Stats Explained
Death Must Die has a lot of different stats to consider when building your characters. And if you’re a beginner looking for information, it can be overwhelming seeing all the different values.
A green number represents an increase to the stat (usually from gear/blessings), a grey number means it’s at its base value, and red means it’s below its base. Additionally hovering over each stat displays a brief explanation.
Some of them make sense, but there are a lot of stats that aren’t as straightforward or sound too similar to a different one. What’s the difference between damage and attack damage? Is there a difference between attack vs strike? What exactly does luck do?
If you don’t know the answer to these questions, don’t worry. This guide aims to go over each stat in Death Must Die in detail, so that by the end you’ll know what they all do.
Offensive Stats
Offensive stats are global stat bonuses that affect nearly all aspects of your character. They relate to increasing your character’s damage output.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Damage | Gives you a straight damage increase from all sources. No matter what skill or ability you use to cause damage, this value represents an increase to it. |
| Critical Chance | Your chance to deal critical damage with all abilities. |
| Critical Damage | Your chance to deal additional critical damage with all abilities. |
| Cooldown Reduction | Decreases the cooldown of all your abilities. This stat has a huge impact on Cast blessings. |
| Area | The increased attack area for all of your skills and abilities. |
| Duration | Bonus duration for all of your abilities. For example, the Trail of Fire blessing has a base duration depending on the blessing level. Bonus duration can increase that amount of time beyond the default. |
| Status Damage | Gives you a straight damage increase from all sources. No matter what skill or ability you use to cause damage, this value represents an increase to it. |
Attack Stats
Attack stats affect your character’s basic attack. This is the attack that happens automatically or that you manually trigger. For Avoron this is his sword slash, for Lorien it’s his arrow.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Attack Damage | The damage range of your basic attack |
| Attack Time | How long it takes to perform your basic attack. The higher this number, the more often you attack. |
| Attack Area | The area your attack hits. This is measured in sq units. |
| Attack Critical Chance | The chance for your attack to deal critical damage. |
| Attack Missile Range | The range that your attacks will travel before they disappear. This only appears for characters with ranged attacks. |
| Attack Missile Count | How many projectiles your attack will shoot. This only appears for characters with ranged attacks. |
| Attack Pierce | How many targets your attack will pierce through. Usually, an attack will stop when it hits the first target, but this will allow you to hit more enemies with the same attack. This only appears for characters with ranged attacks. |
| Attack Bounce | Some blessings will allow your ranged attacks to continually bounce between targets. This number tells you how many targets it will bounce between before stopping. This only appears for characters with ranged attacks. |
| Attack Missile Velocity | The speed of your projectiles. This only appears for characters with ranged attacks. |
| Attack Missile Angle | The angle in between your projectiles. This only appears for characters with ranged attacks. |
Damage vs. Attack Damage
At first glance, these bonuses look like they do the same thing. But this is a good moment to stress that in Death Must Die when the game mentions attack, they mean your hero’s basic attack.
For Lorien, that is when he shoots his bow. With Skadi, that’s when she swings her massive greatsword. So when it comes to bonuses that affect damage vs attack damage, it’s a matter of general vs specific.
Damage boosts will increase damage done from all sources. This means your regular attacks, dashes, strikes, spells, whatever you throw at the denizens of death. Attack damage boosts will only increase damage from your basic attack. The distinction may be minor, but it is still important.
As for which is better, it’s a matter of player preference. Typically, the bonus to general damage will be a far less amount than the bonus to specific damage. So that should be a factor when you’re looking at builds.
With that being said, I still lean towards liking general damage boosts more, especially when you’re a beginner. It just feels safer increasing your power in all aspects of gameplay. Once you start getting specialized builds, then you can start stacking specific damage types.
Dash Stats
Dash affect your character’s dash in a multitude of ways. Typically at the start of a run, each character has access to a basic dash to get them out of a tight spot. As you gather blessings, you can alter your dash to do some fantastic things. These dash stats impact both your basic dash and blessing upgraded dashes.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Dash Charges | The number of max available dash charges a character has. This is usually 2 without upgrades. |
| Dash Recharge Time | How long it takes to fully regain one dash charge. |
| Dash Distance | How far your dash travels. |
| Dash Projectiles | Some blessings allow your dash to fire out projectiles. This stat is how many projectiles are fired off. |
| Dash Damage | The damage done by your dash skills. By default, characters don’t tend to do damage with dashes. You’ll need items or blessings to make use of this stat. |
| Dash Critical Chance | The chance that your dash skills crit. |
| Dash Range | How far your dash skills will travel before disappearing. Some skills allow your dash to shoot projectiles or life refilling tethers. This stat governs how far they will travel to find a target. |
| Dash Duration | How long your dash skills remain active. For instance, Time’s Vortex blessing causes your dash to leave a vortex on the ground. Increasing this stat will increase how long it lasts. |
| Dash Area | Determines how wide your dash skills area of effect is. The previously mentioned Vortex blessing can have it’s area increased by this stat. |
Strike Stats
Strike stats affect your strike blessings, causing them to proc more often or last longer in general.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Strike Damage | Causes your strikes to do additional damage. |
| Strike Critical Chance | The extra chance that your strikes will critically hit. |
| Strike Area | Additional area that your strike will hit. It is quite satisfying to increase strike area and see a chain lightning proc obliterate everything in its path. |
| Strike Duration | Extends the duration of effects triggered by your strike abilities. A good example of a strike with a duration is Krom’s Chains of War blessing. |
| Strike Projectiles | Some strike blessings shoot out projectiles, and this stat determines how many projectiles fire out. |
Attack vs. Strike
We briefly touched on this in the All About Blessings guide, but I want to highlight it once more here. There is a difference between attack vs strike in Death Must Die. They refer to two different methods of dealing damage to your enemies. Again, attack is your character’s basic attack. Strikes are spells that are triggered by your attacks.
If you ever want to know which damage applies to which blessing, you can always check the blessing type in the active effects menu. In that screen, you will find your character’s blessing slot allotment, the current blessings equipped for the run, and the active encounter effects.
Cast Stats
Cast stats improve your cast blessings. They are great for characters who want to stack casts, which are generally some of the more powerful abilities.
As mentioned in the Offensive section, improving cooldown reduction has a large beneficial effect on cast spells. It allows them to come off of cooldown faster, meaning that they activate more often.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Cast Damage | Bonus damage caused by your cast type blessings. |
| Cast Critical Chance | The extra chance that your casts will critically hit. |
| Cast Area | Additional area that your casts will hit. A lot of cast spells have huge areas of effect at base, so increasing this stat has significant impact. |
| Cast Duration | Extends the duration of effects triggered by your cast abilities. |
| Cast Projectiles | Increases the number of projectiles triggered by your cast abilities. |
Power Stats
Power stats increase the effectiveness of your power type blessings. These blessings tends to have some pretty strong effects at base, so buffing these tends to have significant gameplay upgrades.
The downside is that most characters can only have 2 power upgrades.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Power Damage | Bonus damage caused by your power type blessings. |
| Power Critical Chance | The extra chance that your powers will critically hit. |
| Power Area | Additional area that your powers will hit. There are a few powers with wide areas, so this is more effective than you may think. |
| Power Duration | Extends the duration of effects triggered by your power abilities. |
| Power Projectiles | Increases the number of projectiles triggered by your power abilities. There are honestly not too many power abilities that shoot out projectiles. So unless you have a very specific build, you can probably ignore this. |
Summon Stats
Summon stats improve nearly all facets of your summoned allies. In addition to blessings, there are a ton of items that have summons attached to them, and making summon builds can be quite fun.
The only issue is that summons are not predictable, as they act on their own.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Summon Damage | Bonus damage caused by your summon type blessings. |
| Summon Attack Speed | Increases how fast you summons attack. |
| Summon Count | Sometimes, particular summons will have a limit to how many are active at once. This stat lets you know that number. Increasing summon cunt can be fun for summon builds, as you can completely fill the screen with allies. |
| Summon Attack Area | The area affected by your summons’ attacks. |
| Summon Duration | Summons from blessings are typically not active forever, there is a time limit. This stat can increase how long a summon remains active. |
| Summon Move Speed | Determines how quickly your summons move across the map. |
Defensive Stats
Defensive stats focus on mitigating damage, restoring your health, and generally keeping your character alive. A lot of Lady Justice’s blessings focus on upgrading your defensive capabilities.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Life | The total amount of health you have. If this reaches 0 and you have no revivals, your run ends. |
| Life Regen | This is how much life you passively restore every second. |
| Life on Kill | How much life you gain when you defeat an enemy. A lot of times it will be certain attacks that trigger the life gain (weapon attacks, strikes, etc.). |
| Heal on Level Up | The amount of health you restore when your character levels up. |
| Armor | Reduces all damage taken. One thing the game notes is that this stat increases linearly. Which means that every point of armor is worth the same amount of effective life, there are no diminishing returns. |
| Damage Reduction | The percentage of damage being reduced thanks to your armor value. |
| Evasion | The chance to completely negate damage by avoiding/dodging the attack. The game notes that, like armor, this stat scales linearly. |
| Move Speed | How quickly you move. |
| Revivals | How many times you revive after you lose all your health. |
Utility Stats
Utility stats that are generally useful, but do not quite fit in any other category. They tend to provide more passive upgrades that are helpful, but maybe not necessary.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Luck | Luck increases the odds of chance based triggers activating. See below for more details. |
| Pull Area | How far away you can pull exp shards toward you. |
| Passive Experience | How much exp you gain per second. |
| Experience Gain | Additional experience gained. |
| Shorter Enemy Barriers | This stat reduces enemy barriers by a set amount. |
| Pick Up Drops | Increases the chance of that an enemy drops a heal or buff pick up. Pick ups refer to the hearts or magnets that enemies sometimes drop. |
Luck Stat
Luck is…a complicated stat. The in-game explanation even mentions that it affects a lot of things. Briefly put, it increases the chance of an effect triggering.
If you have gloves that have a 20% chance of giving the burn status to an enemy, a higher luck stat can push that to 30%. If you have a blessing that has a 10% chance to trigger a multi-attack, getting more luck can boost it to 15%.
As you can see, luck can be an important stat for particular builds. It does a lot by enhancing both blessings and items. But this is still only scratching the surface of how luck works in Death Must Die. The only thing it doesn’t do is increase the drop rate of rare items.
Cosmic Essence
Cosmic essence is synonymous with talent points. You gain cosmic essence by defeating bosses, and you can redeem them for talent points in the Constellarium. You can only have a max of 36.
If you want to know how many you have, you can check your stat page (it will be in a blue orb next to your portrait, or in the Cosmic section), or visit the Constellarium.
Blessing Slots
These stats let you know how many blessings of each type your character can equip. Each character starts out with a different allotment of blessing slots, making them better at equipping and using certain blessings over others.
Increasing this number lets your character to break their mold, and can allow for some truly bananas blessing combos. Especially when you factor in talents gained through cosmic essences.
God Blessings
Lastly, these stats alter the blessings offered by gods when you level up. Updating these stats will be one of your primary early game focuses, as you’ll want to start stacking items that increase your chances of higher blessing rarities. For more information, the Death Must Die wiki has an excellent page that explains how blessing rarity rolls are calculated.
| Stat | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Master Offers | The chance that a god will offer you a master offer. |
| Legend Offers | The chance that a god will give you a legend offer. These offers will only happen if you first succeeded in the chance for a master offer. |
| Expert Offers | The chance that a god will offer you an expert offer. |
| Adept Offers | The chance that a god will offer you an adept offer. |
| New Offers | The Chance that a god will offer you a brand new blessing you do not have. |
| Level-Up Offers | The chance that a god will offer you a level up increase to a currently owned blessing. |
| Rarity-Up Offers | The chance that a god will offer you a rarity tier increase to a currently owned blessing. |
| Rerolls | The number of blessing rerolls you have. |
| Alterations | The number of blessing alterations you have. |
| Banishes | The number of blessing banishes you have. |
Conclusion
As you can see, Death Must Die has an incredible amount of stats. While this can feel a bit daunting, it does allow for some fun interactions and combos between blessings and items. Plus, the addition of the armory makes finding and equipping items with specific stats much easier. Make sure to purchase mimicbag slots for your characters, and have fun mixing and maxing your stats.
Hopefully you have a better understanding of the stat system, and can better gauge items and equipment you find. For more information about the stat system, take a look at the stat section in the Death Must Die wiki.
Good luck on all your runs!