Damage

Damage (version 2.0) is a system that determines the damage done to a certain target by a given attacker. Damage results are modified by several mechanics – type modifiers (main content of this article), armor, critical hit bonuses, stealth bonuses, Warframe ability debuffs, body part modifiers, faction modifiers – which are discussed below and on their respective pages.

All damage dealt by any weapon or ability belongs to a certain damage type, and every target has specific resistances and vulnerabilities to different damage types. Exploiting enemy vulnerabilities and avoiding resistances by means of weapon selection and mod installation may significantly improve players' damage output.

Damage Display
Damage dealt from players to enemies is displayed on the HUD as numbers near the point of impact on an enemy. Damage dealt from enemies to players is displayed on the HUD both as a bent strip to indicate its direction of origin and as a reduction in shield or health hitpoints to indicate its quantity.

Each individual projectile or melee attack will display a single damage instance. Weapons with multiple projectiles like shotguns or rifles with Multishot will display a damage instance for each individual projectile. Weapons which fire continuously will display a damage instance at a constant rate depending on the fire rate of the weapon.

Damage indicators are color-coded using the following system:
 * Damage appears by default in white.
 * Critical hits and stealth attacks are in yellow.
 * Orange crits, appear in orange color. These are stronger than yellow crits.
 * Red crits, as their name suggests, appear in red. These are stronger than orange crits.
 * Damage against shields appears in blue, regardless of other factors.
 * Damage against overshields appears in purple.
 * Attempts to damage an invulnerable enemy appear in grey.

Damage Types
Every weapon, ability or method of dealing damage is classified as one or more types of damage. Through mods or abilities, further types of damage can be added to attacks.

When multiple damage types are present on an attack, all of them will deal their respective amounts independent of each other, but only one damage number calculated from the combined value of the damage types will show.

With each shown damage value, there is also a chance of a Status Effect occurring; The likelihood of which type of damage this Status Effect is based on depends on the ratio balance of the damage types on the weapon.

Physical Damage
Most weapons' base damage is made up of a combination of three physical damage types:, , and. The overall physical damage of any given weapon is the sum of Impact, Puncture, and Slash damage. This is sometimes referred to as IPS.

Although most weapons have varying proportions of, , and , some weapons (such as the  or ) can have no physical damage at all. Other weapons (like the or ) can deal a combination of physical and elemental, or combo elemental damage.

Unlike elemental, or combo elemental damage types which can be added via mods, physical damage cannot be added to weapons already lacking them. Weapons that do not have one or more components of physical damage are not affected by the respective, , or mods.

General damage increasing mods such as affect all the base damage types of a weapon. Additionally, Faction Damage Mods such as also affect damage as a total damage multiplier against the faction in question.

Primary Elemental Damage
Elemental Damage can be applied on top of a weapon’s base damage depending on what Elemental Mods are applied. There are four primary Elemental Damage types:,, , and.

A single primary Elemental Damage type can be applied alone, but if a second primary Elemental Damage type is introduced they will combine into a secondary Elemental Damage type.

Secondary Elemental Damage
Creating these secondary elements requires mixing two primary elements together.

Elemental Damage is applied in addition to a weapon’s physical damage types. Weapon Damage = ( + + ) + (Elemental).

Elemental Damage Combinations are made by following a mod placement hierarchy. This hierarchy is from closest to top left (first to be considered) to the bottom right (last to be considered) on the mod layout. Innate weapon elemental damages are considered the very last in any hierarchy.

However, a weapon's innate elemental damage can be forced into a different position in the hierarchy (and thus be combined into a combo element earlier) if the player has equipped a mod of the same element as the innate element. As well, when using multiple mods with the same element, the first position that element is placed in establishes it's hierarchy and where it's combined.

For example, putting on the top left slot of  will change the position of its innate  damage from last in hierarchy to first in hierarchy. Similarly, placing earlier in the hierarchy before placing  will still count the  damage where it was first placed.

A weapon's innate elemental damage will contribute to elemental combinations, as long as the combination has been established earlier in the hierarchy. It can also combine with the last uncombined elemental mod in the hierarchy to form a combo element.



For example: when modding a weapon with standalone such as  or, then adding , , and  in 1, 2 and 3 respectively get:  ( + ) and  ( + ).

In the case of Riven Mods where there is more than one elemental stat present, the hierarchy priority will be given to the last elemental stat listed on the Riven mod. For example, a Riven mod with a bonus of +100% damage first and +90%  damage last, will enable the  damage to combine with an elemental mod higher up in the hierarchy, and the  damage will combine with an elemental damage type lower in the hierarchy. If no other elemental damage mods are present, the elements on the Riven mod will combine with itself.

Weapons with innate Combination Elements such as,  ,  ,   and   will always have that damage type, regardless of mods used. On weapons like these, basic elemental damage mods will combine and function independently of the innate combination elements, as basic elements cannot combine with a weapon's already combined innate damage type.



Unique Damage
These damage types are unique as they are not available as base damage types for any typical weapons nor can they be added through mods.


 * damage is a damage type that can be applied through procs, finishers as well as a few Warframe abilities and is distinct in ignoring enemy armor and bonus or malus damage modifiers, directly dealing its "raw" damage value to their health.


 * damage is a damage type that can only be used by the Operator after completing The War Within. It possesses special properties and effects against Sentient enemies.


 * damage is the damage type unique to the energy attacks of Sentients.

Status Effect
A Status Effect, also known as proc, is an additional effect which may be triggered at random by a hit from a weapon, while Status Chance is the probability that a hit will inflict a Status Effect. Each damage type has a unique Status Effect associated with it.

A weapon will always (with every shot) deal any elemental and physical damage installed, regardless of the corresponding status triggering or not.

Damage Calculation
The following explains how a certain amount of damage of one type turns into actual inflicted damage to a target, considering type modifiers and armor. Faction modifiers, body part modifiers, critical hit and stealth modifiers as well as Warframe debuffs are disregarded for now, since all of these are independent of damage types.

Dealing damage is quantized. Meaning, rather than damage being applied smoothly it is dealt in discrete "chunks", or quanta. These quanta are determined by the total listed damage of the source divided by 16.

For example, if you have a weapon with a listed damage distribution of 30, 30 , and 40 , the Total Damage is 100. The value of a quantum will then be $100 / 16$. When damaging a Charger, which has a +25% bonus to damage, the amount of  damage dealt will then be $30 / 6.25$ rounded to the nearest whole number, multiplied by the quantum: $5 * 6.25$. This process is applied to and  as well, yielding 31.25 and 37.5 respectively. As such, the total damage dealt to the Charger will then be $31.25 + 31.25 + 37.5 * (1 + 25%)$ (the game will display the rounded value of 109).

Note that while in this case the amount of damage after the conversion remained the same, sometimes damage may either be gained or lost after the conversion.

Against unarmored enemies or when applying True damage, the formula is simply:


 * Inflicted Damage (ID) is the final damage result.
 * Base Damage (BD) is the initial damage value.
 * Health-type Modifier (HM) is the damage modifier against that health type (may be shield or health).

To make it independent from the amount of base damage:


 * Damage Modifier (DM) is the total damage modifier. An amount of damage of that type (BD) against that enemy will then always be multiplied with this factor (DM).

Against armored enemies, the formula is:

$${ DM = \frac{300}{300 + AR(1 - AM)}(1 + AM)(1 + HM) }$$

Where additionally to the previous definitions, AM is the damage modifier against the armor type and AR is the target's armor after all reductions from debuffs (including, Corrosive procs and ).

It's important to note that type modifiers against armor work in two ways here: they mitigate a percentage of the target's armor, and increase the damage dealt in the same way as a type modifier against the hit points would do. Practically speaking, this means that damage is only reduced by 25% of a target's whole Ferrite Armor and the base damage is increased by +75%. Thus having the damage type with the highest appropriate bonus is far more important against armored than unarmored targets. The formula causes a massive difference between a medium and a large reduction: 75% reduction (¼ original armor) is essentially twice more than 50% reduction (½ original armor).

Because of the twofold reduction, a simple (1 + HM) (1 + AM) calculation yields incorrect results. The following damage type pairings deviate from that simplified calculation:
 * Against ferrite-armored cloned flesh,
 * always surpasses.
 * surpasses above 120 armor.
 * always surpasses ; but never surpasses.
 * Against alloy-armored cloned flesh,
 * always surpasses.
 * surpasses above 342 armor.
 * always surpasses.
 * However, neither nor  ever surpass.

This just shows that one can't easily compare damage type modifiers against an armor class to those against health classes, and those against armor are, at similar values, considerably more effective especially when fighting high level enemies (since armor scales with level).

$${ ben_{AM} = AM + \frac{AR(1 + AM)}{300 + AR(1 - AM)}AM }$$

Exact relative damage bonus (i.e. benefit) of a non-zero armor modifier at a given target net armor value.

The relative damage bonus due to a damage type's armor modifier against armored health compared to no modifier can be quantified using the upper expression on the right. This is only defined for armor values greater than 0, because at 0, the armor type of the target is lost, such that the effect of the damage type's armor modifier is lost as well. Hence, the benefit (relative damage bonus) of the armor modifier at 0 armor is always 0.

$${ \lim_{AR\to \infty} (ben_{AM}) = \frac{2AM}{1 - AM} }$$

Limit for the benefit as armor approaches infinity.

An interesting property of this benefit function is that, while one would intuitively assume the benefit of the armor modifier gets always greater the greater the target's armor, this benefit actually converges against a limit as armor approaches infinity if the armor modifier is smaller than one (which is true for all damage types against all armor types with the sole exception of damage). Since this limit is only determined by the armor modifier of the damage type itself, it is a practical metric to gauge the relative effectiveness of damage types for long endless missions. The formula for the limit is the lower one given on the right. Below is a table of the actual values for all currently implemented armor modifiers. This illustrates the growing returns of greater armor modifiers, which may be compared to the behavior of aura stacking.

General
A generalized version of the aforementioned formula is:

$${ DM = \frac{300}{300 + AR(1 - AM)}\prod_i^k(1 + M_i) }$$

Generalized damage modifier formula.

AR is still the target's armor after all debuffs (, procs and ) have been applied, how these debuffs work is subject of the armor article. AM is the damage type modifier against the armor class. M🇮🇳 for all indices i are all modifiers that take effect, these can be damage type modifiers against armor and health type, the crit modifier (on average: chance damage multiplier), stealth bonus (only normal auto attacks, the special stealth attacks are classified as True damage type and disregard armor), enemy body part/hit zone modifiers and damage multipliers from Warframe abilities like, ,  or. The term following the large pi operator (&Pi;) simply means that this is a product, so all these bonuses stack multiplicatively. The notation replaces (1 + M🇮🇳) (1 + M🇮🇳)  ... .

In case of enemies who have both shields and armor, damage to shield is not mitigated by armor. Lastly, when damage is applied to a shielded target, the damage is applied directly to its health, not shield – it bypasses shields.

Damage Over Time
Damage Over Time (DoT) is a type of damage dealt to enemies over a duration. Though any duration is stated as second(s), DoT is typically calculated as Damage per Tick (1 second = 2 ticks).

When ability or status effect is described to have 1200 damage/s, it means it will deal 600 damage twice within one second. In other word, it will deal 600 damage every 0.5 second. Any time left that is less than 0.5 second will be counted as 1 tick.

A general formula for number of ticks is:

Eximus
Eximus enemies have increased damage resistance to all damage types by 50% and/or boosted stats. Some different Eximus units gain different types of resistance.

For example, while a Blitz Eximus gains no boosted stats, they gain resistance to all damage by 50%. Similarly, while a Leech Eximus gains no additional damage resistance, they gain a significant increase to their base Health and Shield at +200%. Some Eximus units have both defensive scaling and damage resistance such as Parasitic Eximus and even further resistance to primary elemental types such as Arctic Eximus.

Patch History
Schaden 2.0 Daño