Yeah, the skill description does not align exactly with “common sense”.
To the players, the damage we receive is the “power” of the monster’s attack, but from the game’s perspective, it’s the motion value, which exists even for attacks that don’t deal damage (e.g. Rathalos’ roar).
Based on my observation:
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Reflected damage scales according to effective weapon power vs the monster.
- This includes matching elemental weakness. If the weapon has an element that the monster is weak to, the Element Power is added to the damage calculation, otherwise it’s just Attack Power.
- This means that the higher total Attack Power + weakness Element = higher Reflection damage.
- Status Ailment values don’t add to the damage.
- Reflected damage appears to be non-elemental and not of any damage type, but can still break body parts that do not require a specific damage type to be broken.
- I have not tested this part against a monster with extra elemental weakness (e.g. Deviljho, Garangolm, Elder Dragons)
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Reflected damage uses the monster’s attack’s MV as the base factor.
- Higher MV attacks will have a higher base for scaling.
- This means that the same attack from the same monster will always cause the same Reflection damage regardless of their strength, assuming all other factors are the same.
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Reflected damage also takes your active skills into consideration.
- For example, if an attack hits you while you’re behind the monster and you have Sneak Attack equipped, Sneak Attack will be effective and gets added to the reflected damage (e.g. Rathian’s/Quematrice’s 180° tail spin).
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Lock On seems to help guide the damage to the locked-on body part if it’s within range of Reflection when the monster hits you.
- I was able to break either the Horns or the Back of a 6-star Black Diablos by locking to each part when trying it on a 6-star Black Diablos while it performs its burrowing attacks, dashes, and body tackles. Despite being in a roughly similar position for both attempts, the locked-on body part gets broken instead of other body parts.
Therefore, higher combined effective Weapon Power (Attack + Element) + higher effective damage modifiers from skills + higher monster attack MV = higher Reflection damage. The monster’s Strength does not play a role in the damage formula.
In othher words, the Reflection skill uses the same damage formula as the usual weapon damage formula, but the MV comes from the monster’s attack instead of your weapon’s attack.
The net result is that players cannot merely use the skill to reflect the damage of 10-star monsters and trivialise the hunt, and forces the player to:
- Improve their weapon power by upgrading their weapon to the maximum and using high-power skill builds.
- Improve their Defense so that they take lower damage when facing high-strength monsters with high attack power so that the player can last longer. It is possible to get 0 damage from most attacks when your armour are at 10.5 and you have Guard 5 and without the need to guard against the monster’s attacks perfectly.
- Some monsters attack slowly. Reflection will not work well against these monsters because of the low number of hits they perform throughout the hunt. This means that we still need to attack actively and not simply wait passively.
So, the Reflection skill is not meant to be a skill that trivialises the game at the highest levels. It would certainly make the game slightly more accessible to players who are not very good in this kind of game in the first place, but at higher difficulties, Reflection players don’t gain much advantage over non-Reflection players: we all still have to fight actively, and Reflection becomes merely another source of damage.
I think Reflection is not a bad response to monsters whose attacks leaves you no room to counterattack, so that you still can deal some damage to the monster while you’re guarding against its attacks. Consider the scenario of Barioth launching its wind attack against you and then landing on you—if you kept guarding the hits from the wind attack, you will also deal damage to the Barioth when it lands on you. But yes, the applicable scenarios are few, so this skill is, again, not meant for every situation and monster, just like many other skills in the game.
Therefore, I don’t think this is a bug. But I don’t think the game can describe the skill any better without revealing the “unseen” mechanisms behind the damage formula, which is thus far a community-driven effort in discovering and verifying.