Skill tree damage bonuses: setting the record straight

[Ess-Eschas]

Hello all,

 

It’s been brought to my attention that several different posts have been giving some contradictory – and slightly inaccurate – information about the damage bonuses that arise from training to the top tiers of the skill tree. I’ll put a comment up on the strategy central advice thread about this, but I thought this was an important enough issue to flag up that it merited its own thread.

 

When you train to the top tier of the ‘combat’ and ‘magic’ skill trees, one of the perks is an increase in your damage output – physical for the combat tree and magical for the magic tree. This is often reported as a flat increase to your damage by a single, fixed amount (for instance, +2), but that’s not actually the case.

 

To make sure that this damage bonus stays relevant as your party levels up, and adds more damage as your party does more damage on average, this bonus scales discretely with your level!

 

Every sixth level, these bonuses increase by 1. At the start of the game, both bonuses are only +1 (see this yourself with a new game!). When you reach level 6, they increase to +2. For completeness, the bonuses change like this:

 

Level 1: +1
Level 6: +2
Level 12: +3
Level 18: +4

 

This increase keeps on going with increasing level, incidentally, but getting to the next increase at level 24 isn’t hugely practical in Queen’s Wish!

 

In other words, just keep in mind that this bonus changes as you play!

[mikeprichard]

Great info! I'm still waiting for what's likely to be the final patch (1.0.4) before I pull QW from my backlog of games for my first playthrough, but is this information accurately shown in the skill tree tooltips - i.e. does the "+1" change to "+2" at level 6 in that display? If not, would you please ask Jeff to fix the display? (I've already emailed him my third set of suggestions in as many months based on my observations of forum discussions and playthrough videos, and though he's always patient and takes them on board, he's probably getting a little tired of seeing me pop up in his inbox by now!)

[Ess-Eschas]

6 minutes ago, mikeprichard said:

... is this information accurately shown in the skill tree tooltips - i.e. does the "+1" change to "+2" at level 6 in that display?

 

Yes! There's no special need to upgrade the display; everything it shows updates correctly. It's not entirely obvious at first blush that the number changes during gameplay, hence the need for this post, but the number shown on the training screen is always the one relevant to the decision you're making at the time!

[mikeprichard]

Good deal - thanks for pointing this out!

[Lucidus]

Since I am one of the people who (quite unintentionally) contributed to the confusion, I want to thank you for making the correct information available to everyone on the forums.

[Mechalibur]

It's also worth noting that the "Melee" damage bonus is actually a physical damage bonus instead. It applies to bows, but will not apply to melee arcane weapons. The bonus damage from Barracks are similar as well - you don't get alternating bonuses to Melee and Ranged/Magic, you instead get bonuses to physical and magical. As an extra layer of weirdness, Barracks bonuses don't actually alternate between physical and magical - the first one you build gives +1 physical damage, then the 3rd, 5th, and 7th give +1 physical and magical damage. Same end result, but still bizarre.

 

The actual damage bonus you get from tier 4 also appears to be bugged a bit. At level 18, I was seeing "+4" as my bonus, but it was only giving +3 for some reason according my ability/weapon tooltips (I checked by respeccing my talent points and checking the difference from when I had the bonus).

Edited November 14, 2020 by Mechalibur

[Ess-Eschas]

4 hours ago, Mechalibur said:

The actual damage bonus you get from tier 4 also appears to be bugged a bit. At level 18, I was seeing "+4" as my bonus, but it was only giving +3 for some reason according my ability/weapon tooltips (I checked by respeccing my talent points and checking the difference from when I had the bonus).

 

Yes, that’s a known issue. It was actually brought up in the discussions that prompted this thread!

 

For the record, the damage bonuses given for the top tier of the ‘combat’ and ‘magic’ skill trees don’t quite behave as reported. The actual bonus applied to the character is 1 less than the value listed on the training screen. So, for example, if the training screen states that the bonus is +3, the actual bonus applied to your character will be +2.

 

This could be due to a slight mismatch in integer definitions, for example. One figure might start counting from 0, and the other start counting from 1 – hence the difference in 1 between the two values.

 

In any case, Jeff is aware of the problem, but it didn’t quite get reported in time to be fixed for Queen’s Wish 1. However, assuming this sort of perk gets carried over into future games, the problem should be fixed in the sequels!