Combat mechanics and stats witcher 3

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Combat mechanics and stats witcher 3

Hello,

Is anyone aware of any documentation or guides on the internet regarding combat mechanics and stats in the witcher 3? Lack of information on this topic has been bugging me for a while and though I have done some basic tests on my own, any additional resource or more official information would be awesome. Google doesn't turn up anything substantial.

Information on questions like:

What is the basic damage formula to calculate the damage of Geralt's attacks?
Do heavy swings from his sword ignore armor (armor penetration %) as per the tool tip?
How does armor pen work?
Do monsters have armor?
Does the wild hunt, which the game classifies as "monsters" have armor?
Do monsters only do "monster" dmg and not slashing or piercing dmg?
How does damage resistance work?

Any info or a link to a resource with this type of information or combat mechanics in general would be really appreciated.

Thanks!
 
There's pretty much zero official documentation on the underlying combat mechanics, sadly. It's not something the developers focused on and evidently they didn't think many players would give a shit either way. It's sad. In fact, before it was added in a later patch, many items like potions did not include numbers whatsoever. It was just, like, "increases damage" (well, by how much??).

Some in the community have attempted to delve into the game's files and figure the mechanics out, but it's a byzantine labyrinth of shit, with tons of different formulae in different places and sometimes with arcane terminology and ambiguous interactions between them. However, one user in particular shared some notes he compiled during his months of modding.

Also, read Wasteland Ghost's comments on this thread about Quen.

the TL,DR seems to be:


  • Armour and armour piercing are flat values that are added/subtracted from damage before the percent reductions modify that value. As a result, armour is partially superfluous. Let me explain: for example, if I strike you with a 100 damage attack and you have 20 armour and 50% resistance, you take (100-20)*0.5=40 damage. Without the 20 armour, you'd take 100*0.5=50 damage. In which case, your 20 armour only reduced damage by 10 compared to what would have happened otherwise.
  • Sign intensity is useless for Quen, since Quen's damage reduction is a flat X damage and doesn't scale with the increased damage of enemies on higher difficulties (e.g. I'm level 22 and Quen reduces damage by like 300... increasing Quen sign intensity by 30% doesn't even come close to mitigating even a single hit from a low level drowner.)
  • Igni base damage is 100, and sign intensity multiplicatively modifies that (e.g. +100% sign intensity = 200 damage)
  • Igni firestream is useless (inferior to ordinary Igni)
  • Damage over Time effects do scale with enemy HP, which is why burn is so overpowered, especially coupled with its "omgimonfire" disable.
  • Don't fret about the mechanics - the devs clearly don't give a shit about being transparent about it and you're never going to be able to figure out it. Trust me, I'm like you, I drives me crazy to not know the exact underlying mechanics. But take it from me, it'll drive you more crazy to try and figure it out and get frustrated in the process.
 
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