Blue Archive

Blue Archive: the damage table decides your raid team before you do

The right attack type beats any amount of levelling. The full attack-versus-armour table, the armour of all 14 raid bosses, and which attack type the raid roster punishes hardest.

By the GachaData team Updated September 23, 20264 min read

Blue Archive resolves damage through a table of attack types against armour types, and the spread is a 4-fold swing: get the matchup right and you deal 2×, get it wrong and you deal 0.5×. Nothing you can do to a student's level, gear or bond comes close to compensating for that.

Which means the first decision in any raid is not "who is strongest" but "who is not halved".

The table

<thead><tr><th>Attack ↓ vs Armour →</th><th>Light</th><th>Heavy</th><th>Special</th><th>Elastic</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Explosion</th><td class="up">2×</td><td>1×</td><td class="dn">0.5×</td><td class="dn">0.5×</td></tr><tr><th>Pierce</th><td class="dn">0.5×</td><td class="up">2×</td><td>1×</td><td>1×</td></tr><tr><th>Mystic</th><td>1×</td><td class="dn">0.5×</td><td class="up">2×</td><td>1×</td></tr><tr><th>Sonic</th><td>1×</td><td class="dn">0.5×</td><td>1.5×</td><td class="up">2×</td></tr></tbody>

Two things about this table are not obvious from playing:

Explosion is the sharpest and the most punished. It is the attack type with the most halved cells — 2 of them, against Special and Elastic. A box built on it is excellent against Light and actively bad against Special and Elastic.

Sonic is the odd one out. It doubles against Elastic, is halved against Heavy, and carries the only multiplier in the table that is neither a double, a half nor neutral: 1.5× against Special. That partial bonus turns out to matter more in raids than its one doubling does.

Which boss sits on which armour

There are 14 raid bosses: 4 Light, 4 Heavy, 4 Special and 2 Elastic.

<thead><tr><th>Boss</th><th>Armour</th><th>Terrain</th><th>Difficulties</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Geburah</th><td>Light</td><td>Outdoor</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Gregorius</th><td>Light</td><td>Indoor</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Hieronymus</th><td>Light</td><td>Indoor, Street</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><th>KAITEN FX Mk.0</th><td>Light</td><td>Outdoor, Street</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Binah</th><td>Heavy</td><td>Outdoor, Street</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Chesed</th><td>Heavy</td><td>Indoor, Outdoor</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><th>Hod</th><td>Heavy</td><td>Indoor, Street</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Wakamo (Hovercraft)</th><td>Heavy</td><td>Outdoor</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Drumbarka</th><td>Special</td><td>Street</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Goz</th><td>Special</td><td>Indoor, Outdoor</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Perorodzilla</th><td>Special</td><td>Indoor, Outdoor</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Shiro & Kuro</th><td>Special</td><td>Indoor, Street</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><th>Kurokage</th><td>Elastic</td><td>Street</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><th>Yesod</th><td>Elastic</td><td>Street</td><td>8</td></tr></tbody>

The armour is the one each boss wears in every Total Assault season. Grand Assault fights the same boss in several armour types at once, which is exactly when a box that covers more than one attack type pays off. The terrain column lists every terrain the boss has been fought on; each season picks one, and the raid season calendar shows which. Put the matrix and the boss list together and you get the table that actually matters — how each attack type fares against this specific set of bosses:

<thead><tr><th>Attack type</th><th>Students</th><th>Doubles against</th><th>Bosses doubled</th><th>Bosses halved</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Explosion</th><td>92</td><td>Light</td><td class="up">4</td><td class="dn">6</td></tr><tr><th>Pierce</th><td>68</td><td>Heavy</td><td class="up">4</td><td class="dn">4</td></tr><tr><th>Mystic</th><td>68</td><td>Special</td><td class="up">4</td><td class="dn">4</td></tr><tr><th>Sonic</th><td>35</td><td>Elastic</td><td class="up">2</td><td class="dn">4</td></tr></tbody>

Explosion is halved against 6 of the 14 bosses and doubles against 4. Sonic doubles against only 2, but its 1.5× against Special covers another 4 — so a Sonic student has a real raid job beyond the 2 Elastic bosses.

Read the terrain alongside it. Terrain applies a separate multiplier through each student's terrain grade, and it is not a small effect: the 6 grades run from 1.3× at SS down to 0.8× at D (the full table, cover effects included, is on the terrain grades page). A perfectly-typed student on bad terrain can be worth less than a neutral one on good terrain.

The roster is not evenly supplied either

The Students column above counts the whole roster by attack type. Explosion is the most common with 92 students; Sonic is the rarest with 35 — the gap between them is 57 students. If you are short on a type, it is most likely that one, and a strong student of it is worth more to a raid box than the same investment in a fourth or fifth of the common type.

On the defensive side the roster skews differently again:

<thead><tr><th>Armour</th><th>Students</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Light</th><td>91</td></tr><tr><th>Heavy</th><td>88</td></tr><tr><th>Special</th><td>69</td></tr><tr><th>Elastic</th><td>13</td></tr><tr><th>Composite</th><td>2</td></tr></tbody>

Only 13 students wear Elastic. When you are being hit rather than hitting, the armour you are carrying is largely decided for you.

Practical order of operations

Check the boss's armour first and eliminate every attack type that is halved against it. This is a larger effect than anything else on the screen.
Then check terrain grades on the survivors, for the terrain this season is actually on. The gap between the best and worst grade is wide enough to reorder your shortlist.
Then compare stats — and only then. A 20% ATK advantage does not survive a halved matchup, and it is the last thing that should decide a slot.
Do not write off Sonic. Its partial bonus against Special makes it a working answer to more bosses than its one doubling suggests.

Scope and freshness. The multiplier table, the terrain grades, every boss's armour and terrain, and the per-student attack and armour types are all exact and refreshed every patch; if a boss is added or an armour type changes, this page changes with it. The same table is on the damage chart page.

One limitation to state plainly: this is the type layer only. Skills, cost curves, EX timing and the specific mechanics of each boss all sit on top of it and frequently matter more between two correctly-typed students. What the table settles is which students should be on the shortlist at all — and that is the part players most often get wrong.