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How the damage model works

Why the weapon at the top of the list is often not the one with the highest attack value.

Tibia does not tell you what a weapon does against a particular creature. It tells you the weapon's attack value, and the creature's resistances live on a wiki page somewhere else. This site puts the two together, and this page explains how it reasons — so you can judge whether to trust the order it gives you.

The model is built from three things: the wikis, which record what every weapon and creature carries; what CipSoft has published about how damage works; and a great many hours of hunting by players who know what these weapons actually feel like at the levels they are used. Where those three disagree, the last one settles it — a figure that looks right on paper and wrong in a spawn is wrong.

How a hit is worked out

A weapon has a physical part and, often, an elemental one. Each is judged against how the creature in front of you handles *that* kind of damage — a creature can shrug off steel and burn easily, or the reverse. The two are added, and then the whole hit is lifted by the fighting skill the weapon grants, which raises the elemental half as much as the physical one.

That is the entire idea, and it is why a Fire Sword does better against something that burns than its attack value suggests: part of what it swings with lands on a weakness. Against something that resists fire, the same sword is carrying dead weight.

Why raw attack misleads

Two weapons with identical attack values are not equally good against anything. The one whose element the creature resists is worse, the one whose element it is weak to is better, and which of those you are holding changes from hunt to hunt. That is the entire reason this site exists.

The extreme case is worth knowing: a resistance of 0% is absolute immunity. No amount of piercing opens it, so an elemental weapon against a creature immune to its element is only its physical half — and a plain weapon with a higher physical attack beats it outright.

Each row also shows the gap to the next weapon down, so you can see whether the top pick is a real upgrade or a rounding difference. = means an exact tie.

Fighting skill

Most weapons grant fighting skill in their own type — "sword fighting +4" — and that skill scales the whole hit, elemental damage included. So between two weapons with the same attack, the one that also grants skill wins, and the ranking accounts for it even though the game never shows you the two side by side.

Some weapons grant more through their Weapon Proficiency tree. Those points are counted only where the level offering them lists no alternative — then every player carrying that weapon has them, so a Soulcutter reads +4 on its page and swings at +5. Skill offered as one perk among two or three is not counted: it costs a perk a damage-chasing player would rather spend elsewhere, so it belongs to some builds and not others.

What a point of skill is *worth* is the part that took the hunting. In game its value depends on how much skill you already have, and the weapon's points ride on top of yours — so the model uses a single weight calibrated for the levels these weapons are really played at, rather than pretending the curve does not exist. Because it applies to every weapon alike, it moves the gaps between them rather than any one weapon's standing.

Elemental piercing

Weapon Proficiency also grants elemental piercing, which raises the target's sensitivity to that element. It does not simply add — the game gives you full value only up to neutral, and the part of the bonus that carries a creature past 100% counts for half:

90% sensitivity  + 20% piercing  ->  105%    (half the bonus wasted)
120% sensitivity + 45% piercing  ->  142.5%  (already past neutral, all of it halved)

Which is why piercing is worth most against a creature that already resists your element, and worth least against one that is already weak to it — the opposite of what most people expect.

Weapons that gain piercing are listed once per proficiency level worth grinding to, because reaching level 6 — let alone 7 — changes which weapon is actually best. A variant shows its proficiency level at the top right of the sprite and an element-coloured dot at the bottom left.

An elemental imbuement converts half a weapon's physical attack into its element. That is already accounted for here, which is why an imbued row and a plain row of the same weapon can rank in different places — sometimes far apart, when the creature has a strong opinion about that element.

Armor penetration

Armor is the one thing in Tibia that reduces a hit by a flat amount rather than a percentage, which is why penetration is treated separately from everything else here. It is worth nothing against a creature wearing none and a great deal against one of the heavily armoured ones — and because the reduction is flat, it costs a small hit proportionally more than a large one.

The model credits penetration conservatively, on purpose. Working out what a point of armor is worth in weapon attack means assuming a fighting skill, and an assumption applied at full strength would re-order the list rather than inform it. Held back, it does what it should: it separates weapons that were otherwise tied, and it never overturns a ranking on the strength of a guess.

Where nobody has recorded a creature's armor — 139 of the 999, and neither wiki has them — a penetrating weapon gets no bonus at all. That under-credits it, rather than crediting it against a number no one has measured.

What this is not

These are estimates, not official numbers. CipSoft does not publish a damage formula, so nobody outside the company has one. What this site has is the wikis' data, the parts CipSoft has explained, and a lot of time spent watching these weapons land — and where that produced a judgement rather than a fact, this page says so.

What it is good for is comparison. Every weapon goes through the same reasoning against the same creature, so the ordering is worth far more than any single number in it — and the ordering is the question you came with.

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