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Damage is the amount of health or shield lost when a target is hit by bullets, grenades, melee attacks, or Action Skill attacks.

In Borderlands, there are five main damage types: physical, incendiary, corrosive, shock, and explosive. Borderlands 2 introduces a sixth damage type, slag, while Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel features cryo damage instead. Borderlands 3 continues with the same damage types as the Pre-Sequel, and adds radiation damage.

Non-elemental weapons simply inflict the base damage listed on the weapon's item card. An elemental gun will first inflict the listed base damage of the gun, modifying that damage by the element's effectiveness against the target type, then possibly damage the target again with a separate burst of elemental damage. Most elemental weapons have reduced base damage.

## Shield

Main article: Shield

## Armor

Armor reduces damage taken by a multiplicative factor. The degree of damage reduction depends on the body part hit and the degree of armor at that part.

Some armored enemies, such as Lance Defenders, can eliminate 100% of damage taken against areas such as their shields. Other enemies, such as spiderants, have carapaces that offer only partial damage reduction, typically on the order of 75%. All armored enemies have some vulnerable point, and most can be stunned or goaded into revealing that vulnerable point in some fashion.

## Elemental Damage

Main article: Elemental Damage

## Critical Hits

Main article: Critical hit

Critical hits further increase the damage inflicted on the enemy. Different enemies will offer different targets (e.g. head, mouth, eye, abdomen) for critical hits, and may suffer different degrees of critical damage as some enemies are quite vulnerable to critical hits. The bonus can be further enhanced by weapon properties (e.g. Jakobs Unforgiven or Jakobs Bessie) and skills (e.g. Lilith's Slayer or Mordecai's Deadly).

## Notes

• Characters will always take 100% of a weapon's listed damage and cannot sustain critical hits, regardless of whether the weapon is wielded by an enemy AI or another player.
• In Borderlands 2, any damage dealt which exceeds 99,999 will be displayed in thousands, with a corresponding red "K" shown with the damage dealt. For instance, if 150,000 damage is dealt, 150K will be displayed.
• In Borderlands 2, as a gimmick, miniscule damage (1-3) is dealt each time the player bounces on an enemy.

## Borderlands

### Enemy level

All damage taken is modified by the difference in level between the attacker and the target.

Attacker level − defender level Damage multiplier
6 or more 2
5 1.6
4 1.4
3 1.3
2 1.2
1 1.1
0 1.0
−1 0.8
−2 0.6
−3 0.4
−4 0.2
−5 0.1
−6 or less 0.05

## Borderlands 2

### Level scaling

Weapon damage scales exponentially with weapon level, and player character melee attack and ability damage scale with player level.

$\text{damage} = \text{base damage} \cdot 1.13^\text{level-1}$

### Enemy level

Enemies three or more levels above the player take less damage. This is approximately[1] given by $\text{level difference} = \text{enemy level} - \text{player level}$
$\text{damage multiplier} = \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 1 & \text{if level difference} < 3 \\ 0.88^\text{level difference} & \text{if level difference} \geq 3 \end{array} \right.$

Note: Information about exact damage reduction per level difference varies greatly in different sources, even inside this wikia. For example, the damage reduction section of "Digistruct peak" shows completely different damage reduction numbers that do not match the formula above. As of 2020-05-21, tests show that damage reduction is exactly -65% on OP10 vs level 90 enemies.

1. Roughly fitted from [1].
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