Damage Types | Destiny Wiki

Damage Types

Weapons in Destiny have specific Damage types that affect enemies based on the shields they posses. On Mythic difficulty, each enemy race gains one new elemental shield, and hitting a shield with anything but the correct element suffers a 50% damage penalty.

Each enemy weapon and attack in the game has an associated element. These can be found in the Enemies section. Later PvE missions can have a variety of Skulls active, each of which makes the mission more difficult. One set of Skulls is oriented around increasing specific enemy elemental damag

There are also some hidden damage types on all weapons (You can see these values on the Weapons page):

• Precision Damage is indicated when yellow numbers appear over the target you are firing into. This would be similar to a critical hit in other MMOs. This occurs when hitting an enemy's weak point. In PvP this would be the head.
• Flinch Damage is essentially how much your bullets cause your target to react "flinch" when hit. The higher the multiplier, the more disrupted they will be when hit.

Arc Damage

This elemental damage type will do double damage against enemies with blue shields. These are signified by the blue numbers that appear when hitting it.

• Weapons: Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons
• Armors: ?
• Misc: This damage type is excellent against Fallen Captains and other enemies with blue shields.

Solar Damage

This elemental damage type will do double damage against enemies with orange shields. These are signified by the red numbers that appear when hitting it.

• Weapons: Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons, would also like to take note that the primary weapon Vision of Confluence which can be obtained from the Vault of Glass raid also applies solar damage when attacking enemies.
• Armors: ?
• Misc: This damage type is excellent against Hive Wizards and other enemies with orange shields.

Void Damage

 
This elemental damage type will do double damage against enemies with purple shields. These are signified by the purple numbers that appear when hitting it.

• Weapons: Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons. It should be noted that also the legendary Auto Rifle Atheon's Epilogue (obtained from the Vault of Glass) deals Void Damage.
• Armors: ?
• Misc: This damage type is excellent against Vex Minotaur Disciples and other enemies with purple shields.

Kinectic Damage

This is the default damage type of most weapons and can be considered physical damage.

• Weapons: Primary Weapons, Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons.
• Armors: ?
• Misc: All Primary Weapons have Kinetic Damage, with the exception of a few Legendaries and Exotics.