Damage types: slash, pierce and blunt

What the three kinds of physical damage change about a blow, how two-handed weapons use strength, and what happens to a weapon that can do more than one kind.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-01 · Jake4 min read

Every melee weapon in the game deals one of three kinds of physical damage, or more than one. The kind is a flag on the weapon: it shows as slash, pierce or blunt in the Flags column of a unit’s weapons table. The kind does not change how hard a weapon is swung. It changes what happens to the blow on its way through the defender’s armour, and what it does to a shield or a body part. This page lists those changes, one kind at a time.

All figures here are the ones the game’s manual states. We have not re-measured them, so this page reports what Illwinter says the rules are.

Where each kind acts

A blow is settled in a fixed order: the attacker’s damage is set against the target’s protection, and what survives is the damage dealt. The manual says the three kinds act at different points in that order. Slash and blunt adjust a number after or around the protection step. Pierce changes the protection itself, before the comparison.

Slashing

A slashing blow does a quarter more damage once protection has been taken off. It is also hard on shields: when the game works out whether a shield is damaged or broken, a slash counts for half as much again as its plain damage.

Slashing weapons can also cut off a limb. If a slash lands on a leg, an arm or the head and the wound costs the target at least half of its hit points, that part is cut away. Losing a head kills any creature that cannot live without one. The manual’s own counter-example is the hydra, which has other heads and carries on.

Blunt

A blunt blow does a quarter more damage when it lands on the head, and this bonus is added before protection is deducted, not after. Against a shield it is worth a quarter more than its plain damage when the game checks for damage or breakage. That is the smaller of the two shield bonuses: a slash is better at breaking shields than a club is.

The manual also notes that a rusted blunt weapon loses less when it is damaged: one point of damage instead of two.

Piercing

A piercing weapon works on the defender’s armour rather than on the damage. Before the blow is compared with protection, the target’s protection is cut by 15 percent. This is the same effect the armour-piercing ability has, except that armour-piercing cuts protection by 50 percent.

A weapon can be both. The manual says the two stack, giving a 65 percent cut in the protection the blow meets, so the two percentages are added together.

Two-handed weapons

A two-handed weapon adds 125 percent of the wielder’s strength to its damage, where an ordinary one adds the plain 100 percent. Riders pay for it: using a two-handed weapon from the saddle costs a -3 attack penalty, so such weapons suit cavalry badly.

Not every weapon adds strength in full. The manual’s item tables mark some weapons as using half of the wielder’s strength, some a third, and some none at all. The weapons table shows these as the half-strength, third-strength and no-strength flags.

Weapons with more than one kind

Some weapons list two kinds. The manual’s example is the short sword, which is both slashing and piercing. Each attack picks one of the kinds with equal chances and applies only that one: on any given swing a short sword has an even chance of acting as a slash and an even chance of acting as a pierce, and never both at once.

The three kinds are not limited to swords, maces and spears. A creature’s bite or fang can count as piercing, for instance.

Underwater

Underwater, slashing and blunt weapons take an attack penalty equal to the weapon’s length. Piercing weapons take none. A weapon that is piercing and something else takes half the penalty. Flails take a further -1 on top.

What this page does not cover

The manual does not say how the physical resistances (slash-resistant, pierce-resistant, blunt-resistant) sit alongside armour-piercing and the order above, and it does not describe how untyped damage is handled. Those are left out until a source states them.