Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire – Damage Calculations and the effects of Armor

Attacks and Abilities can be of several types:

• Slash

• Pierce

• Crush

• Burn

• Shock

• Corrode

• Freeze

• Raw

All of these types except for Raw affect the matching Armor Type value. Raw damages are always doing the exact number they are supposed to do without suffering any penalty from armor.

For the 7 base types of damage, the damage is calculated according to the roll and all modifiers applied to it (such as Might, Crit, Graze, and many other varied effects). Modifiers can both lower or improve the damage result of an attack or ability (for example Graze and Crit respectively give -25% and +50% to the damage of an attack/ability). All the modifiers are simply added to the roll and the damage is applied that way.

So how does the Armor intervene then?

Armor acts as a modifier similarly to how Accuracy determines the outcome of an action. Your Penetration score is substracted by the matching Armor type of your target to determine the modifier applied following these rules:

• If Penetration ≤ Armor then the damage output is lowered by 25% per Armor point exceeding the Penetration Score up to a modifier of -75%.

• If the Penetration Score matches the Armor score or exceeds it then no modifier is applied unless…

• If the Penetration Score is at least twice as big as the Armor score then a +30% modifier is applied to the damage.

A quick note about how Armor are displayed in the game.

Here is an example of my Shadowdancer current Armor Ratings’. This shows that my character has an Armor Rating of 8 in all Armor types except Crush, Burn and Freeze being respectively 6, 12 and 10. This does NOT mean that your Crush Armor is of 8 + 6 for example, it simply is 6 which means this character is weaker against Crush Attacks and especially resilient to Burn Attacks.

Let’s take a few simple examples to make things clear for the people in the crowd confused by this system.

Let’s say you are fighting a very angry bear with a general Armor of 5 with a Crush Armor of only 3. Our first character Bob attacks the bear with a Slash Attack with a Penetration of 6. Our Penetration is above the Armor type so we don’t suffer any damage penatly. But we don’t gain any bonus either as our Penetration isn’t at least twice as big as the Bear’s armor.

Now Bob decides to use his Mace to deal Crush damage instead of Slash damage with the same Penetration of 6. This time his Penetration is twice as big as the Bear’s Crush Armor meaning that Bob gets a +30% damage boost to his attack.

And if Bob’s teammate, Ted the magician, uses his sword to deal Slash damage with a Penetration of 3 for example the damage will be reduced by 50% because his Penetration is 2 points lower than the Slash armor of the bear and each point lower gives a -25% damage modifier (remember that this modifier never goes below -75%).

Important note

Always keep in mind that many other modifiers can apply to determine the outcome of an Attack or Ability. Below is an example of many modifiers being applied to a damage roll. So you can heavily mitigate the effects of Armor and Penetration (whether they are positive or negative) with varied sources.

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