Understanding Concentration versus Wisdom (magic)

In this guide we are going to have a closer look at the Tower of Knowledge Passives “Wisdom” and “Concentration”. A few players have asked me how these work and which one is “best”? So today we are going to dive into these two passives with the goal of understanding how “Magic Attack” and “Magic Damage” are similar in the sense that they both interact and boost the damage equation, yet they are also two very different types of value and affects the output damage in different ways when you are fighting in Infinity Kingdom.

What is Wisdom and Concentration

First things first, Wisdom and Concentration are both Tower of Knowledge Passives which you can unlock and max to equip on your Immortal of choice. They affect Magic damage and should be paired with a Mage-type Immortal.

Wisdom is unlocked at level 1 and at max level increase magical attack by 60%

Concentration is unlocked at level 24 and at max level increase magical damage by 30%

What is the difference between magical attack and magical damage?

The damage your mage deal is based on multiple things: Magical Attack attribute value of your Immortal, the Ultimate/Passive Ability’s % and by Magical Penetration Attribute Value relative to the enemy’s Magical Protection Attribute Value. These values interact with the current Troop Count on your Immortal to determine the actual damage output. Furthermore, your damage output can be amplified by debuffs, buffs and other modifiers – such as concentration. In addition to this, your attack has a chance to hit as a critical hit, amplifying the damage by around 170% on average.

At this point it is important for me to mention that the precise damage equation remains a closely guarded secret, and one that as far as I am aware, no player has ever come close to uncovering. Especially the interaction of Troop Count on the equation is a big mystery, all we can see is that it matters a great deal! But we can also see that the way the damage is calculated changes during the fight based on fight duration and seemingly troop count as a relative number more than purely static. As such, we cannot simply plot our values and simulate the expected damage output. Unfortunately…

We cannot do the mats and calculate precisely how each passive / type of upgrade affects the damage output result. Instead, I did a few tests to see how running Wisdom and Concentration affects the actual damage of an Empress Wu.

Testing

What I did was pair and Empress Wu against Charles in Training Grounds and run a couple tests. Training grounds is a good place to test this because we want minimal interference from troop count on our data. If you try and test this in arena or other combat, the numbers will change a lot between a fight where your Empress Wu takes a big crit right off the bat relative to one where her troop count is preserved for longer.

So I made a simple test: First let them fight without any passives at all for a baseline. We expect the damage from BOTH wisdom and concentration to be greater than the damage without either one.

Secondly, we let them fight it out with only Wisdom equipped. And lastly, we make them fight with only concentration equipped.

The Results

The outcome of these fights shows us which is best in a controlled environment with level 50 Immortals, with max equipment and tier 7 troops but with the limitations of no technology, alliance buffs, etc. that we have in Training grounds.

The output was as follow:
Our baseline damage of running without any passives was on avg. 528K damage on Imperial Fire
Our damage running Wisdom Passive was on avg. 580K damage on Imperial Fire
Our damage running Concentration Passive was on avg. 723K damage on Imperial Fire

As such, we can see that the damage amplification of Concentration’s Magical Damage % booster is significantly greater than the increase provided by Wisdom. However, Wisdom does provide a solid increase in its own right.

Speculations

I have read many speculations and claims that at high enough Magical Attack Attribute Values, Wisdom is superior to Concentration. So I thought I would put this to the test.

If we at one point are able to increase our base attribute value enough, would Wisdom overtake Concentration in damage output?

I tested this by removing the Equipment on Empress Wu:
With her Attack Wand and Off-Hander level 50 in Fire elemental S2 Epic + quality, we have a total of 2,432.8 magical attack.
Without this Attack Wand and Off-hand, her magical attack attribute drops to 1,045.2 magical attack.

I now did the same test as above, running her without any passives, then with Wisdom and finally with Concentration.

The output was as follow:
Our baseline damage of running without any passives was on avg. 489K damage on Imperial Fire
Our damage running Wisdom Passive was on avg. 545K damage on Imperial Fire
Our damage running Concentration Passive was on avg. 651K damage on Imperial Fire

Conclusion

What this means is, that it does NOT seem to be true that by increasing the base value of Magical Attack enough Wisdom would gain more value relative to Concentration.

How precisely Wisdom interacts in the damage equation remain a mystery. But we have a pretty clear indication that for any player Concentration will be superior value than Wisdom.

Published: 18-11-2022