Receiving damage

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Receiving damage involves several steps to determine whether the damage hits, how much damage is dealt by the attacker, how much of that damage is prevented by the defender's mitigation, and what resources (e.g. life, energy shield) are ultimately lost as a result.

Order of operations

The list below displays the order of operations when an attacker attempts to damage a defender:

1. Avoiding the hit:
   • Manually avoiding hits via movement
   • Damage avoidance frames from dodge roll
   • Avoidance of projectiles
   • Evasion against (vs accuracy of) attacks or monster skills

   These are the only defensive mechanics that prevent a hit from occurring, including preventing all on-hit effects. Other forms of mitigation cannot prevent a hit, even if they reduce damage taken to 0.

2. Before being Hit:
   Effects such as Defiance of Destiny's Gain #% of Missing Life before being Hit by an Enemy occur immediately after the defender fails to prevent the hit. (Regular when-hit or on-hit effects do not apply until after all other steps on this page.)
3. Calculating unmitigated damage:
   
   1. Flat damage
   • Base damage is typically the damage as found on martial weapons for attacks or the skill gem for spells. Unarmed attacks and minions also have independent base damage.
   • Added damage (or flat damage) is damage added to a skill through conditional stats, support gems, equipment (e.g. rings), or certain skill mechanics such as Flame Wall with projectiles. Added damage is added to base damage before other modifiers.
   2. Damage conversion
   • Conversion modifiers change a percentage of one damage type's base+flat damage into another, for example #% of Physical Damage Converted to Fire Damage.
   • Gain conversion modifiers add a percentage of one damage type's base+flat damage as another damage type, for example Gain #% of Damage as Cold Damage.
   All conversion effects apply simultaneously and only apply once, preventing recursion. Conversions do not interact with each other, unless regular conversion exceeds 100% of an original damage type, in which case it is scaled down to 100%.
   3. Damage multipliers
   • All increased and reduced modifiers stack additively, then applied as a single multiplier. This also includes conditional stats.
   • All more and less modifiers apply independently, multiplicative against each other, unless the multiplier is from the same source (e.g. 10% more Damage per Stage would deal 50% more damage at 5 stages).
   Damage multipliers may be applied to enemies through effects like File:Sap status icon.pngSap.
   4. Critical hits
   If a hit's critical hit chance exceeds the requirement (usually rolled when the skill was used), damage is multiplied by % by default, or 130% for monsters. Critical strike multiplier in excess of 100% may be reduced by #% reduced Extra Damage taken from Critical Strikes. For example, 60% reduced Extra Damage taken from Critical Strikes will cause a critical strike from a regular monster to deal 112% of the default hit, instead of 130%.
   5. Rolling for damage:
      The hit rolls for damage, in the range calculated by applying multipliers to the hit's minimum and maximum flat damage. If the attacker's damage is lucky, or damage against the defender is unlucky, damage rolls twice and ignores the lower value. Similarly, if the attacker's damage is unlucky, damage rolls twice and ignores the higher value. This does not affect rolls for other mechanics (e.g. crit, ailments, block, suppression).
   6. Doubling/tripling damage:
      Modifiers that double or triple damage apply after other offensive damage modifiers.
4. Cannot take damage:
   Damage is removed by modifiers that make the defender unable to take damage, such as Cannot take Reflected Physical/Elemental Damage or File:Proximity Shield status icon.pngProximity Shield. This step is not considered 'preventing' damage for e.g. . It should not be confused with immunity, which applies later.
5. Damage taken as:
   Incoming damage can be shifted to another damage type. It is usually done by utilizing an item which offers the #% of X Damage taken as Y modifier, for example:
   • Cloak of Flame
   This is not damage conversion. Damage cannot be shifted twice, exceeding 100% damage taken as will not scale damage proportionally, and damage will only be affected by mitigation for its final type. For example, if incoming physical damage is taken as fire, the shifted damage will not be affected by physical damage reduction.
6. Damage mitigation:
   1. Cannot take X damage prevents damage that wasn't already removed before the damage taken as step.
   2. Immunities prevent damage entirely, such as Shade Form or .
   3. Damage avoidance offers a chance to prevent damage entirely, for example with Elusive or .
   4. Resistance mitigates elemental and chaos damage. The attacker's penetration modifies resistances used in this step.
   5. Damage reduction, not to be confused with reduced damage taken, mitigates damage types it exists for. By default, 'damage reduction' is only gained from armour against physical damage, but armour can grant damage reduction against other types through mechanics like , , or . Additional damage reduction is additive with damage reduction gained from armour, and can be gained from sources such as Strength body armour suffixes, Endurance charges, or . Damage reduction occurs after resistances and is independent per damage type.
7. Modifying damage taken:
   After damage mitigation has calculated base damage taken, modifiers to damage taken are applied. Flat modifiers are applied first, then the sum of all increases/reductions, and lastly all more or less multipliers independently:

   Order	Modifier	Examples
   1	±# X Damage taken from Y	Ashrend
   2	#% increased/reduced X Damage taken	Shock Vulnerability
   3	#% more/less X Damage taken	Toughness File:Fortification status icon.pngFortification Arctic Armour Wind Dancer

8. Suppressing the damage:
   Spell suppression applies, usually halving spell hits and ailments.
9. Being stunned:
   Stun chance is rolled based on damage at this point.
10. Blocking the damage:
    Block or spell block rolls to prevent all damage, or a percentage of damage with modifiers like . Block also prevents most of the attacker's on-hit effects, including triggers. when you Block effects occur in this step, before damage taken (if any).
11. Final damage taken:
    Effects that count the amount of damage taken by the player, such as Cast when Damage Taken Support and Bloodnotch use the damage value at this point. The difference between this damage and the damage at the start of the 'damage mitigation' step is considered prevented damage for effects like or .
12. Applying damage and losing resources:
    Damage (or a portion thereof) is taken from resources in the following order. Any remaining damage will be taken from the next resource. Some effects allow damage to bypass a resource, in which case the bypassing damage will apply directly to the next resource instead.
    
    From other entities or effects:
    1. Effects that change damage to take resources from other objects 'before you'..
       • Each effect is multiplicative, not additive: when 20% of damage is taken from Sentinel of Radiance, causes minions to take 10% of the remaining 80%.
    2. Effects that change damage to take from other objects 'before your life or energy shield', such as .
    3. Buffs that intercept all damage (of a type), such as Aegises.
    4. Buffs that intercept a percentage of damage, such most Guard skills.
    From the defender's resources:
    1. Ward takes damage if not broken.
    2. Damage is taken from energy shield before the resource that it protects (life by default, or mana if using Eldritch Battery).
       • By default, all Chaos Damage bypasses energy shield. This applies regardless if energy shield is protecting life or mana.
       • Energy shield recharge is interrupted when energy shield or the resource it is protecting is lost due to damage.
       • If Eternal Youth is allocated, only directly losing life due to damage will interrupt life recharge. Delayed life loss from Petrified Blood or Progenesis does not interrupt life recharge.
    3. #% of the remaining damage is removed from mana, if granted by an effect such as Mind over Matter or The Ivory Tower.
    4. The remaining damage is removed from Life. Life does not protect any other resource. If all Life is removed, you die.
    5. Life loss can be prevented by various effects. Effects that grant #% of life loss prevented are multiplicative rather than additive.
       1. #% of Life loss from damage is prevented while affected by Progenesis and an equal amount of life loss is applied over time.
       2. #% of remaining Life loss from damage that would reduce your life below 50% while affected by Petrified Blood is prevented and a proportional amount of life loss is applied over time.
       3. If Dissolution of the Flesh is socketed, all remaining life loss is prevented and that amount is reserved as life.

Damage over time

Damage over Time generally follows the same principle, however this damage source doesn't hit, which means that it ignores evasion, armour, ward, and other mechanics limited to hits. Damage over time occurs at the start of each server frame, before potential hit damage, though after over-time recovery.

While damaging ailments are applied by hits, they have a separate base dps calculation, starting from the flat damage of a hit. Hit-specific offensive modifiers will not apply to this calculation, nor will the defender's mitigation. This prevents debuffs like ignite from scaling twice with stats like #% increased Fire damage, or being reduced twice by fire resistance. Mitigation applies after the hit, over time, when damage is actually taken. (This includes immunities: physical immunity does not remove base damage for poison inflicted by a hit of mixed physical and chaos.)

Version history

Version	Changes
0.1.0	Introduced to the game.