How do I improve my damage?

Soveliss

I'm playing a viscanti nihilist and, although I've been told my damage should increase as I invest lessons in my relevant discipline my cosmicfire is still weaker than when I was using a claymore. I was even told during my guild advancement interview that I need to switch to cosmicfire as he was sure it would be doing more damage, but it's not.

Cazanto

So, there's a bit of detail involved here.  Start with this:

• Probe what you are hitting.  Look at strengths and weaknesses.
• Check the relevant AB file for your ability to determine what damage type you are inflicting.
• Do BODYSCAN BUFFS FULL to see what enhancements you have to your damage.

From there, you know generally what you are working with.  Now, understand that damage increases happen on the margin, that is, many small buffs add up to a larger one.

An incomplete list of things you can do to assist with damage:

• Buy Kirigami.  When you're going hunting, "release kirigami".  They are a few hundred hold a piece, but give you a minor increase to just about everything.
• Play to your strengths.  As a viscanti necromancy user, you will receive bonuses to poison and excorable damage at level 50.  In Nihilism, you will eventually learn Symbol strike, which will let you inflict an excorable attack usable against denizens.  A bit later on, you'll learn demonweb, which does 50/50 poison/psychic split.
• Get a tattoo to increase the damage of whatever damage type you are using.
• You can use infused food in order to increase your damage as well.
• Get a beast, some are quite affordable.  Train it to battle (very early beastmastery skill, minimal investment), BEAST ORDER ATTACK <TARGET> before your attack.  This can help you a great deal overall.
• Level, level level.  It makes your critical percent go up.  Your critical percent goes up, you kill things faster.

If you go into artifacts and curios, there are... all sorts of options that I won't even begin to get into.

Cazanto

Soveliss said:

Gotcha. Appreciate the thorough response. I've got the symbol now but the damage seems to be less effective than cosmicfire, atleast against spectres and mutts.

If cosmicfire will never be as strong as the claymore, then why even include the ability? The longer I play the more it seems like playing a warrior is the only sensible option.

Well, here's spectre resists:

Unaware of who or what he once was, this spectral man is clothed in ancient rags. His eyes have 

become cloudy like eggshells, no pupils apparent on the glowing white globes. He floats around with 

an appearance of despair and melancholy, as if he has lost someone close to him. His hair sways in 

the air as if it was floating in water, standing on end.

A spectral man is not one to be trifled with.

He is strangely weightless.

He has a slight resistance to cutting damage.

He has a slight resistance to blunt damage.

He has a moderate weakness to magic damage.

He has a great resistance to excorable damage.

He has a terrible weakness to divinus damage.

You cannot see what a spectral man is holding.

So he's bouncing your excorable damage off.  You'll see that in undead and/or soulless-y type things (everything on astral has a slight exo resist and is moderately vulnerable to divinus).  

Aeldra

PvP often happens on certain events, such as 'domoth claims'. I am not sure whether your city or your alliance has a combat clan, but if there's one, getting inducted into that one should hook you up to staying on tune when battles do happen.

As for combat damage, one thing that make PVE combat crucial are critical hits.
from level 60 onward, you'll be getting more and more chance to crit against a denizen/mob, which you can see with 'bodyscan crits'. These will reach about 40% at demigod. Things like kirigami give you a small buff to that too.

A normal crit doubles the damage you deal in that particular attack and the max crit is 8 times the damage.
There's also an ability very high up in, I think, discipline, that allows you to carry the wasted damage after killing a monster with a crit over to the next monster for a few seconds, often allowing you to drop two mobs with one big crit.

Deichtine

For fights against mobs criticals are really the thing. Like Aeldra said you'll start to notice more and more criticals as you level up more. Kirigami and food can buff your crit rates as well though so its worth using them.

As to PVP well mostly it can happen when ever you want it to. Go raid someone or ask on market for arena fights etc.

Cyndarin

Serious answer: There's a few things to unpack here.

The first of which is that each buff level is only a 3% increase in your damage. So adding +1 level of a damage buff is a pretty minor increase in your damage, and you likely won't see a change in the number of hits it takes to kill X thing. Gaining actual levels does not increase your damage output, it only increases your vitals (health/mana/ego).

Second, most damage from mobs has two parts. A flat amount and a percentage. So a level 100 person will take more damage than a level 10 person, but the overall damage is a smaller percentage of the level 100 person's health. Damage received will scale as you level (because you receive health every level), where as damage you give will not. 

Falaeron

As far as I know, the base damage of cosmicfire will never be as good as the claymore.

Soveliss

Gotcha. Appreciate the thorough response. I've got the symbol now but the damage seems to be less effective than cosmicfire, atleast against spectres and mutts.

If cosmicfire will never be as strong as the claymore, then why even include the ability? The longer I play the more it seems like playing a warrior is the only sensible option.

Aeldra

Soveliss said:

Gotcha. Appreciate the thorough response. I've got the symbol now but the damage seems to be less effective than cosmicfire, atleast against spectres and mutts.

If cosmicfire will never be as strong as the claymore, then why even include the ability? The longer I play the more it seems like playing a warrior is the only sensible option.

It highly depends upon your class choice and what you're targetting. Guardians in particular do not excel in hunting damage on their class skills, other classes do work rather well ( wiccans, chems, warriors, monks, some bards ) seem to do fine in terms of damage output. It's been a long questioned problem about why the newbie claymore is that good compared to class skills.

Also, I want to note that a lot of the mobs in lusternia have actual damage resistances and weaknesses and they have a -significant- impact, so chosing the right ability to attack a mob can matter more then your base damage if their weakness/resistance to the damage type is high enough.

Soveliss

Gotcha, now that I'm probing more I'm finding the cause for the imbalance. It's still not as significant a difference as I was expecting (a moose dies with 6 strikes from my symbol but 7 from cosmicfire) but it is starting to make more sense, and I'm trying to kirigami and food and stuff but it's still not huge.

I'm just trying to understand how you guys hit that next level of ability. Like, I'm level 67 and the game still plays virtually the exact same as level 15. I can take a bit more damage before dying, but even with reflexes, if I couldn't defeat an opponent at level 15 I can't defeat them now. The vast majority of my abilities can only be used against other players, but I still don't know when PvP is supposed to happen because there's apparently some vengeance thing that makes it a suicidal endeavor on the prime plane and there seems to be no reason at all to visit an opponent's plane. It just sort of feels like until you hit level 99 everything you do serves the city, but really it's serving the higher level players so they can ascend or whatever.

Shaddus

It should also be  noted that the newbie claymore is pretty strong as opposed to normal warrior weapons.

Xenthos

Shaddus said:

It should also be  noted that the newbie claymore is pretty strong as opposed to normal warrior weapons.

I was going to say this too.  Don't consider going warrior because of that claymore, it has some buffs to it so that a newbie "does not have to worry" about figuring out appropriate skilling, lesson investment, etc. immediately.  Actual class damage has been reviewed multiple times and should be roughly similar (though not 100%, of course).  Different classes will learn different skills that can affect survivability in different ways, too.

One thing that surprises me is the "if I could not defeat at 15 I can't now".  This reads to me as if you are not using many vital (health especially) buffs (BODYSCAN VITALS).  You should at the least get a life karma blessing.  The more health you have, the more effective a healing potion is.  They build on each other and can make you a lot stronger.  Can also look at other supportive healers like magic scrolls and sparkleberries.

Deichtine

Getting in game help with your buffs can make a huge difference. I think I took someone on a hunt and buffed their health from about 4k to 7k after running them through a bunch of easyish to access buffs.

Cyndarin

Hit someone smaller.

Soveliss

I was going to say this too.  Don't consider going warrior because of that claymore, it has some buffs to it so that a newbie "does not have to worry" about figuring out appropriate skilling, lesson investment, etc. immediately.  Actual class damage has been reviewed multiple times and should be roughly similar (though not 100%, of course).  Different classes will learn different skills that can affect survivability in different ways, too.

One thing that surprises me is the "if I could not defeat at 15 I can't now".  This reads to me as if you are not using many vital (health especially) buffs (BODYSCAN VITALS).  You should at the least get a life karma blessing.  The more health you have, the more effective a healing potion is.  They build on each other and can make you a lot stronger.  Can also look at other supportive healers like magic scrolls and sparkleberries.

Well the problem is my damage now is only negligibly higher than it was at 15. That is to say, it takes the exact same amount of hits to kill something now as it did then. As you've pointed out, critical hits are the only thing helping, and those are so infrequent I'll be lucky if it's 1 out of every 40 hits, and even then it doesn't seem to be significant.

Furthermore, although my health is higher I take the same amount of damage as ever. I mean, I could kill a grub or spectre paladin at level 15, I just had to sip health every time they attacked. Now I can be more neglectful about healing because I have a larger health buffer but a steel goat will still whittle me down, and if a second one comes in I die, no question.

I think I've been misunderstanding how to play. The entire basis of becoming stronger is simply increasing your health and getting more critical hits, is this correct? And essentially no amount of training in any discipline will ever increase your ability to hunt?

Chirbi

Soveliss said:

I think I've been misunderstanding how to play. The entire basis of becoming stronger is simply increasing your health and getting more critical hits, is this correct? And essentially no amount of training in any discipline will ever increase your ability to hunt?

Skill levels helps! And as it was explained to me, skillsets in the same pool also benefit each other. And for what it's worth, while it may seem like you're not any better since level 15, I assure you that you are.

Have you also considered using influence more instead of hunting? A lot of people find that faster/easier, and it's something that anyone can buff pretty easily.

Coretha

Soveliss said:

I think I've been misunderstanding how to play. The entire basis of becoming stronger is simply increasing your health and getting more critical hits, is this correct? And essentially no amount of training in any discipline will ever increase your ability to hunt?

Basically (I'm assuming Lusternia is fundamentally similar to other IRE games here) you gain a fairly minor damage increase from increasing your core skill, but your damage output against mobs is basically governed by your level via critical hits, as you reach higher levels not only do the number of crits you'll hit increase, but you'll also start getting ones that do x2, x4 etc damage which significantly speeds up the hunting process.

Training in various skills does impact hunting, but it's pretty much all in survivability rather than offensive capability.  Assuming Putrefaction in Necromancy functions at all like what I'm used to, it's a solid defensive buff for both pvp and hunting for instance, I'm sure others with more experience can point out others.

Deichtine

Soveliss said:

I was going to say this too.  Don't consider going warrior because of that claymore, it has some buffs to it so that a newbie "does not have to worry" about figuring out appropriate skilling, lesson investment, etc. immediately.  Actual class damage has been reviewed multiple times and should be roughly similar (though not 100%, of course).  Different classes will learn different skills that can affect survivability in different ways, too.

One thing that surprises me is the "if I could not defeat at 15 I can't now".  This reads to me as if you are not using many vital (health especially) buffs (BODYSCAN VITALS).  You should at the least get a life karma blessing.  The more health you have, the more effective a healing potion is.  They build on each other and can make you a lot stronger.  Can also look at other supportive healers like magic scrolls and sparkleberries.

Well the problem is my damage now is only negligibly higher than it was at 15. That is to say, it takes the exact same amount of hits to kill something now as it did then. As you've pointed out, critical hits are the only thing helping, and those are so infrequent I'll be lucky if it's 1 out of every 40 hits, and even then it doesn't seem to be significant.

Furthermore, although my health is higher I take the same amount of damage as ever. I mean, I could kill a grub or spectre paladin at level 15, I just had to sip health every time they attacked. Now I can be more neglectful about healing because I have a larger health buffer but a steel goat will still whittle me down, and if a second one comes in I die, no question.

I think I've been misunderstanding how to play. The entire basis of becoming stronger is simply increasing your health and getting more critical hits, is this correct? And essentially no amount of training in any discipline will ever increase your ability to hunt?

In a way. It depends a little on your skills as well for example wiccans get a basic attack nature curse early on but get their strongest bashing attack highish up in their totem.

Leveling up will make your more resiliant to damage overall and will let you hunt stronger creatures which will give more experience and also different skills will help you survive more. Theres some self healing skills and buffs in some skill sets etc which can let you tank the harder to kill stuff longer etc.

Falaeron

Coretha said:

Soveliss said:

I think I've been misunderstanding how to play. The entire basis of becoming stronger is simply increasing your health and getting more critical hits, is this correct? And essentially no amount of training in any discipline will ever increase your ability to hunt?

Basically (I'm assuming Lusternia is fundamentally similar to other IRE games here) you gain a fairly minor damage increase from increasing your core skill, but your damage output against mobs is basically governed by your level via critical hits, as you reach higher levels not only do the number of crits you'll hit increase, but you'll also start getting ones that do x2, x4 etc damage which significantly speeds up the hunting process.

This is correct. Some class attacks are just better for hunting than others. Due to the way critical hits are rolled and the scaling of base critical hit chance with levels, you'll find that your bashing speed will get much higher as you enter the highest levels.

Most people who bash even sporadically at end game will end up buying an artifact divinus whip for 275 credits because they offer much, much better damage output when bashing.

Versalean

Falaeron said:

Coretha said:

Soveliss said:

I think I've been misunderstanding how to play. The entire basis of becoming stronger is simply increasing your health and getting more critical hits, is this correct? And essentially no amount of training in any discipline will ever increase your ability to hunt?

Basically (I'm assuming Lusternia is fundamentally similar to other IRE games here) you gain a fairly minor damage increase from increasing your core skill, but your damage output against mobs is basically governed by your level via critical hits, as you reach higher levels not only do the number of crits you'll hit increase, but you'll also start getting ones that do x2, x4 etc damage which significantly speeds up the hunting process.

This is correct. Some class attacks are just better for hunting than others. Due to the way critical hits are rolled and the scaling of base critical hit chance with levels, you'll find that your bashing speed will get much higher as you enter the highest levels.

Most people who bash even sporadically at end game will end up buying an artifact divinus whip for 275 credits because they offer much, much better damage output when bashing.

10/10 my third favourite artefact.

Soveliss

Thanks everyone, you've all been immensely helpful. I'm seeing a serious improvement in everything, not just damage, now that I understand the system better.