There are two answers to “which weapon hits hardest”. Against another Claimant, the weapon is matched to their armour. Against a creature, the weapon is matched to that creature’s row in the archived raw-damage table. Both tables are on this page.

Search a weapon by name to see only the row it swings on, or switch to Armour and search a piece to see every weapon that can come at it.

These are the same numbers as the PvE Damage Table, turned around. There, green meant your armour was holding. Here it means their armour is not: a 1.25× cell is a quarter more damage landing, and a 0.75× cell is your weapon skidding off something built for it.

Three pairs of weapons share a row because the game treats them as the same kind of violence. A Mace swings as an Axe. Crossbow and Shuriken are one line. Longbow and Blowdart are another. Picking between them is a question of reach and rhythm, never of matchup.

Most of the grid is neutral, and that is the point — the matrix is a small number of sharp exceptions rather than a spread of gentle preferences. Seven of the ten rows hit an unarmoured opponent a quarter harder, and the three that do not are the ones built to find a gap: a Spear, a Dagger and a Sling treat bare skin exactly the same as they treat armour.

The Dragon pieces are where the exceptions cluster. A Dragon Shield turns a Spear, a Dagger and a Crossbow bolt — and then lets a plain Iron Sword through a quarter faster than an ordinary shield would. It is the only offhand in the game that a swordsman would rather see. Dragon Scalemail inverts it exactly: the one armour that blunts a Sword and a Staff, and the one a Spear finds easier than anything else on the board.

Against a Breastplate, weight loses. Bare Hands, Spear, Axe and Gauntlet all give up a quarter of their bite; only the Dagger gains, because a Breastplate has nothing to offer against a blade looking for a seam.

Bare Hands hit an unarmoured opponent harder than any weapon does, and lose a quarter against every single piece of armour in the game — the only row on the board with no neutral cells at all except cloth. Training Martial Arts does not move you to a different row; it raises the level of the unarmed attack itself, so the shape of the matchup stays exactly as it is while the number in front of it grows.

Weapon type is part of PvE damage. The archived full matrix gives a Dagger 9.0 raw against a Crawler and an Axe 3.0; against a Frost Jotunn it gives the Dagger 5.5 and the Axe 7.8. Fractara scales every cell by one shared calibration factor so the established Iron Sword-versus-Wolf baseline stays put, then applies weapon level, level gap and tier.

This matrix previews the next combat release. Every creature has its own row and every weapon has its own column. Weapons that share a combat profile still show separately, even when their numbers match. Each cell below is the rounded hit at equal level 10 against a Normal creature.

At equal level 10 against a Normal creature, the live resolver rounds a Dagger to 9 against a Crawler and 5 against a Jotunn; an Axe lands for 3 and 8 respectively. Set the weapon, its level, and what you are hunting below.

The level gap is counted twice, which is worth knowing before you carry an old weapon into new country. The gap between your weapon’s level and the creature’s level feeds a second multiplier on top of the curve, worth up to ±10% per level and clamped between half damage and double. An underlevelled weapon is not merely weaker — it is weaker twice over, and against something fifteen levels above it that penalty is already at the floor.

Attack rating beyond what your gear already supplies adds to this as well, at 3% per point. And an unarmed attack with no Martial Arts behind it sits permanently at level 1 — which is to say at 0.55×, the bottom of the curve, forever.

The creature cell is applied inside the same calculation as everything else here: calibrated raw damage, weapon level, the level gap, then the creature’s tier and any visible damage reduction it carries. The other half of the arithmetic — what creatures hit you for, and how much health they have — is on the Creatures page.