Stats

Overview
Damage/DMG: The Damage stat is, put simply, how much damage you can deal per attack. If you add 5 and subtract 5 from your DMG stat, you'll get the range of damage you deal - for example, if your damage was 100, you can deal up to 105 damage, with a minimum of 95.

Defense/DEF: The Defense stat negates how much damage you take from monsters. Higher Defense equals less damage taken. The exact calculation for this is rumoured to be 1.4% per def point (when calculated using bosses) but other theories involve an exponential increase.

Dexterity/DEX: The Dexterity stat shows how fast your weapons fire: if you have a high dexterity, your weapon will fire faster, and vice versa. Dexterity used to be calculated as 1-(dex/60), but since we can now reach 63 dexterity, this can't be possible.

Speed/SPD: Speed is how fast your character moves, the higher the speed, the faster you will walk. Simple.

Strategy:
There comes a point (at about 175 damage) where higher damage should be traded off for higher dexterity, as more shots per second dealing less damage becomes better than fewer shots with more damage.

There is also no point to having too much def - everything has a def cap, ranging from 5 to 75, so don't go putting on your Cassandra's Essence in an attempt to tank everything.

Also, high speed is usually traded for lower scores in other stats, so you should have a "speed set" and a "damage/dex set" which you can swap out quickly.

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