Why is my war's damage so low?

I'm new and utterly confused.

I thought I had sorted out how things work but then something bewildering occured.

I switched from a crafted darksteel boar spear (33-61 damage) with 1.7 attack speed and +8attack power stat mod.

to a epic 59-109 vorpal long spear with +2 to strength agility and chi +1 to int presence and defense. As you can see the base damage is almost twice that of my old weapon yet my actual damage in combat has only gone up maybe 10 points or so. Something feels very wrong here. Previously my 'critical' hits were around 90-93 damage now they're about 100-103.

In comparison my second glad which is a rage, has a 51-86 battleaxe and crits well into the 190-200 range. What's going on here?

stat wise they're both at weapon mastery 6 for their respective weapons, and base stats are similar (all stats are 70 or higher) there's only a 3 point difference in strength between them in the rage's favor(76 vs 73) I sincerely doubt those 3 points make up the almost 100 point difference in damage dealt. So what am I missing?

Weapon damage is only one of the factors taken into account in the overall damage calculation - you also have your gladiator's Strength (or/and Agility, depending on the weapon), Chi and Attack Power vs. the opponent's Defense and armour. Double weapon damage doesn't mean double damage dealt to the opponent. Additionally, the raw damage stat of a weapon shows how much damage it will do against an unarmoured and probably defenseless (meaning using offensive style) opponent, the different weapons have different armour and defense-penetrating capabilities which aren't shown anywhere and only become somewhat visible after you examine many fights. Normally each weapon has similar capabilities to its real-world "equivalent" - although the realism is limited of course - so you can expect maces to penetrate armour well while swords perform relatively badly in that regard. Certain skills in the Rage tree like Devastating Power, Brute Force, Blood Drunk, etc. indirectly increase the damage by boosting your fighter's offense or reducing the opponent's defensive power.

spear is weaker against armor than axe, if your opponent is armored there's your answer

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Originally Posted by Alba Kebab

spear is weaker against armor than axe, if your opponent is armored there's your answer

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Are you sure? According to Kreegans guide, spear has higher penetration power then axe..

To OP- are you using right strategy? Higher bloodlust deals more damage, and right attacking type is factor too. You will do lower damage bashing with spear then lunging..

Some extra info:

Yes I'm using lunges, strategy was the first thing I thought of and I tried using bash and slash just to see the difference in damage, slash was laughably bad, bash....surprisingly not terrible lunge however was still most effective. For testing I used the enemies in the underground conquest area on normal difficulty since all enemies there wear only cloth/leather armor and are consistent stat wise plus there's more than enough of them to get a decent number of fights in to test on.

After reading the replies I've meddled with things a bit, noted some gear modifiers that might be relevant,
At first I assumed the +critrank I had on my rager was the reason for the damage difference but after unequipping the piece I was still using i noticed to real drop in his damage (so I still have no idea what that stat does since I had assumed it was related to crit damage.....there's a lot of stats that seem.......vague on dropped gear.) then I thought it was the +attack power gear....then I remembered attack power in this game isn't exactly 'attack power' in the usual sense but more like accuracy/crit rate(at least as far as i've seen) and my war has +9 extra damage rank from her armor (another stat I had no idea what it actually does. but I assume is supposed to improve her damage...since it says damage)

Bewildered I took another look at skills and strategies...neither char has a lot of skills yet, I'm only just really sorting out where i'm going to go with their builds so alot of skill points have been burned trying to increase weapon mastery and failing instead of dumping into surer things. Then finally I looked at strategies again and.....my war's bloodlust was set at 6 my rage was at 8. So.....I tweaked her to run at 8 and sure enough her top end damage spiked. It's not consistent but she actually hit over 200 damage a few times....so it at least became possible.

She's hitting in his neighborhood now, my rage is still hitting a bit(not much) harder but she's hitting more frequently so apparently bloodlust has a massive impact on damage output......I think I need to re-examine my strategies and learn more about stats. Because if all it took was 2 bloodlust to close such a large gap something still feels very wrong with damage calculation some things don't seem to be given the impact on damage output that they should.
Oh and where exactly does chi fit into offense? I thought it only affected abilities.....or am I horribly mistaken and I should be looking for chi/agility gear?(Unless I'm yet again wrong I believe agility is the main stat for polearms instead of strength which is why i picked them for my war she's currently at 78 agility.)


Also thanks for the replies this was really bugging me.

Chi improves critical hits - damage and effects.

About bloodlust - keep in mind that high levels of it make your fighter more likely to miss (for Wars there is Battle Hardened to partially address that) and endurance is exhausted faster. And don't rely on it too much to boost damage - sometimes it does that quite noticeably, sometimes you won't see any effect.

Yes, Pole Arms get their damage improved mainly by Agility but Strength also contributes.