Physical Damage

Physical Damage is the default damage type of every melee weapon and ranged shot in Britannia. Five canonical damage types exist — Physical, Fire, Cold, Poison, Energy — and every successful weapon hit splits the rolled damage across those five buckets according to the weapon's damage-type distribution property. A plain Long Sword from the smithy menu deals 100% Physical; an imbued or runic-crafted Long Sword can be reshaped to 30% Cold + 70% Physical, or any other split totalling 100%. The split is applied after every base-damage multiplier and before the target's Resistances — each bucket of the split is independently reduced by its matching resist before being summed back into the final damage number.

Physical Damage is special among the five types for one reason: it is the default state of every melee swing. Every weapon ships with 100% Physical unless modified by a property, runic crafting bonus, or imbue. The other four damage types only appear when the weapon's split has been explicitly altered — by a runic kit, by Imbuing, or by the rare baseline-different weapons (Bone Harvester, Bone Crusher) that were authored with a non-100%-Physical default.

How the split is applied

The full per-swing flow:

TotalDamage  = Roll × (1 + AllMultipliers) × Slayer × Exceptional   ← see Base_Damage
Phys_share   = TotalDamage × (PhysPct  / 100)
Fire_share   = TotalDamage × (FirePct  / 100)
Cold_share   = TotalDamage × (ColdPct  / 100)
Poison_share = TotalDamage × (PoisPct  / 100)
Energy_share = TotalDamage × (EnergyPct / 100)
                              (PhysPct + FirePct + ColdPct + PoisPct + EnergyPct = 100)

# Each share is independently reduced by the matching resist:
Phys_dealt   = Phys_share   × max(0, 1 − target.PhysResist  / 100)
Fire_dealt   = Fire_share   × max(0, 1 − target.FireResist  / 100)
... (etc)

ActualDamage = Phys_dealt + Fire_dealt + Cold_dealt + Pois_dealt + Energy_dealt

So the split is multiplicative with Resistances on a per-bucket basis — a target with 70% Physical Resist absorbs 70% of the Phys share, regardless of what the other four shares are doing.

Default weapon-type splits

A representative slice of the un-modified weapon roster as it ships from the smithy or fletcher:

The vast majority of weapons sit at the 100% Physical baseline. The exceptions are short — a half-dozen named artifact weapons that ship with a built-in split. Every other split a player encounters is the result of a runic crafting bonus or an Imbuing intensity.

Runic crafting and Imbuing — moving Physical down

Crafting with a Runic Hammer (smithing) or Runic Sewing Kit (tailoring for archery) can roll a non-Physical damage component. The runic tier dictates the maximum component intensity:

For every non-Physical percent the runic adds, Physical is reduced by the same amount. The total always equals 100%.

Imbuing extends this further — every damage type can be imbued onto a weapon (Phys is generally fixed by the source, the four elemental components are imbuable). At GM Imbuing the maximum single-component intensity is +50% per damage type.

Multiple non-Physical components can stack on a single weapon. A high-end imbued bow might be 30% Cold + 30% Energy + 40% Phys, deliberately split to bypass any single high-resist defense.

Why split-damage builds work

The reason runic and imbued weapons reshape damage away from 100% Physical is target Resistance asymmetry — most monsters in the game have widely varying resistances across the five types, and most have higher Phys Resist than the others. A Daemon-tier monster might have 50% Phys / 80% Fire / 25% Cold / 30% Poison / 80% Energy. A 100%-Phys hit lands at 50% effective; a 30%-Phys-30%-Cold-40%-Energy hit lands at:

0.30 × 0.50  +  0.30 × 0.75  +  0.40 × 0.20  =  0.46 (54% effective)

The split-damage build deliberately drops 70% of the swing into the target's lowest resist to maximise effective damage.

This is the canonical pattern for high-end PvM weapons:

Resist Phys — how a target's Physical Resist works

Resistances are stored on every wearer (player and monster) as five separate percentages, each capped at 70% from items and a final +5% from skill / spell sources. The Physical Resist of a player wearing capped armor is 70%, sometimes 75% with the right consumable / spell stack:

Above 70% Phys Resist, the target takes a strict percentage reduction of the Phys share — there is no diminishing-returns curve. A target at 80% Phys Resist takes 20% of the Phys share, a target at 90% takes 10%, and a hypothetical 100% Phys Resist takes 0%. The +5% post-cap from Resisting Spells and similar sources is the canonical "cap-breaker" — pushing 70% to 75% reduces a tank's incoming Phys damage by an additional 16% (5% / 30% remaining).

Special moves and Physical Damage

Special Moves carry the weapon's base damage type through to the special-move effect. Whirlwind Attack on a 100%-Phys weapon does Phys damage to every target in range; the same special on a 30%-Phys-70%-Cold weapon distributes the swing in the same ratio across each target.

The exception is the Necromancy spell-side specials and the Chivalry spell-side specials, which override the weapon's split with the spell's own damage type:

Consecrate Weapon is the canonical "anti-resist" toggle — it inspects the target's five resists, picks the lowest, and converts the weapon's entire damage into that type for the spell's duration. Against a target with 80% Phys / 30% Cold / 80% Fire / 80% Pois / 80% Energy, Consecrate flips the swing to 100% Cold.

Property-based damage components — Hit Spell properties

Several on-hit weapon properties apply elemental damage on top of the weapon's split, not in place of it:

These properties do not modify the weapon's split — they fire as a separate spell-class damage event when their per-swing chance roll succeeds. A weapon with 100% Phys split + Hit Fireball produces both a 100% Phys swing damage and a Hit Fireball Fire-damage event on the same successful hit.

See also

• Damage Types — overview of all five types and their interactions
• Damage Increase — the pre-resist multiplier stack
• Base Damage — the Min / Max weapon roll the damage formula starts from
• Resistances — the per-type defensive percentages a target can stack
• Imbuing — the +50% per-element imbuing intensity that creates split-damage weapons
• Slayer — the post-cap 2× / 3× multiplier (separate from the type split)
• Necromancy — spells that override the weapon's damage type
• Chivalry — the Consecrate Weapon "anti-resist" toggle