Guide Ned Reddavis' Guide to Sword Damage (Updated to pvp-v1.0.0)

Ned_Reddavis

Honorable Pirate
Swords are one of the most commonly used weapons, and this guide details how to know what damage you'll be doing with any sword you find and under any skill tree.
Edit: Bolstered the guide by adding most of the content from the original reddit post that this guide referenced before.

Basics

Damage is dealt by a random number between a given range of values for each attack ability. The range of values is always some base minimum value up to twice that base value, with rounding exceptions. For example, my level 50 pirate can have a hack damage of 21-42 at 1 skill point. An attack could also deal, say, 8-17 damage where the game rounds down the 8.5 to a visual 8.

Every attack in the game can also be increased or decreased by several factors, and when reducing out those factors one can find the true base value for damage and then determine what gives the best increases over a standard period of attacking. In general, when discussing optimized DPS we are going to avoid any de-buffs that will decrease damage. Now, here are all the factors that I can find that increase damage and how they do this:

Factors

  1. Notoriety: Damage ranges increase as one levels up their notoriety level. Haven’t got exact numbers, but from level 1 to 50 there is a flat 3 multiplier to damage. For example, hack starts at 7-13 damage for level 1 and ends at 21-42 by level 50. Assuming this is even for all levels, this means a 6% increase to damage every level. Although, looking at the old POTCO code claims that the increase is by 5% per level. Either way it is best to be level 50 for the best damage, and luckily enough we don’t need to find the true nature of this value as the game changes the in-game values on the skills page from this factor as one levels up.
  2. Sword Abilities: Many swords have a special attack, such as cursed ice or lightning, recent updates have made many of these significant to use. There is also passives like Critical Strike, Powerful, Blood Fire, Dutchman’s Wrath, Venom Strike, Ghost Form, etc. Each have their own increases to damage, the most significant are Bloodfire (50% at max), Dutchman's Wrath (55%-40% by rank), and Ghost Forms (20%).​
    1. Critical Hits: Critical values will actually double your damage range bounds, and then take a random value in that new higher range. Also, from experiment, the Critical Strike 3 ability yields a critical about 10% of the time, and ability level 2 about 6% of the time.
    2. Powerful: Provides 1.5% more damage per rank, up to 6% at rank 4.
  3. Passive Abilities: Certain passive abilities in the skill tree of weapons; namely blade instinct, spirit mastery, and barrage; give a 5% increase to damage per skill point added.
  4. Enemy Color Type: Attacking a red or yellow enemy reduces your damage based on the relative enemy level to notoriety level difference, shown by the chart below. Gray and green enemies do not reduce player damage.
  5. Skill Points: After having one skill point in a damage ability, each extra point will increase the damage of the range at one skill point by 25%. This addition of 25% can be done with multiplication by multiplying the values in the chart below from 1 skill point to your current amount of skill points in any damage ability. As an example, going from skill point 1 to 5 increases the base damage at skill point one by 100%, seen by either adding 25%, 4 times, or by multiplying the first 4 chart values together (5/4)(6/5)(7/6)(8/7)=8/4=2=200% of damage range at skill point 1. After having 6 skill points the increase in damage tapers off from +25%.
  6. Attack Value: This is the attack number displayed on every weapon, and was possibly the hardest to calculate. Through digging deep into the internet one can find articles that found that each extra attack value increases the damage by 1%, but it is in fact 0.5% and not 1% bonus damage.
  7. Buffs: Finally, there are buffs that will increase your damage, such as potions, curse, and the dark aura buff. These should be used whenever possible for maximizing damage. Potions (if you’re willing to craft them) increase damage from 10-20%, curse provides 30%, and dark aura buffs all other players nearby for 10% damage increase. Generally, curse an opponent that will take more than a few combos and only provide a dark aura buff for a large group of people (>15 people or enough people to where your 100% damage would be outmatched by the group gaining 10% more damage + your staff damage).
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Mistimed Combos

One last thing about DPS before I turn to specific weapons. I have seen mention that mistimed combos will actually increase your DPS! They shouldn't, but they do. I found that mistimed attacks will decrease your damage range by approximately 25%. This means that for a mistimed combo to do more damage than normal combos it would need to do more than 25% faster than normal combos. There aren't actually any mistimed combos that are that fast, so it shouldn't do more DPS, but they do. This is because that decrease in damage isn't actually being applied due to a bug, so the mere decrease in combo time is what increases DPS. So, for now mistimed combos increase DPS.


Formula
Every sword is calculated in the same way, but with different values for all of the values that can change damage. The equation below can be off from the true value by a very small amount, which is usually the fault of using a base damage value that is actually different than what is shown in the game. For example, if the game shows that your attack in the skill tree will do 36-71 damage, then this is actually 35.5 behind the scenes and that value is more accurate to the weapon than 36 is. Here's the equation:

D=1.5 * B * (1 + .005 * A) * BI * C * P

  • D=Damage to be dealt after factors applied
  • B=In-game displayed value range for any skill at any skill level
  • A=Attack power value
  • BI= Increase from blade instinct skill
  • C=Critical Strike factor (1.1 rank 3, 1.06 rank 2, or 1 rank 0)
  • P=Powerful factor (if applicable)

Weapon DPS

Finally! Let’s now discuss the best weapons! The following has 1 rare and all famed and legendary swords in the game with each using (1) a basic full combo, (2) combos with sword skills used, and (3) combos with bladestorm. Bolded ones indicate that I have not yet acquired data for their skills, and italicized ones indicate I have made some assumptions about their skills and added them in despite lacking testing. Each tile is color coded by their rarity, and sorted from top to bottom, max to min DPS:


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Analysis
At the moment, bloodfire appears to be incredibly powerful once fully filled up, which is what lets those famed (and the rare!) to climb ranks. Cursed fire and especially cursed lightning are very powerful and tend to increase DPS by using it, whereas bladestorm only increases DPS when there is a boost for it and only does so marginally. In the past sabres were incredibly weak, but with the critical strikes added and nerf to broadswords, there are now top tier DPS swords as sabres. I also want to note that even though swords like Leviathan may not have the best DPS, they do incredible single hit damage, which is useful in its own right.
Well that is all the information that I have gathered and am able to for now. If you're still interested, here is a link to the spreadsheet that I used to compile all this. Again, if anyone has information that I don't yet I would love to hear it! If you have any questions or a part is unclear I will do my best to answer it. Good luck looting everyone! Ned Reddavis out!
 
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A very short read, but interesting nonetheless. Thanks for doing the grueling portion of this work so that we are informed! ;)
 
Bump for major updates to DPS list. Also I still need community help finishing the incomplete skill list!

 
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One thing missing from this is what skill points should be spent on what, on top of the sword itself?
I could see about adding that, but in terms of most damage you'll want to put the points into maxing out the entire sword combo as well as bladestorm.
 
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