How does Reflect Blows work?

Question

The Reflect Blow perk gives you a 10% chance of reflecting melee damage. I'd like to know the mechanics of it.

Assume an opponent reflects my blow. I'd expect it to work as follows.

I sneak attack with a 400 damage weapon, gaining x3 damage, for a total of 1200 physical damage. The weapon is enchanted with 100 frost damage, which is not multiplied.

My enemy has 50% physical damage reduction. This reduces the physical damage to 600. I am on legendary difficulty, so he takes 0.25x damage, or 150 damage. Now, he has no frost resistance, so he takes 25 frost damage.

This damage is reflected back to me. However, I have 80% physical damage reduction and 80% magic resistance. So the reflected damage is reduced to 30 physical damage and 5 frost damage. However, I take 3x damage because of legendary difficulty, and thus I take 90 physical damage and 15 frost damage.

Is this an accurate description of how reflected damage works? Are there some modifiers which are not considered?

Answer 1

I found a couple wiki articles, and a few forum threads, including one where the poster did tests.

The tester, GameFAQs user theonyxphoenix, says

• Damage Reflect enables even if you are blocking
• Damage Reflect does the same amount of damage regardless of your armor/block
• It is not affected by difficulty level.
• Therefore it has the greatest benefit at lower difficulties.

It looks like the full damage the attacker would deal, before difficulty modifiers, is reflected back to the attacker, without being modified by the target's armor or damage reduction.

I can't tell for sure if the attacker's damage reduction and armor reduces the damage reflected back at them, but I would assume it does.

The tester indicated that the difficulty does not affect the damage reflected going either direction:

The damage done by the attack that is reflected isn't affected by difficulty.

Giant does 100 damage

• Novice: 100 damage is reflected 10% of the time. You take lower damage due to difficulty.
• Legendary: 100 damage is reflected 10% of the time. You take much more damage due to the difficulty.

The same amount of damage is reflected regardless. It is just harder to autopilot the higher the difficulty. Does that make sense?

So, in your example, since neither the target's armor nor the difficulty are taken in to account, you would have 1300 damage reflected back at you (assuming the frost damage counts as "melee damage").

Since you have 80% damage resistance, I would expect that to be reduced to 260 damage. If it were multiplied, it would then be 780, but the tester indicated that it is not.