What is Quadratic Scaling?

Quadratic scaling essentially means that the damage scales much better when we increase the number of enemies.

Most of the damage dealt by Genshin characters scale linearly to the enemies. For instance, if Xiao does a plunge attack, the total damage done by him is directly proportional to the number of enemies affected. So if he did 100 damage and his plunge attack affected 3 enemies, he did a total of 100 x 3 = 300 total damage. As you can see his total damage is calculated by multiplying his damage by number of enemies affected. This is what is meant by linear scaling.

However in quadratic scaling, the total damage is calculated by squaring the number of enemies affected and then multiplying it onto your damage. This scaling is possible because some characters in Genshin has skills that does AOE damage and can proc multiple times onto each other. Currently, there are only 2 characters that can do this which is Childe’s Riptide and Ganyu’s Morgana comp.

In Childe’s instance, hitting an opponent affected by Riptide with a melee attack unleashes a Riptide Slash that deals AoE Hydro DMG. What does this mean? It means that if a bunch of enemies are grouped together, the Riptide effect can proc from each enemy resulting in nearby enemies getting hit by the AOE and vice versa. This is exactly why using Childe’s melee attack onto grouped enemies makes numbers fly all over your screen!

The formula to calculate the total damage for a quadratic scaling is by taking your damage number and multiplying it with x². With x being the number of enemies affected. So for Childe’s example, lets assume he does 100 damage onto 3 enemies. x² would be 3² that translates to 9. This means he is doing 9 times more damage! Multiply it with his damage and you’ll get 100 x 9 = 900 total damage. As you can see, the more the enemies that is involved the higher the numbers would go. To put it into perspective;

1 enemy – total 1 riptide hit; 2 enemies – total 4 riptide hits; 3 enemies – total 9 riptide hits; 4 enemies – total 16 riptide hits….