Damage type is an important gameplay mechanic of Dark Souls 3. Damage is divided into two groups Elemental and Physical. Please see Status Effects for information on abnormal statuses that can be inflicted on players and enemies.
All damage types are reflected in your AR (Attack Rating), which shows an average damage that the player may inflict on a target. However several other things are taken into account to calculate actual dealt damage:
- Weakness/Resistance/Immunity to specific type of damage (more informations on pages with specfic type of damage);
- Type of attack (strong/weak/critical strike/weapon art);
- Hitting weak spots
Elemental damage in DKS3
Magic Damage
- Effective against: Armoured enemies (Knights, etc.)
- Ineffective against: Magic-oriented enemies
- Protective items: Magic Stoneplate Ring, Speckled Stoneplate Ring, Blue Bug Pellet
Fire Damage
- Effective against: Unarmoured enemies
- Ineffective against: Demons, Wyverns, Man-serpents, heavily-armoured enemies
- Protective items: Flame Stoneplate Ring, Speckled Stoneplate Ring, Red Bug Pellet
- Note: Yhorm the Giant and Smouldering Rotten Flesh are immune to Fire. This is an unique attribute amongst elemental-type damages.
Lightning Damage
- Effective against: Wyverns, Man-serpents, unarmoured enemies
- Ineffective against: Skeletons
- Protective items: Thunder Stoneplate Ring, Speckled Stoneplate Ring, Yellow Bug Pellet
Dark Damage
- Effective against: Non-Abyssal enemies
- Ineffective against: Hollow, Abyssal
- Protective items: Dark Stoneplate Ring, Speckled Stoneplate Ring, Black Bug Pellet
Physical damage
Standard Damage
- Effective against: Fragile enemies
- Ineffective against: Knights
- Protective items: Ring of Steel Protection
Strike Damage
- Effective against: Skeletons, Armoured enemies
- Ineffective against: Wyverns
- Protective items: Ring of Steel Protection
Slash damage
- Effective against: Unarmoured enemies
- Ineffective against: Armoured enemies
- Protective items: Ring of Steel Protection
Thrust Damage
- Effective against: Wyverns
- Ineffective against: Knights
- Protective items: Ring of Steel Protection
Notes
- If player does not meet the requirements, he still can use such weapon, but will deal lower damage and in case of few weapons won't be able to use weapon art.
- The status bars are represented inconsistently still: the first segment stops at 33, the second at 103, the third at 300 and the final one at 500, still the your values can go further. This law applies for every status.
Anonymous
- Anonymous
Dark souls games sux big time in doing elemental damages. Enemies who are weak or resistance to x-elements are all over the place. It's just randomly place x-enemy weak to x-damage etc... nothing makes sense.
- Anonymous
Problem is, the Damage types don’t work properly, especially PvP.
For instance, while wearing Exile hp, Gundyr’s cp, Thorn ap, and Exile lp, I was still wrecked by a whip. If the Damage types worked as one would think, someone using a whip against armor should suffer Damage penalties, despite what element they might have it buffed with.
Also, how is it that I can be out-hyper-armored while wearing above mentioned armor against someone using “gowns”?
The weapon shouldn’t be the hyper-armor. What a Fn’ joke
- Anonymous
I'd like the elemental damage to have status effects, it would make the game a lot more interesting and replayable (please modders).
For example: fire damage would build up "charred" status effect. Charred: 1 tick per second, 10% of enemy's total health per tick, -35% defense against physical damage, lasts 4 seconds.
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Do certain spells have damage types? For example; Lifehunt Scythe doing slash damage, Boulder Heave doing strike damage, Lightning Arrow doing thrust, etc...
- Anonymous
the gru are not immune to fire and ill test yorm later tonight but yea the gru i actually kill with flame pyromancies not the poison or boulder heave or sacred flame
i have a question what kinda damage do dragon weapons and the storm curved sword do ?
- Anonymous
How much extra damage do we get if we exploit an enemy weakness? For example Strike against great crab
- Anonymous
Does anyone know (or know how to find) which physical damage type is most popular? I.E. it seems like there are more enemies weak to thrust damage than there are to strike damage, but then the quantity of those enemies weak to strike outnumber those weak to thrust (you'll find more knights in the game than dragons).
- Anonymous
Magic is only good against one type of enemy while the other damage types have a whole list, put some respect on my name Miyazaki! Lol!
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Enlighten me anons, because while everyone is whining about split damage, as far as I know, it often can be a good thing. If every damage type you deal goes through it's respective absorption meter of opponent's armour, then when you're using, let's say, 100 physical dmg and 100 lightning dmg dealing weapon, and enemy in metal trash can on his head absorbs more phys than light type, an 200 phys dmg weapon would be much worse. Am I missing something? Thanks.
- Anonymous
There should really be listings of what resistances scale with what stats here, since it's useful for deciding upon buffs and damage types in PvP and since some of the sub-pages are actually wrong anyway. For those who are curious, the defense/stat paired scalings are: Fire = strength, Lightning = endurance, Magic = intelligence, Dark = faith, Physical = vitality. All these resistances impart a flat reduction to that type of damage. This is why fire buffs are generally less effective in PvP (strength in the 40-70 range is fairly common which can really nerf a fire buff), why buffs are more effective against dex builds (high dex does very little for any resistance increases), and why high vitality with high physical absorption armor can tank so much physical damage (large flat reduction of physical damage and then high % reduction of what's left from armor absorption).
- Anonymous
"Fire damage is an only elemental damage, which has directly killable enemy with immunity to that element."
Uh...what does this mean?
- Anonymous
But what's good against what? All I know is lightning is good against dragons, fire against beasts(???) And magic against armored(??????)
Dark damage be like:
yo I just got access to dark scaling weapons, cant wait to try them out
Aldritch: Resistant
Dragon Slayer Armour: Resistant
Prices: Resistant
Great game design, love to see it
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