Calculating Damage | Elden Ring Wiki
Calculating Damage in Elden Ring can be complicated. There are a lot of different stats at play, as well as additional variables like which attack you use and what type of damage is being dealt. Fortunately, many players in the community have studied deeply and determined precisely how it works. But before we dive into the formulas, there are some important concepts to understand.
Damage Types
There are eight different Damage Types in Elden Ring: four physical types (
Standard, 
Slash, 
Strike, and 
Pierce) and four elemental types (
Magic, 
Fire, 
Lightning, and 
Holy). A single attack can do physical damage, elemental damage, or both. A given attack can even do multiple different types of elemental damage, but only ever one type of physical damage.
Motion Values
Each specific attack you do has a hidden motion value associated with it, which is a number that determines how strong that particular attack is. These usually range from 100% to 200%, although they can be higher for powerful attacks like critical hits or below 100% for weak moves like rolling attacks. As a rule of thumb, the longer an attack animation takes, the higher its motion value. Jumping attacks and two-handed attacks also tend to have higher motion values. Enemy attacks also have motion values, although they're hidden from the player.
Attack Power
If you look at the stats screen for a weapon in Elden Ring under "Attack Power", you'll see that it lists a single "Physical" stat, followed by separate stats for each elemental type. Each of those elemental types that has more than 0 power will do damage for every hit, but the type of physical damage an attack does depends on the specific weapon and the specific choice of attack. For example, a thrusting attack with a sword will do Pierce damage, while a sweeping attack will do Slash. Every physical attack uses the same "Physical" stat as its attack power, regardless of type.
Your attack power for a damage type is based on a number of factors: the specific weapon you're wielding, that weapon's level and affinity, your levels in any stats the weapon scales with, and your Scadutree Blessing level if you're in the Land of Shadow. Spells you cast, items you throw, and any other sources of damage each have their own attack power. Even enemies have an attack power that they use to calculate how much damage they do to you.
Defense and Negation
Each player and enemy also have two defensive stats for each damage type, which you can see on your player status screen listed as "Defense/Dmg Negation." These two stats are determined differently and work very differently, as we'll explore below.
Defense
Your defense for each damage type comes from your rune level and your main attributes. Most defense types have an associated stat:
- Physical Defense is boosted by Strength. Physical defense applies to all physical damage types.
- Magic Defense is boosted by Intelligence.
- Fire Defense is both boosted by Vigor.
- Lightning Defense has no associated stat, and is only based on your rune level. This means it's always going to be lower than your other defenses.
- Holy Defense is boosted by Arcane.
The base defense from your rune level can base calculated using this table, and is the same for every type:
| If... | ...then the base defense is... |
| rune level < 72 | 40 + (rune level + 78) ÷ 2.483 |
| 72 ≤ rune level < 92 | 29 + rune level |
| 92 ≤ rune level < 161 | 120 + (rune level − 91) ÷ 4.667 |
| 161 ≤ rune level | 135 + (rune level − 161) ÷ 27.6 |
The stat defense from the stat specific to the damage type in question scales differently depending on the stat. See each individual defense type for details. Each defense type that's displayed on your status screen is simply
.
Negation
Your negation for each damage type comes entirely from your equipment. Every piece of armor has its own negations for each damage type, listed under "Damage Negations". These are percentages that are taken off any damage of the given type after all other calculations have happened. Damage negations stack multiplicatively, which means your total damage negation is equal to the product of all damage negation from all equipment you have applied.
For example, suppose you're wearing the Bandit Set and you have a Spelldrake Talisman equipped. The Bandit Mask has 3.1% magic negation, the Garb 10.2%, the Manchettes 1.9%, and the Boots 5.4%. The talisman adds 13% on top of that. Since each of these reduces the incoming damage by that percentage, we can't multiply them directly; instead, we subtract them from 100% to get the remaining damage we would take with each one, and multiply those together. This gives us
, which represents how much damage we would take from a magic attack relative to wearing nothing at all.
gives us our total magic negation with all this equipment on at once.
Putting it All Together
If you've followed along so far, you should now understand all the stats that go into calculating how much damage an attack will deal. But how does that calculation work? It actually depends on exactly how the attack power and motion value match up against the total defense (for each damage type). As you'd expect, the damage scales up as the attack power and motion value increase and down as the defense increase. But exactly how quickly it scales depends on how big the offensive stats are relative to the defensive stats, using a metric we'll call attack ratio where:
Attack Ratio = (Attack Power × Motion Value) ÷ Defense
This lets us figure out the defense multiplier using the following table:
| If... | ...then the defense multiplier is... |
| attack ratio < 0.125 | 10% |
| 0.125 ≤ attack ratio < 1 | 10% + (attack ratio − 0.125)² ÷ 2.552 |
| 1 ≤ attack ratio < 2.5 | 70% − (2.5 − attack ratio)² ÷ 7.5 |
| 2.5 ≤ attack ratio < 8 | 90% − (8 − attack ratio)² ÷ 151.25 |
| 8 ≤ attack ratio | 90% |
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Now we're finally ready to calculate the total damage dealt for each damage type:
.
What Does This Mean?
This knowledge may seem a bit esoteric, but it provides us with a few important insights that can make us better Elden Ring players:
- Be careful when you split your damage types! Applying an elemental affinity to a weapon can be powerful, but remember that each individual damage type has a lower attack power. If that pushes them below the crucial 2.5 attack ratio soft cap for a given enemy, their damage will start to drop off quickly.
- Stat defense doesn't matter much relative to level defense. Even at the highest softcap, 60, you're only getting 30 more points of defense for the corresponding damage type. On the other hand, level defense matters a lot up to the soft cap of 161, which makes something like Godrick's Great Rune a deceptively powerful defensive option.
- Lightning hurts! If you've ever noticed your character being a little softer to electricity than they are to other sorts of attacks, now you know why.
