Stats explained: what each one changes

The character panel lists a lot of numbers and explains none of them. Almost every stat in Sephiria answers one of four questions: is it a pool, a chance, a damage source, or a multiplier on top of one? Sort it into the right box and you know whether the artifact offering it is worth a bag slot.

The damage stats, and which one your hit uses

A hit reads from several stats at once, and they are not interchangeable. The element decides which pool it draws from; the source and the move decide which bonuses apply on top.

Stat	What it feeds
Physical / Fire / Cold / Lightning Damage	The four damage pools. Every run starts each of them at 20. A swing, a grimoire or an artifact proc reads the pool matching its element.
The four Damage Amplification stats	A percentage applied to the matching pool. Nearly worthless on a pool you never filled — see damage math.
Highest Elemental Damage	Adds to whichever of your elemental damage stats is currently highest, so it follows the build instead of pulling against it.
Weapon / Artifact / Grimoire / Companion Damage	Tied to the source of the hit rather than its element. A cold-damage artifact proc is artifact damage, not weapon damage.
Normal / Dash / Special Attack Damage	Tied to the move. Last Combo Damage of Normal Attack touches only the final swing of the chain.
Universal Damage Boost	The global one, applying to everything you deal. Ingenuity’s final talent level grants it per active combo type.
Critical Chance / Critical Damage	The roll, and the size of the payoff when it lands.
Ignore Defense / Ignore Evasion	Cut into the target’s defensive side instead of adding to yours.
True Damage	A flat amount added late, after Defense has already taken its cut.
Damage to bosses and minibosses	Only against elites; dead weight on trash.

Two naming quirks: the ice stat is called Cold Damage while the damage it produces is called Ice damage, and Void labels damage belonging to no element at all. Chaos is the opposite — an attribute treated as every element at once.

The defensive stats

Stat	What it does
Defense	Removes a share of every incoming hit, on a curve with heavy diminishing returns. Negative Defense makes hits land harder rather than doing nothing.
Toughness	Subtracts a flat amount from damage received. Flat subtraction hurts a stream of small hits far more than one big one.
Evasion	A chance to ignore a hit outright, also on a curve. A separate absolute Evasion adds straight onto the final chance.
Fire / Ice / Lightning / Physical Resistance	Cut incoming damage of that type. Positive resistance is capped at 99, and against a compound element the single highest matching resistance is the one that applies.
Protection Points	Ignore damage equal to the number of points. This is checked before the hit is resolved at all.
Max HP, Life Steal, HP Regeneration	The pool and the two ways of refilling it during a fight.

Defense and Evasion are the two that mislead people, because both are shown as plain point values and neither is a percentage. Twenty more Defense is not twenty percent less damage, and an Evasion score is not a dodge chance until the curve has converted it.

What a point of Defense or Evasion is worth

Both run on logarithmic curves, so the same artifact is a different purchase depending on what you already carry. Read this before taking the third defensive card of a run. The +10 columns are percentage points added to the figure on their left.

Your total	Defense removes	+10 Defense	Evasion dodges	+10 Evasion
10	9.9%	+8.1	12.0%	+10.4
20	18.0%	+6.9	22.4%	+9.2
40	30.8%	+5.2	39.8%	+7.5
80	48.9%	+3.6	66.3%	+5.4
100	55.7%	+3.1	76.8%	none
200	79.7%	+1.8	—	—
339	100%	none	—	—

Two opposite shapes. Defense never finishes but keeps paying — even at 200, ten more points still remove nearly two percent more of every hit, and the curve tops out at 339, where a hit is fully absorbed and the floor of one damage takes over. Evasion finishes and then stops paying — the curve reads nothing above a displayed 100, so at 76.8% dodge a further Evasion artifact is an empty bag slot. Evasion is also the one an enemy switches off wholesale, since Ignore Evasion scales the final chance down by its own percentage.

Pools, movement and utility

Max MP starts at 50, Dash Count at 2. Grimoire Haste shortens the wait between casts, and MP Regeneration, MP Steal and Efficiency When Recovering MP are three different ways of getting MP back — not redundant, because a costume can shut one down and leave the others working. Attack Speed, Move Speed, Dash Recovery Speed and dash invincibility duration read exactly as written.

Barter changes what merchants charge, Leaf Drop and Experience Drop change what runs pay out, and Inventory Slot, Side Bag Slot, Potion Bag Slot and Wishing Fountain Capacity change how much you can carry. The bag is six columns wide, starts at 24 slots and tops out at 42, growing one slot at a time — the bag planner shows what an extra slot buys you.

Luck is the one stat nobody should claim to understand. Willpower raises it and the Fairy of Fortune costume buys it with an Inventory Slot penalty, but the game never states what it weights, so treat any precise claim about Luck and drop odds as guesswork.

Reading the number on the card

• Percentages mean what they say. Attack Speed, Critical Chance, Move Speed and the four amplifications are all read literally. Point values do not — Defense and Evasion are inputs to the curves above, not outputs of them.
• Some stats have no number at all. The Crocodile, White Wolf and Scholar Lizard costumes each carry a sentence in place of a value, because what they change is a rule rather than an amount. Read the sentence; there is nothing to add up.
• Timing stats are in seconds. Swiftness at level 20 widens the dash invincibility window by 0.1 s, which is a real change even though the number looks tiny.

The stats your build is wasting

This is where most bag space goes missing. A stat is only worth a slot if something in your run reads it.

• Companion Damage and Companion Defense do nothing without companions. The Mole costume pays 20 Defense and 10% Move Speed for it — a bad trade if you never draw one.
• Grimoire Damage, Grimoire Haste and most MP stats are inert if you carry no grimoire. Adventurer Bunny gives up 50 Grimoire Haste for an extra dash — ruinous for a caster, free for a pure melee run.
• Scholar Lizard fixes Max MP at 80 and stops MP from decreasing, which turns Max MP and MP Regeneration into dead stats for that costume specifically.
• Wingless Bat fixes dash count at 1, so every Dash Count source is wasted. White Wolf disables dash invincibility, switching off the extra window Swiftness hands out at level 20.
• Critical Damage needs Critical Chance to exist. The Deer costume trades 90% Critical for Wishing Fountain Capacity, so on it a critical damage artifact is worthless.
• Crocodile removes damage reduction from Defense and converts it into damage dealt, turning your defensive stat line into an offensive one.
• Combo-gated stats need the combo. Planet Damage, Solar Blade count, Storm Cloud capacity and Frost Relic charge speed describe things that do not exist until the matching combo is running.

The cheapest way to avoid all of this is to decide what your run reads from before you start picking up stats. Costume first — the costume list shows both halves of every trade — then whichever damage source your weapon and artifacts produce, then amplification once there is something to amplify. The talent list deserves the same read, since half the talents shift what your build cares about at levels 5, 10 and 20.

If your damage stats look fine and enemies still take forever to fall, the problem is usually order rather than quantity — that is what damage math is about. And if you are stacking elemental damage, status effects covers what those pools also feed.