Different weapons and conditions inflict different types of damage in Valheim. There are physical damage types and elemental types. Standard weapons like maces and spears will deal one type of damage, but specialized weapons like Frostner or a Silver Sword will deal several damage types with every attack.
How to Determine an Enemy’s Resistance or Weakness
You can determine whether an enemy is weak, resistant, or neither to a damage type by paying attention to the color of the damage numbers that appear whenever something inflicts damage on an enemy. The colors are by no means random. Here’s the breakdown:
| Damage Resistance | Color of Numbers |
|---|---|
| Immune | None |
| Resistant | Grey |
| Neutral | White |
| Weak | Yellow |
Table of All Damage Types
The damage type of your weapon is critical. You will have a totally different experience fighting undead with spirit or bashing blobs with blunt damage. It’s so important that you must bring specific weapons to certain boss fights (looking at you Bonemass).
Here is the table of damage types and their corresponding damage category:
| Damage Type | Category |
|---|---|
| Blunt | Physical |
| Pierce | Physical |
| Slash | Physical |
| Fire | Elemental |
| Frost | Elemental |
| Poison | Elemental |
| Spirit | Elemental |
Best Damage Type in Valheim
Blunt damage is the best damage type in Valheim. While it’s true that all damage types have their pros and cons, blunt is the best. Blunt is a weakness of the most dangerous monsters and required for several boss fights.
On the contrary, pierce and slash are resistances of many enemies, and pierce is particularly relevant because all players should be using bows. The elemental damage types are all awkward because, for every monster that’s weak to a particular damage type, there’s another monster that’s completely immune to the same damage type.
The only caveat would be during the early-game, pierce damage is best because trolls are weak to pierce damage and they are the most dangerous enemies to newer players.