Difference Between Skill Power & Skill Power Mod in The First Descendant

There are several confusing stats or modifiers in The First Descendant, but none more confusing than finding the difference between Skill Power and Skill Power Modifier. It seems one affects the other, but if you create builds for Descendants, you wouldn’t know what would be better. Here’s an explanation guide on the differences between Skill Power and Skill Power Modifier so you know what to focus on for all the Descendants.

The Differences Between Skill Power and Skill Power Modifier Stats in The First Descendant

Skill Power is a basic stat that improves the power of your abilities. It has its own stats on the inventory page’s lower right side, next to the equipped Components. You can think of the Skill Power as the baseline for your skill’s damage.

Skill Power Modifier improves on the multiplier of how the damage of your skill and Skill Power is calculated. Each Descendant skill has its baseline modifier. If you hover over the skill, it will look like “Skill Power X 50%.”

The Skill Power is multiplied by the 50% modifier. If you have 10,000 Skill Power and the skill has a 50% Skill Power Modifier, you’ll get 5,000 damage for that skill’s damage output. If you equip a 50% Skill Power module, 10,000 goes up to 15,000, making the skill’s damage go to 7,500 (using the same example). Now, if you change that module to a 50% Skill Power Modifier, 10,000 will be multiplied by 100%, giving you 10,000 damage. In this example, Skill Power Modifier is better than Skill Power.

Each Descendant has several skills and different baselines of Skill Power and Skill Power Modifiers to work with. It is up to you to make the calculation because several factors will come into play, such as your Reactor’s Skill Power Boost Ratios, skill category boosts, and much more.

After working around SP modules, I noticed that the SP in the inventory page doesn’t add the SP bonus from the modules. The SP indicated in the inventory is purely based on your equipped Reactor. Using a level 100 Reactor will put you around 11,000 SP. However, if your Reactor meets the Optimization condition, it’ll go up to 17,000+ SP. Skill Power Boost Ratio isn’t accounted for, but if you meet that condition, you can hover over the Reactor and look at the numbers written on each skill of the Reactor. You can treat this number as your baseline SP for your Descendant.

How Do You Choose Between SP or SPM For Each Descendant?

To make things a little easier, since no one signed up to do mathematics when playing The First Descendant, here are the general rules when you are reading into a Descendant’s skill:

• Low SPM skills tend to want SPM over SP, like Freyna’s Putrid Venom, Blair’s Blaze Up, etc.
• High SPM skills want SP over SPM, like Esiemo Arche Explosion, Bunny’s Maximum Power, etc.

After checking all the Descendant’s skill multipliers, none of their skills overlap when it comes to wanting SP or SPM. The closest were Blair and Gley. Blair’s Blaze Up wants SPM, but his initial burst damage from Deadly Cuisine wants SP. However, the burn and Flame Zone damage from the Deadly Cuisine benefits heavily on SPM, so he wants SPM in general.

Gley’s Life Siphon wants SP, but her Massacre wants SPM. Everyone builds on Gley’s ultimate, so SPM is the best way to build her. Here’s a table of what you need.

If you had mistakes upgrading the wrong modules, you can start farming up those Kuiper Shards again with these strategies. If you got your build right, you can move on to getting the best weapon modules and start upgrading these.