Physical and Magical Attacks
Now let's see about the damage types at the olympiad, so you can understand the game better and have a better idea of what can happen or what you can do during a olympiad fight. First, we can separate the main kinds of damage between physical and magical, where magical are the ones made by magical skills and all the rest is physical damage.
If you don't know whether a skill is physical or magical, a easy way to know it is using the skill without any buffs watching it's casting time, then you must use the buffs Acumen and Dance of Concentration, and if the casting time gets faster now the skill is magical. If it doesn't change, you must use the buffs Haste and Dance of Fury, and check the casting time again, if it gets faster, it's a physical skill.
The developers of the game have the option of making a skill's casting time fixed, in this case it doesn't mean the skill doesn't have a physical or magical type, just that attack speed and casting speed won't influence on it's casting time anymore, but this is rare and almost never used by them.
Normal Physical Damage
Normal physical damage is considered all kinds of damage originated by the /attack command with any kind of weapon, be it an arrow shooted from a bow, a hit from a sword, blunt, dagger, dual swords, spears, fists and even staffs. So all the damage made with any weapon on hand-to-hand combat and arrows is considered normal physical damage, except when the character uses physical skills to deal damage, which we'll also talk about.
Possible Normal Physical Damages
For every normal physical damage, the following character's status are involved in the formula of the final PvP physical damage: physical attack, accuracy, critical rate, critical damage and the attack's direction from the agressor against physical defense, evasion, shield defense rate, shield defense power and shield direction from the victim (shield variables are excluded from the formula if the character is not wielding a shield). Now let's see the possible results of this formula:
- Normal Physical Damage: The final PvP physical damage was calculated by the agressor’s physical attack and attack’s direction against the victim’s physical defense, ignoring the shield defenses (not the case of the second hit) and evasion points from the victim.
- Physical Critical Damage: The final PvP physical damage was calculated by the agressor’s physical attack, critical rate, critical damage and attack’s direction against the victim’s physical defense, ignoring the shield defenses and evasion points from the victim. The example is the first hit from the image above.
- Attack is Evaded: There was no PvP physical damage because the agressor’s accuracy points was too low or equal of the victim’s evasion points, so the victim had the chance to avoid that damage, showing the message “You have missed” for the agressor.
Shield Defense
I won't show the possible shield defenses right now because I dedicated the next topic completely for this matter, since it's a little complicated and it would be too much information to put everything right away, so I recommend you to finish reading this one first.
Normal Physical Damage Bonus
About the variable called attack's direction, despite of being showed inside of the damage formula, it actually influences right at the final damage. Normally the variation is not too big when the attack is made by front, left or the right side of the character, but when it goes to the direction of the victim's back, the final damage is highly increased, something about 10%.
Some Interlude servers have been coming with this bonus value the same as the High Five lately, which is something about 35%, but it's wrong and most administrators don't know how or doesn't care enough to fix it, so it's another thing you might want to check where you play. This bonus does not apply to the damage caused by physical skills, except by the dagger ones, but their bonus has a different value, and it can change more according to the focus buff that's being used.
Physical Damage on Skills
Damage from all physical skills (except dagger skills) follows a logic different from the normal physical damage, so the formula for the PvP physical skills damage is: skill power, physical attack and critical chance (skill critical chance + STR points modifier) from the agressor against physical defense and shield defenses from the victim (some skills completely ignores the shield defenses).
Note that on this formula the variables critical rate and critical damage aren't there, that's why they are not applied to the criticals on physical skills, because every physical skill have their own critical chance, so the only thing we can do to increase the skills critical chance is increase the STR points modifier. Also their damage on a critical hit will always be twice the normal damage, since critical damage is not applied on them.
Other two status outside this equasion are accuracy and evasion, which means physical skills can't be evaded, with the exception of a Wind Rider using the buff skill Dodge, that can avoid all physical skills for 10 seconds. This way, there are only two possible outcomes for the physical skills damage, which can be a normal physical damage or a physical critical damage (2x normal damage).
Physical Damage on Dagger Skills
As I said above, the only exception for the physical skills are the dagger skills, they follow a completely different logic for the final PvP physical skill damage, check it out: skill power, STR points (slightly modifies the damage), critical damage, skill critical chance, skill success chance (blow rate chance, skill success rate + DEX points modifier), attack's direction and focus special buff (Focus Chance, Focus Power or Focus Death) from the agressor against the physical defense from the victim.
Note that critical rate is not applied on the formula, so it doesn't work on dagger skills either, because all dagger skills damage are considered critical damage, you can see it clearly in the chat. The critical damage variable works as their physical attack when compared to the normal physical skills, so their damage is always considered a critical hit, but they can also cause a real critical hit, which will be 2x their normal damage, just like the other physical skills.
So we have three possible outcomes for these skills: the skill has failed and no damage is applied at the victim, the skill causes a normal physical damage (it shows a critical hit anyway), or the skill causes a physical critical damage, which will be twice the normal physical damage.
Magical Damage
Unlike physical damage, the magical damage always comes from a magical skill and have no oscillations when using the same skill at the same condicions, ignoring the attack's direction, for the example of magical skills we have the Prominence (Archmage), Hydro Blast (Mystic Muse) and Hurricane (Storm Screamer). The main difference of physical to magical skills, is that almost all of them are linked to one of six elemental attribute, which are: fire, water, wind, earth, dark and holy.
There are some negative skills called Surrenders that can decrease these elemental atributes resistance, and some others called Resistances that can increase it, but not many classes have them, so I will leave this subject for another topic, for now you just need to remember of their existance.
Possible Magical Damages
Understanding that we have different variables here, let's see the formula for the PvP magical damage, which is: skill power, magical attack, magical critical rate, magical critical damage (fixed value) and magical skill attribute from the agressor against magical defense and attribute resistance from the victim.
- Normal Magical Damage: The final PvP magical damage was calculated by the agressor’s skill power, magical attack and skill’s attribute against the victim’s magical defense and it’s resistance to this attribute.
- Magical Critical Damage: The final PvP magical damage was calculated by all the variables and the agressor got a magical critical damage (4x the normal damage). Unlike the physical critical damage, the magical critical damage can’t be increased or modified by anything in the game, only by the administrator in the game configurations, but this value is 4x by default.
- Magical Damage Resistance: I couldn’t find a formula pattern for this outcome on PvP magical damage, since this happens only on Java servers. At the official configuration, there is no magical resistance for high level magical damage skills against other players, but when it happens, the magical damage is reduced by half or does 1 damage. It happens with normal or critical damage.
Bleed and Poison Damages
