Damage

 is a basic mechanic in Outward which results in a loss of Health. It can be inflicted by Weapons, Skills, Traps and some Effects, as well as falling and some Diseases.

Burnt Health
Taking damage results in a small amount of health being burnt. By default, 10% of damage taken is lost as burnt health. This can change with status effects such as Needs: Hungry.

Direct Damage
Certain sources of damage such as Diseases and falling from great heights can inflict direct damage to characters. This type of damage cannot be resisted in any way.

For falling, the formula that the game uses to determine your damage is:, where "velocity" is the character's current vertical speed. Knowing this value would be impossible without debugging tools, but generally players can expect to take between 10 and 150 damage from falling, excluding extremely high falls.

The rest of this page does not apply to direct damage.

Base Damage
Base Damage refers to the damage stats displayed on weapons, the damage from effects, and the hidden values for skills and traps. It can be viewed by hovering over individual weapons, or by the descriptions on the 'Effects' menu. Base damage cannot be viewed directly for skills or traps, however.

The 6 types of damage the player can deal are: Physical,  Ethereal,  Decay,  Lightning,  Frost and  Fire. There is also Raw damage such as Perfect Strike or Poltergeist.

Bonuses
Damage Bonus, as an attribute, can be acquired from Equipment, Effects and Passive Skills.
 * Damage Bonus increases base damage by a percent, for example having 10 Fire damage bonus will increase all Fire damage you deal by 10%. If you are not dealing any base damage for an element, damage bonus attributes for that element will have no effect.
 * Damage Bonus stacking is additive - different sources do not multiply together, nor does the attribute have diminishing returns.
 * Damage Bonus attributes do not apply to Traps
 * Damage Bonus can be negative - this will reduce your damage dealt, and usually occurs if you receive a Hex

There are also other kinds of "bonus damage" players may encounter in Outward:
 * Imbues can add bonus damage to weapons or pistols
 * Melee Weapon Combos have damage multipliers. See the associated Weapon page for more information, or view any individual weapon page to see the scaled combo damages.
 * Weapon Skills can also have damage multipliers which work in a similar way to weapon combo damages.

Resistances
Damage Resistance is similar to Damage Bonus, but works in the opposite way.


 * Resistance is a percentage modifier which reduces incoming damage. For example, if the player was to receive 50 Lightning damage, and they have 20 Lightning resistance, the damage would be mitigated by 20% - or, in other words, multiplied by 0.8. This would result in receiving 40 total damage.
 * Resistances also reduce relevant damage over time effects such as Burning (Fire) and Poisoned (Decay), and can nullify those effects with high resistance.
 * Like Damage Bonus, all Damage Resistance attributes are additive, they do not multiply or have diminishing returns.
 * Resistances can be negative, which will amplify damage received! This can occur from receiving Hex effects.

Protection
Protection is a resistance stat which only affects  Physical-type damage. It is not a multiplier, but instead reduces physical damage by a flat amount.

Protection is applied before other resistances.

On certain enemies such as Animated Skeleton, protection can also be non-physical.

Barrier
Barrier is the counterpart to Protection, exclusive to  The Three Brothers DLC. It is a resistance stat which only affects Elemental-type damage.

Barrier does not work against DoTs.

Against attacks which deal a single element, Barrier works the same way as Protection, reducing the damage by a flat amount. However if the attack contains multiple damage types, it will only resist one of them. First it will pick the element(s) from the damage which you have the lowest resistance for (less than or equal to comparison), then from those it picks the type which would deal the most damage against you and resists that.

For example, suppose that an incoming attack deals 100 Fire damage and 1 Ethereal damage, and that you have 5 Barrier, 50 Fire Resistance and 0 Ethereal Resistance. Because you have lower Ethereal than Fire resistance, this will be the element that is resisted by Barrier (in this case, reducing the Ethereal damage to 0 and doing nothing else).

For another example, suppose that you now have 10 Fire and 10 Ethereal resistance against the same attack. It would choose to resist Fire because you have equal Resistances to both elements, and the Fire damage would have dealt more. In this case, it would reduce the Fire damage to 95 (100 damage - 5 Barrier).

Damage Override
Certain Skills can override all damage to a specific element, most notably Pistol Skills.


 * For example, with Blood Bullet Imbue, the base damage would be multiplied by 0.8 then converted to Decay.
 * Lightning Bullet converts all base damage to Lightning and increases it to (1.6x) of that value.
 * Perfect Strike overrides the damage type to Raw.

=Formula= Apart from Melee Imbue damage, all combat damage in Outward is calculated with the following formula: ((((Base Damage * Special/Skill Multiplier) + Skill Flat Damage) * (1 + Damage Bonus)) - Enemy Protection) * (1 - Enemy Resistance) Notes:
 * The Special/Skill Multiplier is either the multiplier from the weapon special attack, or the multiplier from the weapon skill, if applicable.
 * Damage Bonus refers to the total of your Equipment, Effects (not including imbues) and Passive damage bonuses for the element, and "any element" bonuses.
 * For the few cases of Damage Override, this occurs as the first step - directly to the Base Damage.
 * Remember that Traps effects are not affected by damage bonus (only exception is Runic Detonation)

Melee Imbues
Melee Imbues which add damage are a slightly unique case. They use the same general formula as above, however they are not affected by skill multipliers or weapon combo multipliers. They are affected by Equipment bonuses, Passives, and Status Effects (for the element of the imbue).

All melee imbues which add damage will also override the base damage to the element of the imbue, and this occurs as the first step.

(((Total Base Damage * (Multiplier - 1)) + Imbue Flat) * (1 + Damage Bonus)) * (1 - Enemy Resistance)

Enchantments
Enchantments which add damage to a weapon will add to the base damage of the weapon. The damage you see displayed on the enchanted weapon is now the active base damage. All bonuses from skills, effects and Imbues will use this new base damage to calculate their effects.

This does not apply to the "AoE Blast" enchants. The damage values on these enchants do not affect skills or imbues.

However, there is one exception to this, and that is Weapon combo multipliers (not skills, only weapon combos). The multipliers from using special or combo attacks with weapons do not apply to the bonus damage from an Enchantment. The multiplier is applied only to the weapon's base damage before the Enchantment was added, and then the Enchantment damage is added on after this.

= See Also =


 * Attributes
 * Mechanics
 * Health