Damage and Defense

Lunia runs two damage economies side by side. Physical damage scales with the attack number on your character sheet and nothing else. Everything with an element on it stops caring about your weapon at 4,500 attack and scales with Strength instead. Almost every "why did my upgrade do nothing" question is one of those two sentences.

Where your attack range comes from

Your sheet shows a range, not a number, and every hit rolls inside it. Strength lifts both ends of that range. Dexterity lifts only the top.

Flat attack from gear is added to both ends after that, and a percentage attack bonus multiplies the result. So Dexterity raises your best hit without raising your worst one: it widens the spread rather than lifting the average.

Two kinds of skill

Relative hits carry a fraction and multiply your attack range by it. An ordinary chain hit is 0.4 of the range, a finisher or a launcher is 1.0. The full breakdown is on the combo page.

Absolute hits carry their own damage numbers and ignore your attack range completely. They pick up extra scaling from the flat attack your gear adds, not from the range itself, and none of the caps below touch them.

Damage types, and the one that sits in both camps

There are eleven damage types: the nine elements, Physical, and Independence. Physical is the only one the rest of this page treats as physical. Independence is the odd one: when you are dealing it, the game files it with the elements, and when you are taking it, the game files it with Physical. Read it as elemental on the way out and physical on the way in.

The 4,500 cap

In a stage the roll still keeps a spread around 4,500. In PvP the clamp is exact, so those hits land on the same number every time.

Strength is the magic stat too

The cap exists because non-physical damage is paid for somewhere else. After the range is settled, a non-physical hit is multiplied by a skill damage factor read off Strength, for all seventeen characters, Intelligence majors included.

Physical hits do not get this factor at all. That is the whole trade: physical damage rides an uncapped attack number with no multiplier, elemental damage rides a multiplier that reaches 20x with its base pinned at 4,500.

Intelligence buys maximum MP, healing power and the magical critical multiplier. It does not buy skill damage on any character.

Critical hits

Every attack carries its own base critical chance, and your Dexterity is added on top of it. The curve is steeper if Dexterity is your class's major stat, and the gap opens fast.

The multiplier is a separate purchase and comes from your major stat. Base critical damage is 1.30x for everybody, and your class's curve is added on top of it.

The gap between the two shapes is not subtle. At 2,000 in the stat that matters, the steep curve adds +1.70 and the shallow one adds +0.10, so the identical critical hit is worth 3.00x to the specialist and 1.40x to everyone else.

The Dexterity curve is quadratic rather than straight, so it is close to nothing early and very large late: +0.04 at 2,000 Dexterity, +1.00 at 10,000 and +4.00 at 20,000.

What happens on the target

The order is fixed, and physical and elemental damage do not share it.

Physical and Independence

1. Armor is subtracted, in stages only. PvP skips this step entirely.
2. The air combo multiplier applies, from the third consecutive airborne hit.
3. Whatever is left is raised to 1 if it fell below it.

The nine elemental types

1. The element chart is applied. It reads 1.0 against every target in the game, for the reason in the note below.
2. The target's resistance for that damage type is subtracted. Resistance is a flat subtraction, not a percentage, and it can never take more than half the hit.
3. Armor is subtracted, but only when the target is a mob. Players never take the armor step on elemental damage.
4. The air combo multiplier applies, from the third consecutive airborne hit.
5. Whatever is left is raised to 10 if it fell below it.

Two consequences worth carrying. The floors are different by a factor of ten, so the smallest possible elemental hit is worth ten of the smallest possible physical one. And elemental resistance stops paying the moment it halves the hit, so stacking it past that point buys nothing at all.

Armor is not a percentage either. While the incoming hit is larger than twice your armor, armor comes straight off the top. Below that crossover it switches to a softer rule that keeps about half the hit and shaves a quarter of the shortfall, which is why armor never reduces anything to zero.

PvP changes the arithmetic, not just the numbers

• Armor is not applied to physical damage at all.
• The 4,500 clamp is exact instead of spread, so those hits stop varying.
• The Strength factor runs on its own curve that barely moves: 1.30x at 2,000 Strength against 3.42x in a stage.
• Skills use a separate table of cooldowns, MP costs and attack values. See PvP.

An arena result is not a PvE benchmark and a stage result is not an arena benchmark. They are different formulas.

When damage feels wrong

The skill browser carries rank costs and attack values, the bestiary carries mob stats, and status effects covers the buffs, curses and damage type increase lines that sit on top of all of this.