Level Scaling
When it's applied
There are two cases where the effects of level scaling are visible.
Using equipment above your level
You're probably familiar with this kind of thing...
...but just to make it absolutely clear, the values in brackets are the stats that the equipment would actually have if worn by a lower level user (level 104 in this case).
Item World
You may have noticed that the stats of your equipment improve when it's "levelled up" in Item World. What you may not have noticed is that they increase by a fixed amount per level gained. This is because the only thing that actually changes internally is the level, and the other stats simply follow automatically as described below.
How it works
To quote Tenboro:
- All stats for all weapons have a certain range they can roll on when they're generated. A club, for instance, can roll a base damage between 18 and 36. These stats are permanent, as in that when they have been rolled, nothing can change them. (Yet.)
- Each stat also has a scaling factor, by which I mean, two scaling factors. The first scaling factor (base factor) is applied to calculate the base "level 0" stat of the weapon. The second scaling factor (level factor) is applied against this base stat and the level of the weapon to calculate the effective stat, which you see on the equipment screen.
Confused? It's really quite simple. Expressed as a formula:
- scaled_stat = (1 + level / level_factor) * base_stat
Or in other words, if we take a stat such as Physical Absorption, for which the level scaling factor is 20, this increases by 1/20 of its "level 0" value per level. Substituting the equipment level gives the actual stats, while the player level gives the "scaled down" stats (which strictly speaking aren't scaled down at all, but rather scaled up by a smaller amount...). The base value for Physical Absorption for the example equipment shown above, by the way, is approximately 1.566. The calculation of the other base values, and the scaling factors, is left as an exercise for the reader. :P
One final note: Burden and Interference are always scaled to the level of the equipment, not the player, which is why they increase if equipment is levelled up, but are not reduced when using higher level equipment.