With so many modifiers, I find it hard to figure out the difference between all of them. Can anyone help me understand how they all work in terms of what they do for your character and the skills you use?
Thanks!
I’ll do my best to sum up the most important ones here, but you should read up on the advanced mechanics guide and some of the other guides on here for better information.
%Weapon Damage, eg 150% weapon damage: This is a multiplicative application of all effects that your weapons apply including damage, dots, debuffs, and procs.
Flat Damage, eg “25 Aether Damage”: This is a flat, basic damage boost to weapon damage only. Any skill or spell with a %weapon damage component will benefit from it.
+%damage, eg “+35% fire damage”: This is a multiplicative bonus to all sources of the listed damage. This stacks additively with other +%damage bonuses, so having two +35% fire damage bonuses would yield +70% fire damage. Special notes: damage types do not include their respective DOTs. +%fire and +%burn are not the same thing. The exception to this is +%elemental which applies to all three elements and all 3 elemental DOTs.
Total Damage Modifed by x, eg “Total Damage modified by 10%”: this is a powerful and rare modifier that takes your final damage value after other buffs and multiplies it by a percentage.
+skills, eg +1 to shadow strike: As may be obvious, this adds one(or more) level(s) to the listed skill. This is the only way to exceed the max level for a skill and can go as high as 10 points over the max.
+stats/+% stats, eg “+50 cunning” or “+5% spirit”: These do what they say, increase your stats by a base value or a percentage of your base value.
+%resists, eg “+15% fire resistance”: These give you % reduction to incoming damage of the given type and can stack up to 80% or more if you have equipment that raises the cap
+%speed, eg “+10% total speed,” “+10% attack speed,” or “+10% casting speed”: These modify Attack, Cast, or Move speeds. Total affects all 3.
I’m sure there are more but that’s a good start.
Very helpful! Thank you! So if you have a spell that does Lightning damage, increasing your lightning damage from any source will increase your damage with that skill right? Also, what bonuses from the player apply to pets?
None, unless the bonus itself specifically says it’s a pet bonus, or the pet itself says it scales with player damage bonuses.
Pet bonuses specify in the text that they are for pets. Player bonuses and pet bonuses are completely separate.
Say you have a skill that does 100 lightning damage and you have a total of +100% lightning damage from 4 different items that each have a +25% lightning damage. You will do 200 lightning damage with that skill. If you remove one of the items, you will do 175 damage with that skill.
I also forgot to mention resistance reduction which comes in three flavors. There is a thread floating around that has the detailed explanation but the short version is that -x% resistance stacks additively with any number of the same type of malus and with the highest active source of x reduced resistance (an additive malus) and the highest active source of reduce target’s resistance by x%(a multiplicative malus)
Wonderful thread! Just saved me the trouble of opening a pretty similar thread myself 
One more thing though- other than resistances (which I know are capped at 80% normally), what are the caps on those modifiers?
Thanks!
Ahhh okay thank you!
Darkemor,
for modifier such as +50% fire damage I don’t think that is capped but there is diminishing returns in a mathematic sense.
Because if you have 50% fire and add an additional 50% then you double your damage goes from (say a base 100 fire flat damage)
100 x +50% = 150 damage
to
100 x +100% = 200 damage
So going from +50% to +100% you got a good bump
But adding an additional +50% when you already have +1000%…
100 x +1000% = 1100 damage
100 x +1050% = 1150 damage
So while that extra +50% still added another 50 damage (for your flat 100) the relative bump in damage per second will be small…
Thanks a bunch!
There are also caps on speed (attack, cast or movement, but I don’t recall them) and on skills (most often, 10 over the “max”, ie a x/16 skill won’t go over 26/16, but then you can put only 12 points in the skill and get +14 through equipment to reach 26/16).
Do note, that “Total damage modified by X%” modifier is different, and is multiplicative to others.
Do does “racial” damage bonus (damage to Aetherials, etc).