Damage

Every weapon you hold belongs to melee, ranged, magic or summon, and nearly every bonus in the game is written against exactly one of those words. An emblem that reads increased magic damage does nothing at all for a bow. Class identity here is not flavor, it is which pool of multipliers your gear feeds.

A small set of weapons has no class. Their tooltip shows a bare damage figure with no type word after it. Those weapons ignore every damage bonus and every critical strike bonus you own, including ones that sound universal: the Avenger Emblem says all damage and still contributes nothing. They stay locked at their printed number forever, which makes them punchy when you find them and dead weight two tiers later.

Melee, ranged and magic can critically strike on their own. Summon cannot, unless a whip tag or a specific armor set grants it a fixed rate.

Order matters more than the size of any single bonus. The weapon's modifier rescales its base damage first. After that, every percentage bonus you own that matches the weapon's class is summed into one multiplier starting at 1. Fifteen percent from an accessory and ten from another give you 1.25, not 1.265. That additive stacking is why the tenth damage accessory is worth so much less than the first.

Bonuses that name no class at all are added into all four pools at once, so they are worth the same as a matching class bonus of equal size, and they keep working when you switch weapons mid-fight. The Destroyer Emblem is the standard example, while the Ranger Emblem and its siblings pay more only if you never leave the class.

Ranged is the one class where the gun and the bullet are priced separately. The weapon's damage runs through your ranged multiplier, the ammunition's damage runs through it a second time on its own, and the two are added together at the end.

Two boosts sit outside the additive pool and multiply on top of it. A Shroomite headpiece applies a flat 1.15 factor to the weapon half, and a Magic Quiver or one of its upgrades adds 0.10 to the multiplier before that, but only when you are firing arrows or stakes. An active Archery buff from an Archery Potion multiplies the finished total by 1.1, again arrows only. Between them these are the reason bow builds outscale gun builds late even when the raw weapon numbers look similar.

Ammunition with no damage value of its own contributes its raw item figure instead, and a few of those come out negative. Loading Fallen Star, Gel or Sand Block into a weapon that accepts them shaves a point off the shot. The Sandgun is the exception that rewards picking your sand, since the evil and hallowed variants add five flat damage each.

One thing to remember when comparing weapons: the figure shown when you hover a ranged weapon already includes the quiver, Shroomite and Archery factors but excludes the ammunition entirely. The tooltip and the number that actually leaves the barrel are never the same.

Once the hit exists, the target's side of the math runs. A banner for that enemy hung nearby multiplies incoming damage by 1.5 in Classic and by 2 in Expert, with Old One's Army enemies getting a much smaller bump of 1.1 or 1.2. Then comes the roll: every hit is scaled by a random factor from 0.85 up to 1.15, which is where the spread in your damage numbers comes from. Armor penetration applies next, then the target's defense is subtracted at half its listed value, and the result is floored so that no hit can ever land for less than 1.

Critical strikes double last, after defense has already been removed. That ordering drives most of the argument about which stat to stack, because a critical strike doubles what survived the subtraction rather than what you started with.

Melee swings and projectiles run these steps in a slightly different order, which occasionally produces a one point difference, but the pieces are the same. Minions and sentries count as projectiles here, and so do mount attacks, though mount attacks skip the random roll entirely and cannot critically strike.

• Banners are the cheapest damage boost in the game and most characters never hang any. Doubling your output against a whole enemy type in Expert is not something an accessory can match.
• Because same-class bonuses stack additively, moving into critical strike chance is usually stronger than adding a fourth damage accessory. The two categories multiply against each other in practice.
• Armor penetration only pays up to the target's defense value. Anything beyond that is wasted, and it does nothing in PvP at all.
• Area attacks deal the same damage across the whole area. There is no falloff from the center, so positioning for an explosion is only about coverage.
• Minions that grow stronger with your minion count run their own formulas, so their listed damage is not directly comparable to a weapon's.