Thorns Damage Capped?

Wicked Feedback
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With no armor, the training dummy does 7 damage. With cloth, it’s doing 5. With all my gear and gems, I have a whopping 72% on shield, 20% on helm, 80% on chest, 80% on legs, and 64% on gloves, adding up to 316% thorns. This does 101 damage to the training dummy. It is definitely unclear how thorns damage is calculated, because 101 damage is way more than 316% of 5 incoming damage. I figured thorns would be relative to the incoming damage. On bosses however, which hit WAY harder, thorns seem to be capping out at 140 damage. I thought the idea of thorns was to do damage by taking damage, but on a boss, you are taking WAY more damage than you reflect back, and on the training dummy it’s the inverse.

On the training dummy, the thistle ring at 25% damage is doing 91 damage. That feels wrong to me, how one ring does as much damage as fully investing in thorns.

How Do Thorns Actually Work?
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These are the results of my experimentation with Thorns.

In the first round of testing I have three armor pieces with 36%, 36% and 32% Thorns. This totals 94% when all three are equipped. My character is lvl 30 with stats 18/17/36/10/10/36/17/23, designed to wear full plate and wield a 2h weapon without being encumbered, and handle all Str and Faith gear at the current level cap. The damage of your equipped weapon seems to have no effect on Thorns, as expected.

At 94% thorns against the training dummy I received 3 damage and reflected 33 damage. Blocking mitigated the damage received but not the damage reflected.
At 36% thorns, with only one armor piece equipped, I took 4 damage and reflected 11 or 12. This suggests that at 100% thorns, I would deal 35 reflected damage, no matter how much damage I took. This also approximately aligns with your value of 316% Thorns dealing 101 reflected damage to the dummy. (Training dummy footage not shown)

I saw the same reflected damage values against all other enemy types I tested, regardless of whether they dealt 34 damage or only 10 to me. Variations appear to be related to the enemy’s defenses. For instance, the enemy who deals fire damage in the following video caused thorns to reflect fire damage, dealing 27 instead of 33. This is likely due to the enemy having some fire resistance (needs verification)

Against enemies who deal slightly larger damage, these results remain consistent.

Certain enemies within the crucible are dealing even more damage to me, but receive the same reflected damage(Not shown, enemies were the armored enemies). Meanwhile other enemies deal more or less damage to themselves, depending on the type of enemy and the type of damage. Again, I believe this is due to their defense values. This ranged enemy dealt more physical damage to itself, while this plagued enemy dealt less plague damage to itself.

Still, in all cases, the thorns damage seems directly linked to the xx% Thorns value, and has no relationship to the amount of damage dealt. Only to the damage type and the enemy’s defenses.

It does not seem correct from the player’s perspective for the reflected damage to be completely independent of the damage of the reflected attack. Frankly, it seems off from a balance perspective to have Thorns damage not scale with anything as the general power level increases.

If the only way to increase reflected damage is to increase the xx% Thorns value, then a lvl 1 character wearing lvl 1 gear with perfect enchantments would deal as much damage as a lvl 30 character with lvl 15 gear and perfect enchantments. Similarly, that lvl 1 character would do the same damage to a danger lvl 25 enemy as the lvl 30 character with their Thorns. This seems unintentional.

Further testing is required to see if levels or stats play into this at all.

1 Like
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yeah it feels like thorns is really strong low level and gets weaker as the lv goes up because its not scaling with enemy damage or health

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At 94% thorns against the training dummy I received 3 damage and reflected 33 damage. Blocking mitigated the damage received but not the damage reflected.
At 36% thorns, with only one armor piece equipped, I took 4 damage and reflected 11 or 12. This suggests that at 100% thorns, I would deal 35 reflected damage

i guess is just lvl.

You are lvl 30.
100% thorns will damage any attacker for your lvl for 30 dmg. No matter of attack dmg, mitigation and other things. Higher/lower lvl enemies will get little more or little less of that. Thats it.

How Do Thorns Actually Work? - #5 by Eranise - tested thorns today. Have a look plz.

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The post you linked does not prove that it’s level based, it only assumes without proof. I was forced, therefore, to find proof myself.

I created a lvl 1 character, wasted a bunch of embers to craft lvl 1 thorns gear, and found evidence that corroborates your claim. However, the level has an unexpected impact on the results. The Thorns damage was less than half, but still a double digit number.

Here are my results on that level 1 character with 84% total Thorns on level 1 gear. 13-14 damage reflected by the training dummy.

Interestingly though, the danger level of the world does have an impact, at least on the damage the training dummy takes from Thorns. In a danger level 25 world, the training dummy took 13-14 Thorns damage at 84% Thorns. In a danger level 3 world, the dummy took 10 Thorns damage from the same level 1 character in the same gear. Nothing changed except which realm I was in, and the thorns damage changed. This suggests that the character level may have some impact, but that it is not the only factor. More testing is required.

I spent 24 embers on this experiment though, and I do not feel like delving further into this rabbit hole until I can farm more.

EDIT: I only just realized that you were the tester in the post you linked. Thank you for your contributions, but I still must assert that my results indicate that Your Level is not the only factor.