moonlight greatsword

I have 32 intelligence and my moonlight is +1 and its damage is listed as 145 but on some enemies im doing 250 damage...how can a weapon do more do almost double its listed damage....i thought when u scaled your intelligence it got closer to the listed damage....does scaling make your ar surpass listed damage?

The damage the weapon would do, if you had 0 intelligence, and the weapon had no intelligence requirement, would be 145. Look to the right of that number, and you'll see a +#, that is what your intelligence is adding for scaling. If you look at your character stats in R hand one or two, which ever its equipped to, it will say the total Attack Rating (AR). This is how much your weapon deals, but since we don't know a lot about defense, we don't know exactly how much it will deal on any target.

I don't think you can surpass that number when you attack, but, at least with weapons that deal physical damage, when you do different attacks (running, rolling, strong, etc), it will do different damage, as well as if you 2 hand it, which adds damage, and increases your STR to 1.5 for STR scaling purposes (if it works like other weapons, it won't get any more AR, but 2 handing a weapon will increase its power still).

When you evaluate AR, you need to consider if its in 2 damages, or if its just pure physical. Against players, and enemies who are in the end of the game->NG+ stuff like that, pure physical will do more damage, because it doesn't have to get through 2 defenses like a magical, fire, or lightning weapon would. These weapons have higher ARs but less overall damage. Your weapon is unique, along with the Moonlight Butterfly Horn, in that it deals 1 type of damage, that isn't physical. In fact, there are no weapons that deal just fire or just lightning. In this case, you can pretend its pure physical, but as its a different damage type, magic usually gets through shields better (that players use especially), and magic defense happens to either be (usually) much higher or much lower than the physical defense, depends on the player. The main weakness is that spell, Great Magic Barrier, that if you don't have a backup weapon, you're dead, because it prevents 90% of magic damage.

^What he said. LOL...

TL;DR version: 145 is the base damage. At +1, the bonus for INT stat is rank S, so whatever extra damage you are doing will be determined by your INT.

Which enemies were you testing this on though? Some enemies are more resilient towards magic and the MLGS is pure magic damage.

The serpents