Damage

Damage is the attack value dealt by a weapon. The health points (HP) of a player or object must be attacked down to 0 for them to be splatted or destroyed. Players have 100 HP. The Rainmaker shield has 1000 HP. Splash Walls have 600 HP, and lose 85.71 HP per second.

Damage Up vs. Defense Up
The Damage Up and Defense Up abilities interact by canceling the effects of the other. If a weapon starts at dealing 52 damage per shot, it will still do 52 damage if the attacker is wearing 1 main of Damage Up and the defender is wearing 1 main of Defense Up. But if the attacker is wearing no Damage Up and the defender is wearing 3 subs of Defense Up, the damage will be reduced to 49.6, forcing the attacker to land one extra shot in order to splat the defender. This leads to players stacking more and more of these abilities to counter each other.

Hits-to-Splat Tables
These images show the hits-to-splat for all possible match-ups of Damage Up and Defense Up, for weapons that deal consistent damage. Weapons that deal consistent damage but never have their hits-to-splat changed are: Aerospray, H-3 Nozzlenose, Jet Squelcher, Slosher, Sloshing Machie, Splattershot Pro, and Tri-Slosher.

Weapons that deal variable damage, like Blasters and Chargers, may also have different hits-to-splat depending on the accuracy of the Blaster player and on how much the Charger player charged their shot. Rollers will have their effective range slightly reduced by Defense Up, which sometimes results in a different hits-to-splat.

Falloff Damage
If a player is fighting above their target, or outside of the effective range of their weapon, falloff damage will occur. This means the damage dealt will be less, often making it necessary to hit an opponent extra times to splat them. This happens because ink is less lethal when it loses velocity, which happens if a player is fighting outside of the effective range of their weapon. When a player is fighting at effective range, a crosshair will appear when they point their aiming reticle at someone.

The Slosher and Tri-Slosher are least likely to experience difficulties related to falloff damage because their damage starts very high. Blasters, Chargers, and the Sloshing Machine are not affected by falloff damage at all. Falloff damage can be mitigated by using Damage Up abilities.

Maximising your shots to their limits
If a player stacks enough damage up to the limited damage with certain amount of shots, the player can have the potential to get one less "number of hits to splat" due to the enemy walking on enemy ink and it hurts him. For example the base damage of Full Charge shot from Bamboozler does 80 damage. If you stack 2 Main & 5 Subs of damage up you can do 99.9 damage to the enemy, if the enemy walks on your ink for a split second you have the potential to splat them in one full charge shot instead of 2 shots. Splattershot Pro has the potential to splat in 2 shots instead of 3 if the player stacks enough damage up to do 49.9 damage per shot and the enemy walks on the player's ink. Jet Squelcher has the potential to splat in 3 shots instead of 3 if the player stacks enough damage up to do 33.3 damage per shot and the enemy walks on the player's ink. For the full list, check the chart with all the kinds for weapons.

List of damage and related stats
 Special Weapons are discussed in their own article.
 * maximum damage, ie. direct hit

Calculating Damage
a = Ability Points of Damage Up = 10 × [Number of Damage Up Main Slots] + 3 × [Number of Damage Up Sub Slots] d = Ability Points of Defense Up = 10 × [Number of Defense Up Main Slots] + 3 × [Number of Defense Up Sub Slots] A = (0.99 × a - (0.09 × a) ^ 2) / 100 D = (0.99 × d - (0.09 × d) ^ 2) / 100 When Damage Up ≥ Defense Up Damage = [base damage] × [1 + (A - D)] When Damage Up < Defense Up Damage = [base damage] × [1 + (A - D) / 1.8]