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How a hunt's damage is worked out

A hunt is a weighted mix — and what it deals you 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, in whatever proportion you actually meet them. The figures look identical on the card and answer slightly different questions.

Kill counts are the weights

A hunt's ranking is its creatures' rankings, weighted by how many of each you kill. So a rare, tanky, awkwardly-resistant creature does not drag the recommendation around — and if one is genuinely the problem, pick it on its own.

Where part of a hunt has no data, the card says what share of the hunt the figure is based on rather than quietly averaging what it has.

What it deals you is a ceiling

The second strip is the top of each ability's range, summed within an element — a creature can land more than one thing in a turn, and a Dragon Lord putting a fireball and a fire wave on you together is the turn that decides what you wear. Expect it to read high. It is not a typical hit, and reading it as one is why people conclude the figures are wrong.

Those ceilings are weighted by the mix exactly as the ranking is. Where nothing is recorded, 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.

Life drain and mana drain are not elements here

No protective imbuement answers either. A strip whose whole job is to name the imbuement to go and buy would be offering advice that does not exist, so both are flagged as effect badges in the corner of the card instead — where they can point at a trinket, or a charm that turns the drain into something useful.

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