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How a hunt's damage is worked out

A hunt is not one creature, so its numbers are a weighted mix — and the damage it deals is a worst case, not an average.

Pick a creature and the numbers are about that creature. Pick a hunt and they are about a *mixture* — several creatures in whatever proportion you actually meet them. The figures look identical on the card and they answer slightly different questions, so this page is about the difference.

Kill counts are the weights

A hunt's ranking is its creatures' rankings, weighted by how many of each you kill. A place that is nine tenths one creature is ranked almost entirely on that creature, which is what you want: the weapon that clears the bulk of a spawn is the weapon that clears the spawn.

It also means a rare, tanky, awkwardly-resistant creature does not drag the recommendation around. If you meet six of them an hour among four hundred of something else, they have about the influence they deserve. If a single creature is genuinely the problem, pick it on its own — that is what the creature view is for.

Coverage, and why the card admits it

Not every creature has everything recorded. Where some part of a hunt is missing data, the card says what share of the hunt the figure is actually based on rather than quietly averaging what it has. A number built on 60% of a spawn is worth reading differently from one built on all of it, and you cannot tell the two apart unless it says.

The damage it deals is a worst case in one turn

The second strip — what the hunt hits *you* for — is deliberately not an average. It is the top of each ability's range, summed within an element, because a creature can land more than one thing in the same turn: a Dragon Lord can put a fireball and a fire wave on you together, and the number that matters when you are deciding what to wear is the turn that could kill you.

So expect it to read high. It is a ceiling, not a typical hit, and reading it as a typical hit is the reason people conclude the figures are wrong.

For a hunt, those ceilings are weighted by the mix exactly as the ranking is — so a rare creature's enormous spike does not dominate the advice for a spawn you spend your time elsewhere in.

Where nothing is recorded at all, the strip says so instead of drawing seven empty bars. Unrecorded is not zero, and about a fifth of the creature set is in that state, most of it scenery nobody has bothered to measure.

Life drain and mana drain are not elements here

Both appear in the same sources as the elemental damage, and neither is listed as an element on this site. The reason is practical rather than theoretical: no protective imbuement answers them. Putting them in a strip whose whole purpose is to name the imbuement to go and buy would be offering advice that does not exist.

They are flagged as effects instead, in the icons above the card, where they can point at something you can actually do — a trinket, or a charm that turns the drain into something useful.

Where these numbers come from

The kill counts are read from real recorded sessions rather than estimated, so the mix is one somebody actually got. The creatures' own figures are the wikis', the way damage combines is what CipSoft has published, and the judgements in between — which figure to prefer where two sources disagree, what counts as one turn — come from hours of hunting. Your own hour will differ: spawn, level, gear and luck move all of it.

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