Slash Damage vs Thrusting Damage

How is slash damage vs piercing damage calculated for backstabs and ripostes exactly?

I'm aware that on some armor types the bandits knife(that did slash-damage) actually did less damage than a rapier(which did thrust-damage) because that armor type had more slash defense than piercing defense.

I assume that even though the bandit's knife technically does a thrusting motion for backstabs, it still counts as slash damage because that's the only type of damage the weapon does.


But in the case of the Dark Silver Tracer, which does both slash and thrusting damage, does the backstab damage count as slash or thrusting?

I believe only rapiers have this bonus on ripostes and backstabs due to their thrusting nature, so it wouldnt matter if other weapons had piercing or slash damage, it would all come to their critical bonus...though Im not sure. Oh, and If you check the bandits knife backstab damage, you will see that its higher then the rapier, I dont know why....I assume they are calculated differently.

Don't listen to the above guy, some rapiers and the bandit's knife get backstab bonuses because of a visible stat modifier that you can see in the in-game menus, like the faith and occult modifiers. It's not because of their thrusting nature that they get extra damage.

To answer your original question though, backstabs seem to ignore a lot of defense. Putting on more armor decreases BS damage slightly, but even if the animation effects the type of damage in the bs (i.e. a katana inflicts pierce while a Mura does slash), after the defense bypass the attack type will matter almost nothing next to AR. It hardly has an effect in normal play, once you cut down a vast percentage of the opponents defense points the fact that it's slash or pierce will be negligible.

Ghadis_God wrote:Don't listen to the above guy, some rapiers and the bandit's knife get backstab bonuses because of a visible stat modifier that you can see in the in-game menus, like the faith and occult modifiers. It's not because of their thrusting nature that they get extra damage.

To answer your original question though, backstabs seem to ignore a lot of defense. Putting on more armor decreases BS damage slightly, but even if the animation effects the type of damage in the bs (i.e. a katana inflicts pierce while a Mura does slash), after the defense bypass the attack type will matter almost nothing next to AR. It hardly has an effect in normal play, once you cut down a vast percentage of the opponents defense points the fact that it's slash or pierce will be negligible.

thats what I meant with the rapiers...but i though they only got that bonus for being...well...rapiers, I only tried to explain why with simple terms, while the bandits knife pretty much shows it how much bonus they get on criticals.

Ghadis_God wrote:

backstabs seem to ignore a lot of defense.

I can add to that. Backstabs ignores (IF I REMEMBER) Around 60-80% of your Armor. It does of course depend on how strong the Weapon is. 60-80% isn't much when the weapon have 56 Damage :3 . I Remember seeing it somwhere but i i'm pretty sure it's fairly accurate.

About Backstabs in general. Am i the only one that Pretty much knows how much a Backstab would do against -Set- armor?
Example:
I know that my Rapiers does 600-650 against Fully Upgraded Giants. It get's a 200 damage boost with Hornet.

And i'm sure everyone knows that BKGA Delivers 900-1000+ Damage with Hornet.