make. I hardly get into NG+ now, just enjoying co-op and pvp. The best decision I made, without any regrets.

Goes back to laughing at healthbars with _Destined Death_

@@MamaTrixxieAsmrmaliketh‘s black blade goes brrrrrr

Darth Kermit meme: "Put bleed on a Destined Death weapon, cowards"

Can't hit enemy with numbers.

Just gotta hit em once​@@reedschadegg9023

WTF IS A SOFTCAP??????

​@@manusan1014soft cap is where the gains from increasing a stat becomes lower, or minimal. Or in other words the law of diminishing returns. For example, a raising your vigor from 20 to 21 will net you +28 HP Raising it from 39 to 40 will net you +48 HP. There are multiple soft caps for stats. The ones for vigor are 40 and 60. From 59 to 60 you will get +13 HP, from 60 to 61 will get you +6 HP, and the HP gain will never hit double digits again.

@@Gwenyvier ☝️🤓

I just got a build idea...

Is it the poison zweihander?@@cheftroyardee7982

found this out on a like no views yt vid and was playing a braggarts roar build cause i love that ash of war so had to test it and ya its weird nothing really talks about it and it seems different for weapon types

Look a bit like dead by daylight as done it at first everything was like moderately increase X things before they replaced everything by the real numbers witch is so much better

It's really two issues that blend together: Weapons with abilities/effects that scale with stats the weapon shows aren't important (I.E. the example given in the video with death's poker), and not knowing what the actual scaling is (I.E. low A scaling vs high A scaling). Fixing the first issue is just straight up a game design issue. Either make the weapon line up with what you made the stat scaling show, or have some other way of communicating that extra bit of information to the player. Add more to the stat screen, put something in the weapon description, I don't know - just do something instead of having random weapons misleading players. The second problem is so easy to fix I genuinely don't know why they haven't done it. Keep the letter scaling as an at-a-glance method of generally seeing what a weapon best works with, but also just...let us see the numbers? Like FromSoft please just add a toggle or something so we can switch between the letter scaling and the number scaling it can't be that hard.

@greatswordofvictory1271 with enough demand they might just like dbd did but i don't have a lot of hope

@@greatswordofvictory1271 i think a big part of why the scaling numbers aren't shown is the fact that they don't ... really mean anything like, if the weapon screen said a sword had a str scaling of, say, 1.1, anyone's gut instinct would be that that means that every 10 points of str would increase the damage by 11. except, of course, the stat system inherited from dark souls has major diminishing returns, and each weapon with each affinity can have completely different scaling graphs for those returns, so it's really more complicated. except except ... even after you figure out the _actual_ amount of your stat that's going into the scaling, you can still end up with an a scaling weapon that gets massively outscaled by a c scaling one, because turns out the scaling multiplier you're feeding your stats into is _itself_ being fed into a multiplier. so you could see an incredible scaling factor on a weapon with shit base damage and make the assumption that it's a weapon that starts out pathetic but will absolutely destroy everything once you've got huge stats, and you'd end up wrong and and stupid and disappointed when you put all that effort into it and its damage is exceedingly mediocre in the best case. i'm pretty sure your default fists actually have _absurd_ str and dex scaling that would make anyone who makes one-shot vids drool ... but, of course, their base damage is entirely emotional, so that absurd scaling means absolute jack shit the formula for ar just ain't all that intuitive and it's hard to cobble together a weapon's performance just by glancing at all the factors. ar calculators exist for a reason, even in a world were anyone can just look up the scaling numbers with a quick google search, after all. if anything, what would be most useful is being able to see how much scaling damage is being contributed by each stat, because it's actually pretty easy to compare the actual weight pulled by a weapon's scaling to one another when both are heavy affinity and only have one stat to worry about

It's like the pokemen system. They try to make it seem less overwhelming, but it just gets confusing if you try to do anything with it.

It didn't always do piercing. That was patched later.

​@@asdergold1this

Probably the easiest way to find this out, and incidentally the way I found this out at all, was when during a Randomizer playthrough one of the earlier bosses involved Rotten Crystalians and I had no hammers at all yet besides the Warpick. I thought, "well given that we know it's bugged and says it deals Strike damage, it'll work here erroneously right?". Turns out it didn't, since as it is known, Crystalians take immensely reduced damage from literally anything *but* Strike damage, and as unexpected my Warpick was about as useful as a toothpick against them. As for the Lucerne I kind of wish it had something like alternate attacks to use both Pierce and Strike damage since, y'know, that's why it has a blunt hammer head and a piercing beak head on opposite sides, and the technology isn't absent since plenty other weapons e.g. alternate depending on their moves but alas.

@@shinokijorainokage I found out when I ground out a warpick super-early game, then realized I was only 4-shotting skeletons rather than the expected 2-shotting.

@@shinokijorainokage Fun fact: the lucerne doesn't actually have a _blunt_ hammer; it's hammer is made of 4 sharp points that are arranged in a 2x2 pattern.

I test one the Shack Leyndell Knight and the Godrick Troll among other things. The fodder farm is only good for fire testing. Maybe magic also. And Strike since they are resilient to it.

​@@asdergold1 ah yes, i always use the godrick troll for testing, is one of the enemies in the game that sits still

@@asdergold1 thank you i need to tune all my builds with this new information bc logically a build should be tailored against enemies weak to that build, this is not considering pvp of course

I test based on who has a drop I might want, so at the moment I'm smacking the Dectus Lift Archer Golem a lot. I don't actually even really need that bow, I just want it... to test, funnily enough.

@@KassFireborn its like that feeling of needing to 1000 percent the game 🤣

They like to give a simple problem a convoluted solution. And then it shits itself. Its like Limit breaker's Ds3 video is it possible to live in lava. So much didnt make sense.

It's honestly not overdesigned at all. It's convoluted because of how it's conveyed (aka barely, if at all), but everything is there for a good reason. The only reason any of it is opaque is because there's nowhere in game to actually SEE most of this. There's no training dummy, nowhere to see enemy stats, no moveset overview that gives you the MVs, etc. For whatever reason games in this genre absolutely despise giving you access to the raw numbers of how things work. I've been playing a ton of Nioh 2 recently and it's a constant, you want to talk about overdesigned and convoluted, holy crap man, and barely any of it is explained. For example, there's a bonus there called "Melee damage vs unscathed enemy". You read the description, it says exactly what you'd think. But when you actually USE it guess what, it improves ALL damage dealt to a full HP target, ranged, melee, magic, yokai ability, whatever. Or how that game gives you letter grades for effects like "Life drain (water)". But it doesn't say what happens when you stack those grades. Does wearing the set that has that on every piece give you more life back when you do water damage? If it does, how much is the increase? And what's the actual % it heals in the first place? There's no answer in game, you've gotta test it yourself. I could go on but this is a ER vid and not a Nioh 2 one lol.

@@Graysettmy biggest want out of elden ring is a training dummy to test weapons on in the roundtable hold

@@GraysettOh Learning Nioh (and even worse, learning Nioh 2). Have fun reading weird forum posts. Actual, genuine calculus lessons. With in between test and everything. It's great. I mean what the community build around it. The actual thing is a total nightmare. Takes like 500 hours of gameplay to reach the point where you have all the tools *and* understand how they work. Imo quite fun but yeah, to each their own. I agree tho, Nioh (2) is actually overengineered for no good reason other than the smug satisfaction of finally understanding what you're doing.

@@themanwiththeplan3793it’s a bad idea! (One man’s opinion), but only because of the studio. They would implement it, and forget to properly code .0001% of it, and its data would be scrap. I too just want a better system of info delivery. Think of all the faith builds that specced into holy damage, only to reach the endgame disappointed. Is this our lot, now? We can’t finish your game without YT and reddit!? Sorry for the rant, my dude. Cheers-

as someone who's best class in school was math and who plays this game im already confused

As a doctorate student in engineering i can state that this is unnecessarily complicated

Bro i play this game. Have played all games. Gameplay aspects are what i understand and have knowledge on most. This shit fucking ruined my brain bro - dont sweat it

l can definitely tell you for a fact that Elden Ring uses the same flat defense system; perhaps not the exact values as l myself don't remember the specfics, but it's definitely the same system.

This is part of the reason the split damage types are not penalized nearly as much if both damage types have large outputs, like using the Chaos infused dagger for riposte in DS3. If the numbers are individually big enough, nothing is severely affected. This is also why the Greatsword of Judgement getting a flat 80 magic damage bonus on the existing magic damage in DS3 was a lot better than adding 80 to 100 magic damage to some regular greatsword. If it were purely flat, they would be affected the same.

From my experimentation, it seems that is uses _basically_ the exact same system, numbers only don't line up because Elden Ring has a different standard compared to DS3. DS3 was balanced around 40 Vigor, Elden Ring is balanced around 60 Vigor. Your weapons don't have 2 hit combos anymore, so all the damage of all weapons in the game is notably higher as a baseline. Enemies also deal more damage and have more health, and I think they balanced Defense to accommodate the fact that weapons deal more damage than their DS3 equivalents, so enemies have higher average Defense than DS3. For some reason people haven't ripped the formulas from the game so we have to rely on DS3 formulas instead, but I haven't encountered any errors myself from my testing, it looks as though they behave the exact same way, with the only attributable differences being that the games are balanced differently, and not because they changed the formulas. If you had a weapon that dealt 500 Physical damage exactly and struck an enemy with exactly 100 Defense and 20% Physical Negation in both games, the outputs would be the same.

The formula is exactly the same in Elden RIng, DS3 and even DS1. But DS2 is a different story...

we dont talk about this one....​@@michaelbowman6684

No Caelid after Liurina is basically the intended progression. It's not a huge power jump. You shouldn't be getting twoshotted with 40 vigor. Dragonbarrow on the other hand is a massive jump.

​@@ryrin6091yeah, the difference is northern vs southern caelid aka north and south of sellia. If you can beat the commander in the lake of aeonia then you're good enough to start northern caelid

I'm glad I'm not alone here 😅

I've been trying to understand why multi-hit attacks are better than single-hit attacks at high NG+ cycles since this video came out and I feel like I've made negative progress. Like I just understand less now. Good thing I'm a Strength player.

Bro is about to ascend 💀

Most unnecessarily structured comment ever.

True. And even considering all the downsides, split damage ends up not being that bad since it is incredibly easy to buff elemental damage. So I guess it is somewhat balanced? at least for someone who knows how to build around it. And I say this thinking of PvE.

@@KodFrostwrath This is also the case in ds1/3 (not sure about 2) Split damage isn't bad in pvp either, player defense stats are pretty much set in stone at any given level, so with enough damage of each type you can make a pretty efficient split damage weapon.

@@samgraffen9212 I think something that got "lost in translation" from "split damage gets negated twice, that's why it's a lot higher when you look at raw attack damage" is the second part of that sentence. The overall community around the DS games started to equate "split damage = bad, because more negation" and forget the part where there's a lot more of it to compensate. Game is honestly very well balanced. At least in PvE. As long as you don't use bad weapons (which, sadly, you kinda have to use to know that they're bad so that's not the best) it genuinely doesn't matter to much if you have split or pure damage. Unless you hit a burning lava rockmonster with a firesword but that's on you.

​@@JinFreeks I would argue that Elden Ring is not well balanced in a PvE context. Especially with the presentation of open world and much greater verticality, where issues with the tried-and-true formulas crop up.

@@Invus1 Only talking about the viability of weapons and damage types / infusions. Should have clarified that I guess. And by "well balanced" I mean you can play with any of them and be just fine. It genuinely doesn't matter of you have the biggest Bonk stick since the invention of Greatclubs fully geared towards Bonking, or the most split damage weapon you've ever seen that even deals unholy-devilsfire as a secret, 7th element. They all perform well enough that you can beat the game with them just fine. It's not like the olden times where game would go like "oh, you're dealing terrible, insane, worldending fire damage? Good for you. Here, have a level filled with demons from hell that get healed by fire. Have fuuuuun."

As is way too typical of FromSoft it’s not the concept that’s complicated but how they approached it and named it. Had they just called it attack multiplier or damage modifiers or combo bonus, I could go on, anything along those lines it’d be totally clear. Sometimes I think they’re intentionally making the games basic mechanics confusing to create the difficulty

@@monhi64 I mean motion value isnt created for the player to work around same as EV and IV in Pokemon arent meant to work around. Its supposed to be a invisible mechanic that works in the background. People just found out over the years and now they just roll with it because everybody knows. And since everybody knows there is no need to change it.

@@monhi64 motion value is not a fromsoft term, it's a monster hunter one not, like, one that capcom necessarily uses. it's what monster hunter _players_ have used for the concept, and since there's an overlap in appeal between the two series it was just kinda natural for it to carry over to the souls community the actual fromsoft term is atkCorrection, which is to say that's the term they use _internally_ in the code. i feel it does not really need to be said why it's stayed as a code term and not a community one

Yup, that's why you can't just add up physical damage resistances to become unkillable with phys damage, for example. Not that adding negation on top of negation doesn't help, but that you get an even increase, instead of a constantly increasing increase (log stuff), which would be utterly broken.

Constantly converting everything to a percentage was bothering me the entire video. It's literally just multiplying every multiplier together. You do .9 * 0.8 * 0.7 etc and you get your final damage taken number. Doing percents before the final result just complicates everything, and the status screen value IS accurate for your final number.

@@RandomMagus It changes nothing at all. The error is in adding them together instead of multiplying. Whether you use percentages or decimal fractions is irrelevant since the value is the same either way.

@_alaskanBullWorm common knowledge among the core audience of Rusty's videos perhaps, but not really among casual players I'd think. It definitely is a little convoluted in some places.

…damn so every single staff doesn’t scale with strength after all. I thought it was weird but it was what the description says. It must mean it would scale with strength if you’re bonking people with the staff but who would do that. FromSoft just makes me feel dumb

I used to think standard damage made no sense until i watched a video of "longsword vs chainmail" where it was shown that a longsword is surprisingly decent at blunt force trauma, at least compared to what i expected I think standard is supposed to be a combination of slash and strike damage. It's capable of some of both, but isn't crazy at either

@@frazfrazfrazfraz That's mainly because chain is actually pretty shit at dealing with blunt force trauma; even a dagger could deal solid impact damage to someone in chain. It's the gambeson underneath that absorbs that impact and why you'd end up with bruises instead of fractures. If standard _is_ supposed to be a combination of slash and strike, it should probably be renamed to something like chop, hack, or cleave, since those words really describe an axe and that combination is exactly what an axe does.

@@ChishioAme that's not a bad idea actually, "cleave" sounds like a cool damage type I'm sure they call it "standard" to reduce confusion. Dark souls 2 actually removed standard damage and made all swords slash, and that was a whole affair in its own right. I think they just want it to be clear that "this physical damage type will cover most scenarios", especially since Elden Ring is far less ambiguous about its mechanics than the souls games were

@@ChishioAme that'd get kinda weird, though, because why would stuff like big ol' boulders do cleaving damage? really, what the physical damage types are describing is the attack's relationship with armor. slash is especially effective against flesh but can't do much damage against armor or bone or stone, piercing mostly just does consistent damage regardless of armor but can struggle against foes that don't have any armor to penetrate and are just hard all the way through, and strike shatters inflexible minerals but doesn't do well against the malleable and the padded. standard serves as the, well, _standard_ that all of these derive from, and consequently acts as a catch-all for any physical damage that lacks these special traits it'd be more accurate to describe the damage types as, like, standard, anti-flesh, anti-armor, and anti-stone, but that just sounds sillier and comes with its own unique issues ( i.e. it being a lot harder to intuit that the straight sword r2 does anti-armor damage, whereas it's pretty easy to make the connection that stabbing with a sword would do piercing damage )

​@frazfrazfrazfraz ultimately even a blunt sword is a large piece of metal with a handle

A big fan of information huh? Good to see.

Yeah that’s a solid solution, there have to be a few ways to work around this but it’s almost like fromsoft wants them to be bad. But btw I’ve heard that the multi hit spells don’t get outclassed by later spells like most would assume. And that it’s totally worth going back to them late game. Have you tried? I haven’t had a chance yet

Because they used the same engine as ds3, even ashes of war are in the “weapon art” params

Giant crusher is the best pure strength weapon. It can be found in the Altus plateau, near the Golden order church, guarded by an ulcerated tree spirit.

If you don't want ANY buffs, ashes or even talismans then I think dual greataxes are really strong in the game right now and worth to check out, they are about as fast as two handed colossals but they do lot more damage since you are hitting with two weapons. Dual colossals are also an option but they are even slower than two handed ones and take a ton of stamina. If you allow talismans and the physic flask buff then dual curved swords f*ck shit up faster than anything else on a strength build since you can get over 40% combined damage boost from the consecutive attack talismans and physic.

He's just biding his time, roping in as many From Soft fans as possible into his channel, until he can convert all of them into Silksong fans. Just you wait, his master plan will be enacted flawlessly and Silksong will take over this side of gaming

check out chrightt. he has much more detailed videos