What is base damage?

[Knoweyedear]

     Many dots, like fire and slash do 50% of a weapons base damage.  What's confusing to me is what a weapons base damage is supposed to be.  Take the Tonkor for instance, it has, with out any mods, some physical and blast damage.  The Tonkor also has 2 stages to it's attack, a projectile phase and a explosion/blase phase.

Is the stats the weapon has with out mods the base damage?  

Can I increase the "base damage" stat with serration?

Is the base damage only the physical damage? (ie. the blast damage on the Tonkor is not part of it's base damage stat)  

If the blast damage is part of the base damage and serration can increase that base damage, can a fire and ice mods also increase the  base damage due to the blast damage being already part of said base stat set.  

If i'm using a multiple type attack like a shotgun or Kulstar and only some of the projectiles or bomblets hit does the base damage come from the individual pallets or bomblets base damage or the total weapons damage. 

What would be the base damage for a charged weapon?  Would it always follow the type of attack you choose in calculating the base damage stat used for dots.

 

 

I'm sorry if this question has been answered before but I've been unable to find any satisfactory answers anywhere.  Please help this noob!

[Xzorn]

Base Damage is your weapon's listed Damage type before mods are added.

Base Damage can be increased by mods like Serration, Rifle Amp, Hornet Strike and Heavy Caliber. Any Elemental or Damage specific mods like +%Slash will calculate their bonus damage based on your modified Base Damage but they will not be considered your base damage.

Base Damage can be physical or elemental. When it's elemental it functions similarly to physical except if you were to combine something such as Toxic with Heat. Your resulting Gas proc will calculate the Base Toxic damage and not the Heat mods you've added to make the damage type Gas. Gas also happens to take into consideration other Toxic mods you've added. Also a gas proc does not ignore armor. It will not consider armor when calculating the  proc damage but the resulting proc will still be reduced by armor. Only Finisher damage ignores armor, such as Bleed status from Slash damage.

Some weapons are calculated differently on the UI than others  Shotguns for instant show their total damage per shot however the damage used to calculate status effects is for each pellet. So if a shotgun like Tigris Prime has 8 pellets per shot and does 1560 damage per shot. Your Stats effects will use ( 1560 / 8 ) = 195 before any mods and it will roll status chance for each pellet not each shot. Other weapons like Torrid show their damage as 500 which is a combination of the initial explosion damage and the resulting DoT left after the explosion.

Charge attacks have their own base damage or damage multiplier. They function the same as normal Base damage it's simply a higher number that all mods and effects work off. Any status effect that functions off base damage will consider charge multipliers, crit multipliers and stealth multipliers(for melee).

If you have a weapon which does 500 Slash Damage 200 Impact and 300 Puncture. It's base damage is 1,000. Elemental mods will be added based on this total value and status effects like bleed will use it to calculate their proc damage. In this case a non-crit Slash proc would yield 2,450 Finisher damage over 7 tick for 350 each.

Edited December 27, 2016 by Xzorn

[EvilKam]

base damage should be the damage listed for an unmodded weapon.  A weapon with 10 impact, 10 slash, and 50 blast should have a base damage of 70.  Then Serration/point strike/hornet strike comes next to give you an "improved base damage"

I had no idea that the tonkor did any projectile damage.  In this case, I don't know, but instinct is to say that the explosion is what inflicts the base damage.  Serration of course modifies this, so does heavy caliber.

 

[Bouldershoulder]

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_2.0

[Magnar21]

Base damage refers to the damage of a weapon prior to resistances and weaknesses are applied. Status effects are based off of this base weapon damage, after critical hits and mods are applied (meaning, +damage mods like Serration, and +elemental mods like Heated Charge), but before things like armor come into play. This makes Slash and Gas status effects extremely effective against groups of armored enemies, since the status effect ignores armor, even if the initial hit is affected by it.

Now, if we want to be completely accurate, base damage would refer to the unmodded values of a weapon, but when we're talking about base damage and status, it just refers to the "true damage" of your weapon, that is, before enemy resistance and weaknesses come into play.

[Knoweyedear]

Wow. so let's say I crit a non armored target for something around 100k and apply a status of slash, would that status damage be something around 50k?

If I hit the same target for a non crit of 10k and got another slash proc that would be something around damage over time 5k?

 

[Magnar21]

23 hours ago, Knoweyedear said:

Wow. so let's say I crit a non armored target for something around 100k and apply a status of slash, would that status damage be something around 50k?

If I hit the same target for a non crit of 10k and got another slash proc that would be something around damage over time 5k?

 

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Status_Effect

 

 

lol, something like that. Slash actually deals 35% of the base damage each second for 7 ticks iirc. Base damage in general is really confusing, since the wiki and ingame sources of info seem to clash when it comes to definitions of "base damage".

Edited December 28, 2016 by Magnar21