Combat mechanics

Level and rank scaling

Three separate systems decide what happens when you fight something above or below your own level. They stack, and they are not equally important.

1. Level offset

damage swing from a level gap

It rises 4% a level then stops dead at four levels. Above your target you multiply by this; below it you divide by it, so the same gap hurts more than it helps.

Outside PvP, the game looks up the level gap in fight_level_offset_damage and applies a multiplier: damage is multiplied when you are higher level, divided when you are lower.

This is a weak lever. The scale caps at +16% from a gap of 4 levels through 20, and any gap beyond 20 falls back to MaxLevelOffsetDamageScale, which is only +10%. Raw level difference matters far less than most players assume.

2. Rank offset

The same idea by rank, from fight_rank_offset_damage. This one is dominant. The per-rank damage scale (divided by 10,000) climbs steeply:

Rank	DamageScale
No Rank	0
Apprentice / Elite / Expert	0.7
Champion	15
Master	95
Paragon	300
Saint	700
Ethereal I / II / III	1,000 / 1,500 / 2,000
Ethereal IV / V / VI	2,500 / 3,000 / 3,500

The gap between two ranks, not the absolute value, sets the multiplier.

3. Combat-rating suppression

A power-score comparison applied on top. It has one notable exemption: the check IsCombatRatingSuppressionEfective returns false when a player already out-ranks the monster — so once you are a full rank above the content, suppression stops applying and you simply steamroll it.

The one that actually hurts

None of the three is the real wall. The elemental base value is: because your Mastery is divided by the defender's base and their RES by yours, fighting up is penalised twice over, and the effect is far larger than a ±16% level offset.

Unlocking matters too — rank suppression only begins to apply from SuppressUnlockRank, which is set to Champion I.