Guide - How to increase your damage (2024)

Edit: Accessory reforges were removed, making some parts of this post no longer relevant. It does mention many other things tho, so make sure to give it a read if you don't know how to increase your damage or if you are just curious how the damage calculation works. Some principles mentioned in the context of accessory refoging also apply for thaumatury, which replaced accessory reforging, so you might not want to skip over that.

Tired of explaining it every single day, so I am making a post that I can link to people.

The damage formula looks like this:

final damage = ( 5 + base weapon damage ) * ( 1 + strength/100 ) * (1 + crit damage/100 ) * (additive damage multiplier) * (other multiplicative bonuses)

To get more damage, you need to increase these factors.

Base Weapon Damage (BWD)

The BWD is the "Damage: +XXX" part of your weapon. This is the most important stat of a weapon, much more important than its strength or crit damage. A weapon with higher BWD will deal more damage. The first step in increasing your damage is getting a weapon with high BWD. Some good options are the aspect of the dragons, fel sword, shadow fury or giant's sword. The pooch sword with full mastiff armor is also a good option, but if you choose this, make sure that you know what you're doing.

Hot potato and fuming potato books increase the BWD, hence getting these is very important if you can afford them. They also give some strength, but the BWD is the most important part. Getting fuming potato books usually increases your damage more than recombobulating your weapon, so if you need to choose one, choose the fuming potato books.

Crit Chance

Needless to say, you want to have 100% crit chance (200% with bows). Without having 100% crit chance, some of your hits will not be crits, and the (1+crit damage/100) part in the formula is skipped, leading to much lower damage. Getting 100% crit chance should be prioritized over getting strength and crit damage. You can increase your crit chance by getting higher combat level and reforging your armor and weapon, maybe even some accessories if you still need higher crit chance. Use the wiki to find the reforges that are the best for your gear:

The best armor reforge for crit chance is ancient, which also happens to be the best for physical damage. If you can't afford it, pure is the best regular reforge for crit chance, and it also gives some other physical damage stats (strength and crit damage). It is followed by fierce, which is the best reforge for physical damage, but gives less crit chance than pure.

Even though odd is the weapon reforge that gives the most crit chance, I recommend using sharp instead as it gives much better physical damage stats than odd and only slightly lower crit chance. Getting that crit chance from other sources would result in losing out on much less physical damage stats, than by using odd. If you don't need more crit chance, there are better weapon reforges than these.

If you still need more crit chance after the armor and weapon reforges, you can get a bit more by reforging your accessories. The unpleasant reforge gives 1 crit chance on common, uncommon and rare accessories. Start by reforging the lowest rarity. They all give the same amount of crit chance, but the higher rarity you reforge to unpleasant, the more physical damage stats you lose out on, due to the higher rarities giving more physical damage stats from other reforges.

Strength and Crit Damage

On critical hits, the final damage has the same scaling with strength and crit damage. There are a lot of ways to increase these. The most notable ones are getting a good combat armor that has a good amount of these to start with, reforging the armor, reforging your weapon, and reforging your accessories. You should try to get a lot of accessories, reforging them provides a lot of stats. You can find a list of accessories on the wiki:

For a weapon, the fabled reforge is usually the best. Even though it is not the one that gives the most strength and crit damage, its ability increases your damage by 7.5% on average. If you don't mind your damage being a bit inconsistent, and you want high average damage, then this is probably the way to go. Otherwise, you can use the withered or suspicious reforges. Note that suspicious adds 15 BWD, which is extremely important. If you are early game and can't afford these, spicy is the best regular reforge for physical damage, and sharp is good if you need higher crit chance.

Ancient is by far the best armor reforge for physical damage. If you can't afford it and have to use a regular reforge, fierce is the best, followed by pure, which also gives more crit chance than fierce.

Choosing the right accessory reforges is what new players struggle with the most. For mythic and legendary accessories, the strong reforge gives the most physical damage stats. For the rest (epic, rare, uncommon, common), shaded gives the most overall. If you can't afford shaded, you can use either forceful or hurtful. Forceful gives strength, hurtful gives crit damage. To maximize your damage, you need to choose the one that you have less of. So hurtful if you have more strength than crit damage and forceful if you have more crit damage than strength. Make sure that you are wearing your combat armor and holding your weapon when you check your stats to choose the reforge. You can also use strong on the epic accessories if you can't afford shaded, it gives the same sum of strength and crit damage as hurtful or forceful does, while also giving a little bit of defense. This will slightly limit your choice between strength and crit damage that you would have with hurtful or forceful, but it is usually not a problem.

Combat pets can also provide some strength and crit damage, but they often have other useful abilities, such as the legendary wither skeleton's death's touch or the epic tiger pet's ferocity. These perks can increase your DPS drastically, they are often more important than the strength and crit damage that a pet gives.

Additive Damage Multiplier (ADM)

The additive damage multiplier is a collection of many bonuses. These bonuses are additive with each other, and they make up a single multiplier that then multiplies the final damage. When people say that something is "additive", it usually means that the bonus is added to the ADM. However, this can often lead to misunderstandings, so please refrain from simply saying that "it is additive" or that "it is multiplicative", always say what it is additive or multiplicative with. These are operations between two things, after all.

The base value of the ADM is 1. Some of the most notable factors that can increase it are the bonus from your combat level, enchantments, including One For All, or OFA for short, the warden helmet, the golden dragon pet's legendary treasure perk, the lion pet's king of the jungle perk, the full set bonus of tuxedos and the final destination armor. For a full list of multipliers, see the wiki:

For example, if you have combat level 30 then you get 30*0.04=1.2 added to your ADM (+4% damage per level), making it 1+1.2=2.2. If you have OFA on your weapon, then you get an additional 5 added to it (+500% damage), for a total of 2.2+5=7.5. Note that this is an increase of 5/2.2=2.27=227%, not 500%. The higher your ADM is to start with, the more suppressed a new factor in it is, and the lower the fractional increase is.

The easiest way to increase your ADM is to get regular encahntments or OFA on your weapon, and to upgrade your combat level. OFA gives much more ADM than you can get with regular enchantments, hence it is better for single hit damage. Regular enchantments have some overtime effects and other useful perks, such as life steal or syphon, the slow from venomous, the heal from vampirism, the armor destruction of lethality, luck and looting (they work on rare drops too btw!), and the ability to use some other useful ultimate enchantment, such as ultimate wise or soul eater (latter can increase the damage far beyond what OFA does in some cases).

The overtime effects from regular enchantments, such as fire aspect, venomous, or thunderlord always give the same fractional damage increase. On the other hand, OFA and some other regular enchantments that increase the ADM get more suppressed by other factors in the ADM as you progress in the game. Early to mid game, OFA might be better for not only single hit damage, but for DPS as well. However, regular encahntments are not far behind for DPS, if at all. In fact, there will always be scenatios in which regular encahntments perform better, such as against a high defense enemy, thanks to the lethality enchantment, or against a high damage enemy, thanks to the soul eater ultimate enchantment. At high combat levels, especially with end game items such as the warden helmet and golden dragon that further increase the ADM, OFA gets so suppressed that regular encahntments result in a higher DPS against a general enemy.

Other Multiplicative Bonuses

Some armors and weapons have bonuses that are separate multipliers. It is important to distinguish these from the ADM as these do not get suppressed by anything else. The most notable ones are the slayer weapons that give a high damage bonus against a certain group of enemies. For example the voidwalker katana gives +150% damage against enderman. This is added to the base 100%, so you have 100%+150%=250% damage in total, hence the weapon bonus factor is 2.5 in that case.