by Bachmanetti
With the new ways that armor mods work, in addition to new exotics, abilities, and a whole new subclass; a lot of this information may be outdated.
Esoterikk has posted a video outlining most of the current mods and changes for Beyond Light
I am actively doing a full suite of testing (Feel free to reach out if you want to help!) That will also include overshields.
‘Infusion’ is a fancy word for powering up your gear in Destiny 2. As you play you’ll get plenty of guns, armour and class specific gear that will drop from defeated enemies and mission rewards. Weapon damage calculator. For any one that's interested here is a calculator to tell you how much damage you should do with a weapon. Just select the weapon type from the drop down menu, input the impact (found from destinydb) the attack value, your lvl and the mobs lvl, and it'll tell you an approximate damage dealt.
Stay Safe Guardians!
While I was running Prophecy I wondered: “What was the actual resistance provided by stacking mods?”
I went down a Rabbit hole for 2 weeks and this is what I came back with:
Weapon damage calculator. For any one that's interested here is a calculator to tell you how much damage you should do with a weapon. Just select the weapon type from the drop down menu, input the impact (found from destinydb) the attack value, your lvl and the mobs lvl, and it'll tell you an approximate damage dealt. Destiny 2: Which Weapons Offer the Best DPS. The Destiny 2 community collects data to determine the absolute best Kinetic, Energy, and Power weapons in the game that dish out the most damage per.
I highly recommend using the above if you need a quick version of how Damage Resist works. For more details, continue reading or check out the spreadsheet
This only pertains to PVE, as modifiers in PVP are generally different.
Resist Mod Stacking Chart
Resilience is unfortunately not very useful in PVE aside from providing increased Barrier regen time for Titans. Each Tier of Resilience is effectively a 1-2% increase in overall shield, which ends up only being about a 0.5% increase in your overall resistance to damage.
At 15% resistance, and stacking up to a staggering 55.6%, it significantly outperforms other stackable mods. Most hard-hitting damage sources count as Area of Effect (AOE) damage and are reduced by this mod.
- Boss Stomp
- Concussive Blasts, Shots (This covers a lot of Bosses, Majors, Cyclops, Knights, and other sources)
- Fire Pools, Grenades
- Exploding Shanks, Screebs, Cursed Thralls
Unfortunately, elemental resists only provide a 5% resistance and stacks in a standard fashion
Minor, Major, and Boss Resist mods provide a stacking 10% resistance. However, this decreases in effectiveness faster than other mods. I would not recommend stacking more than 3 mods as this increase drops below even elemental resist.
Important note: For the purposes of Damage Resistance only, elite enemies with a Triangle Icon, including Champions, are actually considered Boss enemies. Use Boss Resist to decrease damage from them.
For Weapon Damage mods, you would use Major Spec to increase damage to Champions and other Elite enemies.
Enemy Barrier mods provide a 20% damage resistance AFTER having received damage from those sources. It does not stack with itself. However, Taken Barrier will stack with Hive or Fallen barrier for 36% resistance to those enemies.
This chart provides a brief overview of how Damage resistance works with your power level compared to the Activity power level
Essentially, as you approach the Power level of the activity; received damage drops substantially. After you reach the activity power level; received damage continues to decline slowly. This drop-off does not seem to have a cap.
Contest mode activities such as Grand Master Nightfalls, are not affected by this.
Regarding Damage dealt, there are more details in the spreadsheet. It would seem that there are two curves that are combined to effect weapon damage. The first curve applies to your overall light level and stops increasing at the recommended power level. The second curve continues to increase until the weapon itself is at the recommended power level +20.
The takeaway from this is that you should infuse your weapons as high as possible up to the power level cap of the activity minus your artifact level.
In almost all cases, the way Damage resistance combines is the same. The Resistances are each applied to the incoming damage, reducing it sequentially.
If you want to determine your percentage of incoming Damage from a source, you can calculate it as follows:
ReceivedDamage = (1-Resist_1) * (1-Resist_2) * (1-Resist_3) * (…….)
For example: If you are attacked by a Taken Echo Knight and you have Taken Barrier 20%, Hive Barrier 20%, and 2x Concussive Dampener 27.75%:
(1-20%) * (1-20%) * (1-27.75%) = 46.24% incoming Damage, or effectively 53.76% total resistance.
Sword blocking is highly dependent on both the frame of the sword, and the sword guard chosen.
These are the stats of sword blocking with Temptation’s Hook with different Guard perks.
Expect different results with different swords
Most Supers have about a 80% resistance. This is while they are active in the case of roaming supers, and while being cast in the case of supers like Nova Bomb and Blade Barrage.
Environmental Damage is handled a little differently, and you only have about a 50% resistance to damage in those same supers
Neither Golden Gun super seems to have any Damage Resistance provided.
For each exotic that offers a damage resistance or “reduces incoming damage” perk, the following information applies:
The few exceptions to how damage resistance combines:
- Minor/Major/Boss Resist – These mods have a decreasing curve based on the number of each mod to a max of 30%. Basically more than 3 is essentially useless compared to any other mod.
- Resistant Tether 5% and Enhanced Resistant Tether 10% – In Garden of Salvation, each mod adds their resistance together for a max of 50%
- Dreambane Mods 10% – each mod adds together for a max of 50%. However these are ONLY effective against a Nightmare Hunt Boss, no other enemy tested had damage reduced. Note: This is also the one exception I found where it also ADDED to Hive Barrier….
- Riven’s Curse -3% – This mod increases damage from all sources in the Dreaming city. It drops on all Reverie Dawn armor. These add together for a potential 15% increase in Damage received.
A note on Overshields
Overshields were not tested thoroughly as there are some difficulties with testing them and inconsistencies when being applied. For Example, the overshield from Saint-14’s helm with Bubble is a different amount then the overshield from the defensive strike melee ability. Couple this with overshield abilities that recharge separately from your shield bar and health, and the elemental aspect of some Overshields makes them difficult to gauge and measure.
To begin, most tests were performed using a “base” damage from a consistent source where possible. These were performed at 1083 light (1060 base , +23 Artifact) with Tier 0 resilience armor.
List of some test locations and enemies:
- Minor Taken Hobgoblin – Dreaming City Chamber of Starlight
- Minor Taken Acolyte – Dreaming City Aphelion’s Rest
- Minor Taken Vandal – Dreaming City Aphelion’s Rest
- Greg, Hive Ogre Boss – Titan Cargo Bay 3
- Network Projector Boss Cyclops – Curse of Osiris Story Mission
- Hive Barrier Knight Champion – Moon Hellmouth
- Hive Lunar Scavenger Knight – Moon Hellmouth
- Radiolaria Puddle – Asher Mir IO
- Flame Cauldron – Crown of Sorrows
- Taken Goo – Corrupted Strike
- Taken Echo Knight – Prophecy
- Vex Fanatic – Garden of Salvation
- Loyalist Legionary – Leviathan
- Phogoth – Nightmare Hunt
- Fallen Vandal – EDZ Widow’s Walk
Almost all tests were run with at least 2 sources of damage, and over multiple damage cycles. These were recorded at 2160x1440p 60fps (with some exceptions of verification tests by ABagOfPowder) and then transcribed using Tracker Video Analysis and Modeling Tool. Measurements for most tests were only taken from damage to the “Shield” portion of the Damage bar, as the “Health” portion is smaller and slightly more inconsistent.
This data was then transferred to Excel where it was translated into individual tests and percentages were calculated from the pixel measurement differences. Where appropriate, this was used to calculate resistances or combined resistance information.
Due to the way the Health bar is handled, there is definitely some rounding involved in the rendering. At 2160×1440 resolution, the shield portion of the health bar is 404 pixels wide, meaning a change in damage of 1% over the length of the bar SHOULD be measurable as a 4 pixel difference. In reality there seems to be some additional rounding, or integer math being done in damage calculations, leading to smaller damage sources actually being rounded up.
For Example, Minor resist often measures 9.75% on Thrall melee, but closer to 10% on Hobgoblin snipers. This, coupled with other measurement issues, may mean that some tests are within 1-2% of the actual in game values.
Some Damage Resistance, such as Warlock Nova Bomb, Titan Thundercrash, and Hunter Blade Barrage occur over such a brief period in time that resistance was difficult to test. Environmental damage was often used in these cases, however there is an environmental modifier applied while in super. This value was then used to determine what the “Base” damage resistance was for some of these supers.
In Destiny 2 there has always been a struggle to offer players difficult content that felt fair by challenging. Either players were overleveled for the content available and it was a cakewalk, or the required level for an activity was too high and it was impossible for average players to complete (read: Black Armory forges before the nerf). For Shadowkeep, however, Bungie is going to try to make a change that could add some of that difficulty back without making things impossible.
In part 3 of his Director’s Cut blog post, Destiny 2 director Luke Smith detailed changes coming to power scaling in the game. Where there once was a fairly narrow gap when it comes to damage scaling and damage mitigation with power levels, Bungie is hoping to widen that gap for Shadowkeep.
RELATED: Destiny 2's Trials of the Nine Still Not Returning
How Power Level Scaling Works in Destiny 2
As it stands now, there is a 50-point window for power level scaling. Players that are anywhere between 1 and 50 power level points below the recommended power for an enemy are still capable of dealing damage. At 51 points below, the player will see Immune where their damage numbers should be.
It might not seem like a lot, but that 50 points is also broken up into deltas. For every 5 points that a player gains, they enter the next damage delta and are capable of dealing out more damage and surviving longer. For example, a player at power level 720 deals roughly the same damage as a player at 725, but at 726 they feel a bit stronger. So within that 50 point power level scaling there are about 9 “steps” where the player can see the benefits of their higher power level.
With the release of Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, Bungie is expanding that window to 100 power level points. For starters, this means that Destiny 2 players will be able to attempt content that in Year 1 and Year 2 would have been impossible. If the recommended power level for an enemy is 500 and they are 401, they should still be able to damage and eventually kill it with enough perseverance.
To be clear, though, Bungie promises that this change to power level scaling will not impact the “on level” concept that exists in Destiny 2. Specifically, if a player is at or close to the recommended level for an activity they shouldn’t feel any more or less capable of completing it. The power level scaling increase is meant to remove some of those barriers and hopefully introduce some new challenges for the hardcore.
Playing With Casual Friends Becomes Easier
Perhaps the most beneficial element of the new power level scaling is that it will allow friends with different schedules to play together. By that, we mean a hardcore player who has already reached Destiny 2: Shadowkeep’s power level cap of 900 can play with a more casual friend who is only in the low 800s.
Before, it was hard to help (or “Sherpa”) a friend through a piece of content without it feeling too easy for the higher level player or too hard for the lower level one. It’s unclear how Destiny 2 will balance those experiences, but this 100 power level gap should do well to remove some barriers. And, since Bungie plans to standardize powerful rewards in Shadowkeep, players will have more predictable reward levels. Even players that are at the power level cap should be able to benefit thanks to the power bonus system.
Destiny 2 Difficulty is Coming Back
The other group that should see a benefit from the power level scaling is the challenge running community. These players are constantly trying to bend or break the rules of Destiny 2’s activities in order to accomplish impressive feats. Solo runs through raids, beating bosses using unique mechanics, and speed runs are just a few of the challenges that these types of players create for themselves.
Now, with this new 100-point power level scaling gap, there will be even more opportunities for challenge runs, or just to add a little more difficulty to activities. Players won’t have to look at activities as being impossible if they are 30 points under the recommended power level.
No doubt that activity will be challenging, but that is something that’s been missing from Destiny 2 for a while. It’s one of the reasons that raid teams enjoyed the Contest Modifier on the Crown of Sorrow raid race; it forced everyone to face the same challenge and prevented anyone from over leveling. Now you can make that content challenging right from the start, by attempting it earlier than expected.
Although Bungie hasn’t announced any plans for it, this feels like it could be a precursor to customizing activities based on desired difficulty. Currently, only Nightfall Strikes are capable of imposing limitations on players via the Strike Card, but there is a template available. Admittedly, plenty of people just want to run their missions and strikes and not worry about a big challenge, but others want that element of strategy. Hopefully, this power level scaling change is the first step towards that.
Destiny 2 Power Level Dmg Calculator Free
Destiny 2: Shadowkeepis available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.