Guide to Harm Touch

There are two parts to this guide. The first will give you general information about Harm Touch, the second will give you the formula for damage, and a damage chart in case you are mathematically impaired.

Harm Touch

Harm Touch (HT) can be used once every 72 minutes real time, which equates to about 1 full day game time. The 72 minute timer stops when you are off-line, so you must be online for 72 minutes before you can re-use it. Planar Alternate Advancement can cut this time in half. HT is magic based and therefore, can be resisted. At high levels you receive a discipline and an AA ability that changes the resistance check to disease, making it harder to resist, except to disease resistant monsters.

HT is an innate skill to Shadow Knights, and does not need to be trained in to be used. In addition, it can not gain levels the same way as casting and weapon skills. Instead, it's damage output automatically increases each time you gain an experience level. Formula is below.

There are two schools of thought as to when you should use Harm Touch. One says you should use it as soon as it becomes available because this will increase your total damage output. And the other says you should only use it in situations when you will die anyway or when using it can save your life. Personally, I am of the latter school, but both have their merits. Using it only in need will almost guarantee you have it available when you need it to save your life. However, there are not many occasions where an extra Harm Touch will be enough to save your life. Most battles that cost the Shadow Knight his life do not come down to the wire, and are decided more by a timely heal or being overwhelmed completely. It is useful however to draw taunt off a healer or caster who is getting attacked out of turn. Using HT as soon as it becomes available, will increase damage output, and, especially at lower levels where the penalty for dying is small, increase experience gain. This also makes use of an ability that otherwise may go generally unused. In the 45 days of so of my play time, I have used Harm Touch less than 100 times.

At level 55, you get your first Discipline that affects Harm Touch called Unholy Aura (Velious required). To use it you must have Harm Touch available, and this will use your Harm Touch timer. So this replaces your Harm Touch. To use this discipline, type "/disc unholy" and you will use your HT. This does two things, increases damage of Harm Touch by 50% and changes resistance to be disease based, making it virtually unresistable. When you reach 55, you should remove any hot key that you have for Harm Touch and replace it with a macro button which will do this instead. The only reason you would use regular HT is if you are fighting a foe that is extremely disease resistant.

At level 60, you get the Discipline Leech Curse (Velious required). This is not a Harm Touch, but at this point you may wish to get your regular Harm Touch back out since you may use this discipline instead which will use your discipline timer, but will not use your Harm Touch timer. This discipline is/will be explained further in the disciplines section of the site.

At level 59, you can choose to spend AA points in Shadow Knight Alternate Advancement. These require that at least 18 total points be spent between the first two tiers of AA and requires the Shadows of Luclin expansion.
The Super Harm Touch AA ability costs 6 points and is essentially the same as your level 55 discipline, except it will not use your discipline times. It will use your Harm Touch timer however, and no type of Harm Touch can be used for another 72 minutes.

The Leech Touch AA ability costs 6 points. This one uses your Harm Touch timer, and therefore no other Harm Touch ability can be used for 72 minutes, and gives you the hp back that you took from the enemy. So if your Harm Touch does 1001 damage (at level 60) you will be healed for 1001 hit points if it isn't resisted. This can not be stacked with discipline Unhold Aura, thus you can not increase damage output of this ability. Note: it has been reported that this ability ALWAYS does 900 damage and heals for 900 points regardless of the standard Harm Touch damage. I can neither confirm nor discredit this report.

So, you've got regular Harm Touch, Unholy Aura, Leech Touch, and Super Harm Touch. Wow. Unfortunately you can only use one of these at a time. My recommendation is to use Unholy Aura after it becomes available, and continue to do so until you have time to invest in more "important" AA abilities at 59 such as Fearless, Soul Abrasion, and the level 55 abilities that improve damage output and mitigation.

Harm Touch damage

The formula for calculating Harm Touch damage is rather simple, but gets slightly complex at higher levels. I am not sure how it scales above level 60, so for now, I will assume it continues in a linear fashion.


If your level is less than 40, the formula becomes:

So at level 1, you are doing (1 * 10) + 1 = 11 damage.
At level 45 you are doing (45 * 10) + ((45 - 40) * 20) + 1 = 551 damage.
At level 60 you are doing (60 * 10) + ((60 - 40) * 20) + 1 = 1001 damage
If that's still too much for you, here's a quick chart: