Last Epoch Damage Guide: Essential Tips for Scaling Your Damage and Focusing on Minions

In this Damage for Beginners guide, we’ll cover the fundamentals of dealing damage in Last Epoch. The more damage you deal, the faster you kill, earn experience, and drop loot. Understanding these key concepts will help you take full advantage of the damage options available to you.

Skill Tags

To begin scaling your damage, it’s important to understand the scaling tags of your skills. These tags determine which stats will influence the scaling of your damage.

For example, the tags for Hammer Throw indicate that it is a Throwing Attack that scales with Physical modifiers, Strength, and Dexterity. As a Throwing Attack, it is not affected by Melee or Spell modifiers.

Scaling Your Damage

Understanding how damage scales is crucial for maximizing your character’s power in Last Epoch. Here's a breakdown of the key concepts for scaling your damage:

• Base Damage: All skills have a base amount of flat damage, though some skills have a very small base.
• Added Damage: This is added directly to your base damage. It’s a flat value (never a percentage), and can either be a specific damage type or adaptive damage that adjusts to the damage type of the skill you're using.
• Added Damage Effectiveness: Every damage-dealing skill has a specific Added Damage Effectiveness, which is a multiplier for the added damage. For example, if you have 50 added damage and use a skill with 50% added damage effectiveness, the result would be 25 added damage. With 200% effectiveness, that 50 added damage would become 100.
• Increased Damage: This multiplies your added damage. All sources of increased damage applicable to your skill stack additively. For instance, if you have 4 adaptive spell damage and two sources of increased damage (150% spell, 150% fire), these would add together (300% total increased), and then multiply the added damage (4 * (1 + 3)), making your 4 spell damage increase to 16.
• More Damage: These modifiers are multiplicative, meaning different sources of more damage multiply off of each other. For example, if you had two sources of more damage instead of increased damage, the calculation would look like this: 4 * (1 + 1.5) * (1 + 1.5) = 25.
• Attack/Cast Speed: Increasing the speed of your skill’s hits is another way to improve your damage. Generic Attack Speed applies to all attacks, while Cast Speed applies to all spells. Specific versions of attack speed (Melee, Throwing, Bow) apply only to the corresponding skill type. Most skills can scale attack or cast speed, though there are exceptions (e.g., Disintegrate only scales the initiation of the cast, not the DoT damage speed).
• Critical Strikes: If a hit lands as a critical strike, the damage is multiplied by your Critical Strike Multiplier. Critical strikes have a base multiplier of 100%, meaning you deal double damage if you have no other critical strike multiplier bonuses. Additional sources of critical strike multiplier are added to this base. All skills that can critically strike have a base chance of 5%, but this can be increased. Added Critical Strike is a flat increase to your critical strike chance, while Increased Critical Strike Chance is a percentage increase to your total base and added critical strike chance.
• Resistance Shred: This reduces the enemy’s resistance to a particular damage type (e.g., Physical Resistance Shred). Each stack decreases resistance by a percentage (5% for non-bosses, 2% for bosses) and caps at 10 stacks. Resistance can go negative, meaning this can increase damage to enemies even if they have no resistance to your damage type.
• Penetration: Penetration directly reduces an enemy's resistance, and multiple instances of penetration add together. It works in conjunction with resistance shred to further lower the enemy's resistance. Resistances can go negative, amplifying the damage.
• Armor Shred: This ailment reduces enemy armor by 100 per stack for 4 seconds, and stacks infinitely. While armor has diminishing returns, it can go negative, causing enemies to take more damage.
• Increased Damage Taken: This works as a multiplier for your damage, stacking additively. Multiple instances of increased damage taken add together, increasing the amount of damage the enemy takes.

Damage Types and Ability Types

Damage can be classified into two categories: Hits and Damage over Time (DoT).

• Hits deal all of their damage at once, can trigger Critical Strikes, and can apply Ailments.
• Damage over Time (DoT) deals damage over a period of time, cannot be Critical Strikes, and generally cannot apply Ailments or On Hit effects.

Ailments can be DoTs (e.g., Bleed, Ignite, Poison), but not all Ailments are DoTs (e.g., Chill, Shock). Ailments are usually applied based on chance, and if you have more than 100% chance to apply an Ailment, multiple stacks may be applied at once.

Increasing the duration of an Ailment that deals damage will increase the total amount of damage it deals, but does not affect the Damage per Second (DPS). This means it increases the overall damage dealt by the Ailment over its duration.

Damaging Ailments have a base damage that is independent of the skill that applies them. Damage modifiers from a skill tree will affect the damage of Ailments applied by that skill unless stated otherwise (e.g., “More Hit Damage” does not affect DoTs).

Here’s a list of Damage Types and Ability Types:

Damage Types

• Fire
• Cold
• Lightning
• Physical
• Necrotic
• Poison
• Void

Ability Types

• Melee Attack
• Throwing Attack
• Bow Attack
• Spell

Minions

Minion damage scales independently from the player, meaning they have their own set of stats and affixes that must be included in your build, instead of relying on traditional damage stats. If a stat doesn't fall under the categories listed below, it won’t scale with Minions:

• Minion (e.g., Minion Damage)
• Companions (For Primalist Pets)
• Totems (For Primalist Totems)
• Allies
• Shared
• For You and Your Minions
• Primary attributes tagged for the Minion skill

Summary

• Added, Increased, and More Damage are the core damage stats.
• More Damage is a powerful multiplier and essential for nearly all builds.
• Take Added Damage Effectiveness into account when evaluating the value of Added Damage.
• Stack various Damage bonuses to efficiently scale your damage.
• Damage Types and Ability Types define how you can scale your damage.
• Minions don’t scale with your character’s stats. They have their own set of stats that you need to focus on when building for Minions.