Weapon and item power
From the Polandball Go Wiki
In PvP and alliance war duels, an item does two things. Its attack powers the Weapon move, and its defense adds to the ball's Protection. Nothing else on the item counts: effect lines like Poison, unexhaust or double damage only work in raids. This page works through both numbers with the game's published formulas.
1 The Weapon move#
A ball with an item can pick Weapon instead of Attack. It hits for the ball's Attack times 1 plus its weapon power, and:
- It hits with the item's resonance type, or the ball's own type if the item has none.
- It goes through a Block for half damage, which the game calls a Guard Break.
- It lands after every Attack in the round, the faster ball's first.
- Each ball gets two charges a duel. They never come back.
A ball with no item has no Weapon at all. Any item gives one, even an item with 0 attack: Sandspire Crown ✦✦✦ (0 attack, 3,000 defense) still gives its holder a Balance Weapon hit worth 1.35 times its Attack.
2 Weapon power#
Weapon power is built from three pieces:
- A floor of 0.35 that every item gets.
- The item's attack, put through a scale that rises steeply up to 4,000 and then flattens.
- The ball's Soft Power, which decides how much of that scale the ball gets: half of it at Soft Power 0, all of it at Soft Power 100.
Written out, weapon power is 0.35 + 0.65 × (item scale) × (0.5 + 0.5 × Soft Power / 100). The item scale is 0.8 × attack / 4,000 up to 4,000 attack, and above that 0.8 + 0.2 × (1 − 4,000 / attack).
3 The falloff past 4,000#
The item scale is the reason a 20,000 attack item isn't five times better than a 4,000 one. Here is the scale and the weapon power it gives at Soft Power 50 and 100:
- 1,000 attack: scale 0.20. Weapon power 0.45 at Soft Power 50, 0.48 at 100.
- 2,000 attack: scale 0.40. 0.55 and 0.61.
- 4,000 attack: scale 0.80. 0.74 and 0.87.
- 8,000 attack: scale 0.90. 0.79 and 0.94.
- 20,000 attack: scale 0.96. 0.82 and 0.97.
The first 4,000 attack takes the scale from 0 to 0.80. The next 16,000 add only 0.16 more. Past 4,000 an item's attack barely moves its Weapon, and no item can push weapon power past 1.0, so a Weapon hit tops out just under twice the ball's Attack.
4 Soft Power#
Soft Power only matters on a ball with an item, and only through the Weapon. At its strongest it adds about a sixth to a Weapon hit: with Staff of Incandescence ✦✦✦ (5,000 attack), weapon power runs from 0.62 at Soft Power 0 to 0.90 at Soft Power 100. That's the gap between a Weapon worth 1.62 Attacks and one worth 1.90, on a move used twice a duel.
The game's rules also have steps that would give a low Soft Power ball one charge fewer and a high Soft Power ball one more. Both are switched off, so every item holder gets exactly two charges whatever its Soft Power.
5 Protection and the 60% cap#
An item's defense goes into Protection, a shield that takes damage before HP and never comes back once spent. A ball's Protection is:
- From the ball: 20% of its CP times Economy out of 100.
- From the item: half the item's defense, times the ball's Economy factor, which runs from 0.70 at Economy 0 to 1.30 at Economy 100.
- Capped at 60% of the ball's max HP.
The cap is what stops a huge-defense item from making a ball unkillable, and it's reached sooner than you'd think. See Country stats for the HP and Economy formulas.
6 A worked comparison#
Take a ball at 7,500 CP with 50 in Military, Population and Economy, and 75 in Soft Power. Its Attack is 3,000, its max HP 7,500, and its own shield 750. Its Protection cap is 4,500. Here is what five items do for it:
- Iron Sword ✦ (750 attack, 150 defense): Weapon hit 4,306. Protection 825.
- Inkstained Pages ✦✦✦ (4,000 / 3,000): Weapon hit 5,415. Protection 2,250.
- Shadowscript Brush ✦✦✦✦ (8,000 / 8,000): Weapon hit 5,586. Protection 4,750 before the cap, so 4,500.
- Glorious Mace ✦✦✦✦ (20,000 / 0): Weapon hit 5,688. Protection 750.
- Glorious Sword ✦✦✦✦ (10,000 / 10,000): Weapon hit 5,620. Protection 4,500, capped.
Going from Inkstained Pages to Glorious Mace, five times the attack, adds 273 to each Weapon hit, about 5%. Going from the Mace to the Sword gives up 68 per Weapon hit and gains 3,750 Protection, half of the ball's HP again as a shield. In a duel, the Sword is the far stronger item with half the Mace's attack.
The cap also means extra defense is wasted past a point. For this ball, any item with 7,500 defense or more fills the cap, so Shadowscript Brush's 8,000 and Glorious Shield's 20,000 give it the same Protection. A ball with high Economy and low Population hits the cap sooner, since its own shield is bigger and its max HP smaller.
7 Resonance and Weapon typing#
The Weapon's type is the item's, so an item can give a ball a second type of hit. A Global Dominion British Empire attacks with Cosmic, but with Staff of Incandescence its Weapon is Light. In one recorded duel against a Cosmic and Balance United Nations, its Attack hit for 3,482 and its Light Weapon, boosted 12% by the chart, for 7,288, more than twice as much.
The same goes against you. A Weapon is typed against the defender like any other hit, so a resisted resonance can make a Weapon worse than a plain Attack would have been on a strong matchup. See Types and matchups.
8 Using the charges#
- Into a Block. A Weapon fired into a Block still lands half, and the Block gives the blocker no Momentum. Since a ball can't Block two rounds running, a plain Attack the round after their Block can't be stopped either.
- For the KO. A Weapon lands after the round's Attacks, so it can finish a ball that an Attack has already worn down.
- Don't save them. Charges left at the end of a duel are simply lost.
9 In raids#
Raids use items differently: the item's attack is added to each hit, typed by its resonance, and its effect line applies. None of the duel figures on this page carry over to raids. See Items, tiers and resonance and Item effects.
10 On polbielytics#
Items lists every item's attack, defense and resonance, and each item has its own page with the Mymic that drops it.