Damage Scaling
As combos go on longer and longer, moves start to do less and less damage. A move that has the base damage of 100,000 could easily only be doing only 30,000 damage when connecting late in a combo. This has been a system put in place in Fighting Games for decades to prevent combos from being overpowered and K.O.'ing people too quickly, but the systems used have always been extremely varied and, in some cases, extremely complex. Understanding Damage Scaling oftentimes can help you figure out what the best combo to maximize damage is.
The Damage Scaling in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is very straight forward and purely mathematical, so fortunately it's actually not too difficult to explain. The one interesting concept is that different moves scale differently depending on what "category" they fall into. There are actually 5 different category of moves in the game:
- Light Attacks
- Medium Attacks
- Hard Attacks
- Special Moves
- Hyper Combos
As you can see, even the categories are pretty straight forward and pretty self-explanatory. The first three categories cover all Normal Moves that are executed via the respective buttons. All Special Moves fall into the Special Move category and all Hyper Combos fall into the Hyper Combo category. The only questionable moves are Launchers and Special Attacks when performed in the air. Special Attacks in the air qualify in the Hard Attacks category and Launchers qualify in the Special Moves category.
Once you you know which category the move falls into, it's just a math formula to determine the Damage Scaling. Damage Scaling in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is entirely based on the Combometer and what hit in the combo you are at. So Damage Scaling kicks in immediately from the 2nd hit onwards.
Here are the formulas:
Note: '^' = to the power of
So you can see that the different categories all follow the same formula, they just have different damage modifiers. Light Attacks scale much quicker with a modifier of 75% and Hyper Combos scale very slowly with a modifier of only 98%. Also it should be noted that all damage gets rounded down to the lower number that ends in two zeros. But let's see how that works with some solid numbers, shall we?
If a Light Attack does 50,000 base damage, it will do 50,000 as the first hit of the combo. That's a given. If a Light Attack connects as the second hit of the combo, however, then we get:
30,000 x .75 ^ (2 - 1) = 30,000 x .75 ^ 1 = 30,000 x .75 = 22,500
If it connects as the third hit of the combo, then we get:
30,000 x .75 ^ (3 - 1) = 30,000 x .75 ^ 2 = 30,000 x .5625 = 16875 = 16800
If it connects as the fifth hit in the combo, we get:
30,000 x .75 ^ (5 - 1) = 30,000 x .75 ^ 4 = 30,000 x 0.31640625 = 9492 = 9400
Because the modifier is exponential, you can see how the lower modifiers cause more pronounced damage scaling while the higher modifiers will cause much slower scaling. But the formula holds true for every hit for every category. So using lots of Light Attacks in your combos will rob you of a lot of damage and you're better off using as many Medium and Hard Attacks as possible. And you can see why, now, ending long combos with Hyper Combos still do a decent amount of damage. By the 20th hit of a combo, the modifier of a Hyper Combo will only be about 68% of the base damage whereas, for a Hard Attack, it would already be at about 13.5% of the base damage.
Please note, however, that the lowest a move's damage can scale down to is 10%. So once the modifiers drop below that, it caps out at 10% damage. So if your move does 100,000 points of damage, the lowest it can ever do in a combo is 10,000 points of damage. Note, however, that this changes if you activate X-Factor!! X-Factor not only ups your damage overall, but it raises the Damage Scaling cap by a huge amount! Some characters capped out at 60% being the lowest a move's damage can be! The cap seemingly is different for each character, but more research will have to be done to find out if this is correct or not.