This in-depth article will explain how damage, stat caps, and mitigation works in WAR. Ever wonder what affects everything? You won’t once you’re done reading this!
Armor Factor is used to mitigate melee and physical ranged damage only. It scales very well, with abilities that provide additional AF really making a noticeable difference in damage numbers on you when attacked (20, 30% or more depending). Like all stats, it trails off after a certain point (a “soft cap”) with diminishing returns at 75% mitigation. Armor Factor can be buffed by a few classes such as the Disciple of Khaine, Runepriest (with a tactic that gives a 25% proc chance to boost the target’s armor every tick of their instant Heal Over Time spell), Ironbreaker, and others via various abilities, some being actual buffs, others being procs or short-duration effects.
Damage for magic, likewise, is affected by the three resists: Spiritual, Corporeal, and Elemental. Spiritual attacks encompass a lower number of attacks such as “holy smiting,” while Corporeal is done by most physical-effect attacks or things that affect your character’s physical actions (i.e. damage for every half a second or full second you’re moving, a big chunk of stone effect smashing down, a wind blast to knock you back, etc.), and finally Elemental, the most common resistance that spells check against, is of course things such as fire, water, etc.
Damage is primarily increased by your main stats: Strength for melee physical attacks (such as swords, shields, axes, and others), Ballistic for ranged attacks (such as a Shadow Warrior’s bow or a Witch Hunter’s gun), and Weapon Skill for both of those. Magical effects are determined by your Willpower and Intelligence: Willpower increases healing effects, or the healing component of spells with damaging effects (such as a lifetap that damages an enemy and heals you for that amount), and Intelligence affects the damage per second factor of your spells. Your Wounds stat gives you more hit points for every point you have of it (10 HP per point): in fact, your hit points are 100% based off of your Wounds stat and nothing else. Each class gains a different amount of Wounds (and other stats) each level. Equipment can increase your Wounds, as can the Warrior Priest’s buff high in one of the mastery paths (13 points to reach the trainable level, + 1 to train it, providing a 1.5x level boost to Wounds). Finally, your toughness score affects a flat damage per second reduction to help mitigate damage done to your character, which can have significant effects.
In addition, your resistances change how much damage you take from magical attacks. High resistances (such as 400+) will provide around 25% magic mitigation, but since most good items at the top levels only have around 50-80 of any given resist depending on their rarity, that can be hard to reach. Debuffs for resists, stats such as toughness, and others affect this. Buffs for them of course reduce the incoming damage, within the scaling mechanism of diminishing returns. Buffs for Wounds are very rare (but significant: 600 HP from the Warrior Priest’s group buff when he himself only has about 5800 HP at Rank 40 on my test character), and only a couple of classes per side (Order or Destruction) have buffs for other stats and resistances. Buff bonuses are affected by your Mastery levels, and speccing higher in their path does indeed raise their effectiveness by a good amount, similar to how a damage spell or heal would be altered.
On another note for resistances, while they are “soft-capped” at 40% (about 680 points), resistance debuffs are based solely on the numbers, not a percentage. So, “over-capping” your resistances to, for example 800 for around a 43% resistance effectiveness, is quite valuable, as a debuff that might normally take off 200 points, leaving you at 25-26% resist if you had exactly the soft-cap, would only bring you down to about 37% resist by “over-capping” the resist (800 - 200 = 600 resist left, for that percentage, versus 680 - 200 = 480 as an example).
The only way to increase the effectiveness of your buffs and other skills aside from tactics, Mastery skill, etc. are very rare and powerful armor pieces at Rank 40 that provide +1 or 2 to a Mastery (or the incredibly rare ones that do +1 to all three). These count as extra skill points in the tree for effectiveness, but do not allow you to train a skill you don’t have enough natural points invested in a line to train. For instance, if you have 6 Mastery points invested, and you need 7 to be able to purchase an ability at the 7th spot on the Mastery line, a +1 skill item will not enable you to spend one more point to purchase the ability: you would have to invest one more actual point to be allowed to then purchase the ability still. Think of it like +skill items from Dark Age of Camelot, where it increased the effectiveness of your spells/abilities but did not change the skills you had. The other way to get additional Mastery Points or effectiveness for them is Realm Ranks: at RR40, you get your first bonus Mastery Point, and one more for each milestone after: RR50, RR60, and RR70. These are actual points you can spend for abilities or to move up the line further. At RR80, you gain an innate +1 effectiveness bonus to all three lines, though it is not an actual point (it works like the item bonuses do).
As you may or may not be aware, Mythic does not typically release much information on the formulas behind how things work. Most buffs and debuffs however seem to be 2-3 x your level for the actual number of points they do. Most damage spells or healing spells scale on a 1.5x-2.5x multiplier, with DOT spells and HOT spells having scaling typically higher than others in that range. Mastery points seem to boost things around 2.5-3% per point invested in the line. Note that the Mastery points improve your skills by raising their effective level: they do not provide an actual flat bonus percentage. Items with +Mastery skills can provide effective levels of over 40 total, while the current system only allows actual trained Mastery points to provide an effective level of up to 40. These items will be very rare as well as hard to obtain, but quite powerful.
One final note: you can have a melee attack which deals magical damage (and can therefore be blocked or parried, but will mitigate based on magical resistance types) or a magical attack which deals physical damage (and can therefore be blocked or disrupted, but will mitigate based on armor) (paraphrased info from NLevy of Mythic). Basically, your defenses are based on the attack type: if it’s a melee attack that does magical damage, it can be blocked/parried/etc. but is mitigated by its magic type resistances, not your armor. The same applies for ranged attacks that do physical damage, though: they can be disrupted or blocked, but not parried, yet they will be mitigated based on armor because they are doing physical, not magical, damage.
Lastly, here’s the breakdown on what each stat does for your character:
These statistic descriptions are based directly off of the in-game tooltips and clarifications that the developers have posted. Note that the flat DPS increases will be changed to a percentage-based system as of the 1.3 “Land of the Dead” patch cycle. All stats are “soft-capped” at 1,050, at which point they grant half-effectiveness for anything further granted by items, buffs, etc.
Strength is a flat damage-per-second (DPS) increase on your melee abilities, which also affects autoattack damage and activated abilities. Additionally, it reduces your enemy’s chance to block or parry your attacks.
Ballistics is the same as strength, but affects your ranged physical abilities (such as a bow and arrow, or a Witch Hunter’s pistol). It reduces your enemy’s chance to block or evade your ranged physical attacks.
Weapon Skill changes how much armor penetration you have as a percentage, which is around 20% on average as a Witch Hunter at Rank 40. This is a percentage of armor on the enemy that your attacks will completely ignore. It also boosts your chance to parry physical attacks.
Toughness is a DPS decrease for all attacks against you: basically, a flat damage reduction that counters increases from others.
Wounds is the stat that your hitpoints are based on. Each point of Wounds gives you 10 HP.
Initiative is your chance to detect stealthed enemies, as well as the stat that reduces enemies’ chance to critically hit you. Due to the formula it is based on, the higher initiative you have, the less gain you will see for adding more initiative per point as a percentage reduction. Thus, flat “reduction in chance to be critically hit” items are quite valuable.
Intelligence is “strength” for magic attacks, offering a DPS increase on magical abilities to make them quite a bit more potent. It also decreases the chance your enemy has to block or fully resist/disrupt your magical attacks.
Willpower changes how much you heal someone for on a DPS basis. A heal spell or ability “proc” that you cast on yourself is affected by this as well, as you are in that case the caster. It also increases your chance of disrupting/outright resisting an enemy’s magical attacks.