Zelda LIES about its damage numbers in Tears of the Kingdom

The weapon damage numbers are not what they say they are in Tears of the Kingdom...here's how Spears and 2h weapons are impacted by these hidden altercations!

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-- RESOURCES --
WEAPON DAMAGE CALCULATOR (make a copy so you can use!)
Tears of the Kingdom Data sheet - you can find all the base weapon stats here (HEAVY SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING)
Credits to Echocolat for these resources/research!!

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[Croton]

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this, but these numbers do NOT represent the DPS of a weapon, as that varies greatly between normal/charged and flurry attacks amongst many other factors! DPS can only be measured in games when tested against an single, unretaliating "dummy", which is far from what any Zelda combat is
All all of the weapon/armor numbers in this game represent a stat - not a theory

[SpaceRider]

The greatest loss out of this whole ordeal was the ability to see health numbers with armor

[clairebun]

I just realized there's an important reason why this may have been done. Fused materials add the same amount of "power" to a spear as a two handed weapon, but if it was a flat damage amount to each, then spears would become disproportionately powerful due to their higher attack speed. The visual indicator may suggest that fused materials are affected by the hidden multipliers, scaling fuse damage up for two handed weapons and down for spears.

[SaotomeLuna]

Little editing compliment: I really liked that during the brief discussion about rounding, the spear icon had durability up (because they round up) and the greatsword icon had increased throw distance (which looks like a ROUNDED down arrow)

Very neat little detail!

[whatthebeardoin]

Spears are still my favorite weapon type, low damage is just balanced by how quickly I can dodge out of attacks or how much further I can engage larger targets without worrying about getting hit by something that isn't fully visible on the camera

[jlco]

I am curious how well these numbers line up with DPS. If they line up pretty well, then that actually makes the "fake" numbers quite useful, as long as you know what they represent.
That said, it's a little odd for stuff like mounting Lynels, where all weapons have the same attack speed.

[Dharengo]

This fixes two problems:

One is, in BotW people would pass over spears because of their incredibly low number even though their DPS is on par.

Two is, if left as is, spears would be disproportionately affected by the Fuse system.

[matoikazamaki]

I miss the HP showing feature, it was great to figure the numbers on my own on my playthrough.

Given how many multipliers there are in this game it would have been incredible

[Ninjaananas]

I noticed that the number balancing of the weapon types is different in this game. I suppose they wanted to make it more like damage by time unit and adjust for attack speed.

[HS-mnjc]

I honestly prefer the way they handled this system this time around. I saw so many players online in BOTW basically completely ignore spears because they were “weaker” even though realistically their DPS was much HIGHER than swords and two-handed weapons. Same thing with the two-handed weapons; their DPS was much lower, but because of their massive shown damage values, I saw a lot of players tend to gravitate towards them exclusively.

Now, I see those same players online using a healthy balance of all three main weapon types, which is really awesome and provides a better overall playing experience where these players don’t feel frustrated for getting a spear as a reward over a two-handed weapon, and are more willing to attach different monster parts to any type of weapon, not just their “strongest” ones (the two-handed weapons).

I am definitely curious how the fusions work with shields though, hoping to see a video on that soon! Loving the content man!

[qarsiseer]

The most important takeaway from the formulas is the developers balanced fuse based on weapon type. If you fuse a White-Maned Lynel Mace Horn (+40 damage) to a spear it adds only 75% of that to the base damage (actually +30 damage). If you fuse the same thing to a two handed weapon it gives an extra 5% on top (actually +42 damage). One handed weapon damage is accurately reflected on screen.

I understand wanting to display the fuse damage bonus without the modifiers. I don't get lying about the base damage on the display in the way they did, since it makes the damage MORE inaccurate not less. It could reflect the difference in damage per second, but frankly just giving the unmodified numbers does that just fine since the majority of weapon damage comes from the fused material. Really strange choices.

[Platoqp]

Interesting, for me the opposite to the intention has happened. I stopped using spear because they did so much less damage per hit than I felt it should do. Now i know why!

[pompelmsus]

I think the developers did this to estimate the damage per Dt where DeltaT is the time for one single hit of one-handed weapons, so in the same Dt, you deal more damage with a spear because has a faster hit rate

eg (in 100 seconds, let's say you attack 100 times with a one-handed, 95 times with a two-handed and 125 with a spear)

[CrimsonMoonM]

I noticed this during the Mucktorock boss fight where one of my two-handers dealt more damage than my other weapons despite having a lower attack stat.

[Rascalli]

Babe wake up, new croton video dropped

[wesnohathas]

I'm pretty certain this system was implemented to balance fusions, since spears would be overpowered and two-handed weapons would be more of a burden if the additive damage was the same for all weapon types. Though I still would've preferred true damage be shown for weapons and fused materials.

[catz_ee]

I think it makes more sense if the calculations run backwards from how you did them. The shown number in menus is the raw attack, which is the weapon's base damage plus the fuse value of any materials on it. Then that's multiplied by a hidden scalar to produce a balanced true damage based on the weapon type. This is so the materials can have a consistent fuse value without making spears overpowered and two handed weapons irrelevant.

[nicdick]

this makes sense, since fuse damage increases damage by a flat amount, faster weapons like spears would have their dps increase more than claymores. this is their way of balancing weapons ig

[jasongreene]

Slightly unrelated but I was curious since the appearances of monsters' horns and the way the different monster types attack with said horns seem to correlate with each weapon type (Bokos look like spear heads and they ram at you, , lizals look like blades and they swing their heads at you, , etc) do you get some sort of a bonus for fusing them to that weapon type? As far as I can tell it just adds the same amount of damage to everything but I thought that would be kinda neat if it worked like that

[jumponeverything]

Very glad this is the case, was thinking with the way fusing works spears would always be the best choice since they attack so much faster