Stat based or stat-scaling damage

[satani]

Well, i have here the Desert Marauder and am struggling to equip him properly. He has pretty high ATK, but his primary attack states scaling based on Special.
Is it like the Sentinels (visions & mummy eddie or allied bomber boy, allied general and soulles demon) where you simply ignore all other stats and pack him with life to get damage?
In that case would it be useful to pack my desert marauder with mostly yellow talismans. I currently have the invisibility talismans equipped (1 will, 2 onslaught), and am thinking about dropping attack talismans for a 2x booster set to gain more special stat.

[konstifik]

Well, i have here the Desert Marauder and am struggling to equip him properly. He has pretty high ATK, but his primary attack states scaling based on Special.
Is it like the Sentinels (visions & mummy eddie or allied bomber boy, allied general and soulles demon) where you simply ignore all other stats and pack him with life to get damage?
In that case would it be useful to pack my desert marauder with mostly yellow talismans. I currently have the invisibility talismans equipped (1 will, 2 onslaught), and am thinking about dropping attack talismans for a 2x booster set to gain more special stat.

His attack should scale of both ATK (if he does physical damage) and Special, so you might want to play around with different talismans to see what works best for him.

[Kardas]

Hate to break it to you, but with your sentinel examples, they need both HP and the stat of the original attack. Trust me, I was testing Mummy Ed with 2 green Talismans, and he did significantly more damage with Ward Talismans (which increase MAGIC) than with Overwhelming. Similarly, Alliance General prefers the Overwhelming green subtype if you want to get the most damage out of him.

I don't have the Desert Marauder though, so I can't tell you if you're better off going full yellow (just make sure you use Will) or adding in some reds.

[satani]

well, before i've had:
3x invisibility (2x onslaught 1x bulwark) - i know it's kind of stupid, but his passive, combined with the invisibility effect works pretty often and i wanted to try the effect), 2x burning and 1 green
Now i changed 1 green and one of the burning talismans (all three in mid 3-4*) to my 5*maxxed booster will set from my soldier eddie (as i don't use him anymore), this way he gains life, special and atk) Tried him around in LOL VII and he does better damage than before.
So i stick around with this and hope to get 3 will invisibility talismans. I could have used thief talisman, because i'm swimming in any kind of these, but they work better on people who do multiple hits of damage (gunner golden son is may favourite for these), 1 hit - 1 finisher.

[Aristo4]

never tested a desert Marauder, and the only thing I heard about him was this :

'''' Just ran a couple of game of death's and even with these 4* talis, the assassin child got hit with 8-9000, basic with crit hit and the same for power attack. Less with no class advantage off course. No skill shards btw''''

This was tex-0775 back in the end of October....anyway i'd go 4 strength fierce,2 boost will as usual

I STILL wanna try him

[Kulimar]

I think you should still focus on attack, but just want to get as many Special sub-stats as possible.

[aur0ra85]

i have one of these. Sadly I don't have talismans for him. Gotten pretty salty about this issue ->to the point of fuming today while I picked up the game for the first time in about 2 weeks.
Anyway, a bit about stat scaling:
All characters either scale attack (physical damage), or magic (magic damage), or both (in the case of true damage). In addition some characters scale special, max HP, and defence to name a few. I cannot completely calculate how this truly effects damage output, as we have no idea at this time how MR and defence lowers the damage of your hit. However true damage is very simple to calculate and quantify, it is merely the sum of attack and magic multiplied by a modifier (0.49 I calculated a few updates ago for my pryo soldier) so:
(attack + magic) x (modifier 0.49) = damage produced.
I suspect this modifier changes based on single target or Aoe damage, and may or may not vary for individual characters.
Which leads me into physical and magic damage: these types of damage may or may not have a modifier, but the attack or magic stat only, should translate directly into damage produced. However due to the unknown effect from enemy defence, producing consistent damage to to calculate the formula has been elusive. Clearly when I do 10k in damage to a character on normal in allied kingdom, and the same character does 1.5k in damage on underworld madness, something is amiss with the effect of the defence and MR stat and we just don't know how it works exactly.
I digress.
I have a theory about characters that scale special, max HP, and defence: the the formula used to calculate their damage output is again simple in nature (ie Attack + special, or attack + 1% of Max Base HP, or attack + defence). For all intents and purposes this "extra" stat scaling produces extra damage on top of the attack stat. This can be witnessed by changing talisman sets on a character that does this extra stat scaling like the allied general. No matter how many green talismans you seem to put on, he does not appear to do much more damage, same with the red bat, etc. I'm positive the extra stat scaling is just an addition equation. If you have a wickerman I believe it's even obvious on his basic attack which seems to do 2 hits, the first being the "attack scaling hit" and the second being the "defence scaling hit" (I'm sure this 2 hits is a bug). And I'm also positive that the max HP stat scaling only takes into account the base HP stat unmodified from talisman bonuses. So an allied general with 12k HP does an extra 120 damage based on 1% of his base HP, even one of the devs tuning posts seemed to confirm this as it was mentioned I believe one character was changed from scaling 1% of HP to 8% for a buff. Look in the change logs for more info. Therefore if we use wickerman as an example, guardian fierce talismans should produce the most damage as compared to strength or iron (the simple equation theory means attack + defence =damage output), and therefore guardian sets scale 20% of the defence stat, and iron talismans scale 15% of the defence stat.

One of the really big issues as to why this is all a mystery is testing all these stat bonuses and modifiers and understanding how that translate into damage output for particular characters, is directly due to the lack of high level talismans you can possess, and therefore test. Complicating the matter is the devs have never released this information and have clearly left ambiguous character skill descriptions for us to read.

[Arcturus]

...words...

I agree a lot of this, particularly how frustrating it is not knowing how the scaling works (or exactly how defense/MR work), and class advantage complicates that, too. But to one of your later points, you don't need level 50 talismans to test - just 4* level 40s are much easier to come by and would suffice for testing (to a lesser extent 3*, but with the lower stat boost the effects would be harder to see).

[satani]

I've tested around a bit, and found out:

Abilities that say "damage increases BASED on STAT" (for example DEF for Gunner Corrupt Rescuer and Warrior Wicker Man) IGNORE any other stat like atk for physical damage! Increasing ATK does NOT increase the physical damage)

So you can peacefully equip them for example with the freezing set (even though, they have Magic and no atk, yet MUST have DEF) and they still do the same (based on def stats of the Iron or other talismans you had before) damage. I can confirm that! Now my Gunner CR runs with a freezing set.

Next thing i'm trying to figure out is, if double'd talismans effects activate, or only one is active. (Like only one effect, not double'd when playing with 2 nodmads, for example).
So i will be checking, if 4 or 6x, for example the life-talismans will give you 30% or 45% more life OR "only" + 15% off stat before and another 15% of that OR yet only ONE 15% is triggered. (i guess someone else has already figured it out.)

[Arcturus]

I've tested around a bit, and found out:

Abilities that say "damage increases BASED on STAT" (for example DEF for Gunner Corrupt Rescuer and Warrior Wicker Man) IGNORE any other stat like atk for physical damage! Increasing ATK does NOT increase the physical damage)

So you can peacefully equip them for example with the freezing set (even though, they have Magic and no atk, yet MUST have DEF) and they still do the same (based on def stats of the Iron or other talismans you had before) damage. I can confirm that! Now my Gunner CR runs with a freezing set.

This is wrong. I can't promise that different characters don't behave differently, but for the handful I've tested (including the Gunner Corrupt Rescuer named above), damage increases with both the the listed star and the base stat. Also, this has been confirmed by the devs. For example, the Rescuer does more damage with a set of Guardian Fierce than a set of Iron Fierce.