Death Must Die Luck Stat, Explained

Some terms get thrown around a lot in video games. The Luck stat is arguably the biggest culprit among such classifications, so Death Must Die players may be confused about what it does. This obscure stat can help your run succeed in a few different ways.

About the Luck Stat in Death Must Die

Let’s begin by looking word-for-word at what Death Must Die tells us about the Luck stat in the Inventory menu. In the Inventory menu, if you hover over any stat, you’ll get a brief breakdown of what it does.

To reword the in-game tooltip: Luck in Death Must Die increases the odds of chance-based effects occurring—specifically god blessings, item spells, and objects. God blessings and item spells are straightforward. However, after about 10 hours of gameplay, we have yet to come across anything that could be considered a “chance-based object” that isn’t an equippable item.

Note

As of writing this, Death Must Die is still in early access. Therefore, chance-based objects may be added to the game later in development.

“Chance-based objects” are too obscure to examine at this point in the game’s development. With that in mind, we’ll focus on explaining how Luck affects god blessings and item spells.

Testing Luck With God Blessings

Whenever you get to choose a god blessing, you’ll see a brief description of what each offered blessing does as well as its stats.

For instance, in a recent run, we got to choose a blessing from Winter, Goddess of Cold. The three options we got were Chilling Attack, Ice Shands, and Path of Frost. Out of these, only Ice Shards has a Chance stat, meaning that it only has a chance to activate. In this case, that chance is 17% to activate every time the player attacks and hits an enemy.

Note

“Attacks” here means using your main weapon; not using Strikes, Casts, or other forms of dealing damage.

Ice Shards’ Activation With a 17% Base Chance and 0% Character Luck

During this run, we chose Ice Shards while our current character—Kront—had a base Luck stat of 0%.

While going through this run, we found that Ice Shards activated about once every five or six attack hits. This lines up with Ice Shards’ 17% activation chance.

Ice Shards’ Activation With a 25% Base Chance and 34.8% Character Luck

After this run, we started a new one with Kront, but this time equipped an item (Magnetic Gauntlets of Luck) that gave us +16.8% Luck. We then got Ice Shards as a god blessing again. Moreover, we grabbed a Master-level Serendipity god blessing for another +18% Luck. We upgraded Ice Shards throughout this run to get its activation chance from 17% to 25%.

Overall, since we’re testing if Luck bonuses stack additively, we then wanted to see if all these bonuses combined to make Ice Shards’ activation chance 59.8% on attack hits.

Afterward, we found that Ice Shards activated about half the time we landed attacks—sometimes on back-to-back attacks. From this, it seems that Luck bonuses stack additively, as a Luck stat of 34.8% plus Ice Shards’ base activation chance of 25% resulted in Ice Shards activating consistently around 60% of the time when landing attacks.

Testing Luck With Item Spells

Some equippable items in Death Must Die have a chance to trigger unique effects. This seems to work similar to the activation of god blessings. There’s only one way to find out for sure!

Weapon Burning Effect Activation With a 20% Base Chance and 0% Character Luck

For our next test, we equipped Avoron with an item (Sovereign Katana of Wisdom) that has a 20% chance to apply Burning to enemies upon hitting them with basic attacks. To get some control data, we started a run with Avoron at 0% Luck.

We found that the Burning effect of Avoron’s katana was activated once every five or six attack hits—as you’d expect.

Weapon Burning Effect Activation With a 20% Base Chance and 16.8% Character Luck

For our next run with Avoron and his inflammatory katana, we equipped the knight with the same Magnetic Gauntlets of Luck we gave Kront in our god blessing Luck test. This raised Avoron’s Luck stat to 16.8%. Theoretically, this should cause the Sovereign Katana of Wisdom to apply Buring to enemies once every three or four attack hits.

This was exactly what happened! With a combined activation chance of 36.8% (20% from the weapon’s base chance and 16.8% from the equipped Magnetic Gauntlets of Luck), Avoron’s attack hits applied Burning approximately every three or four hits. As such, an item effect’s base activation chance and a character’s Luck stat stack the same as they would for a god blessing.

Conclusions on How Luck Works in Death Must Die

After thorough testing, we’re confident in saying that a character’s Luck stat in Death Must Die stacks additively with the base activation chances of god blessings and item effects. Therefore, if you want your Strikes and item effects to trigger more often, increase your Luck stat!

You can do so most easily by equipping items that give you bonuses to your character’s Luck. However, you can also get Luck bonuses from interacting with structures you come across during a run. These structures appear on your minimap as yellow dots.

Warning

We recommend staying away from graves and fallen hero structures, as they tend to curse you (which gives you a debuff) more than help you.

Keep in mind that Death Must Die (as of writing this article) is still in early access. As such, some mechanics may change as the game gets closer to its full release. To learn more about how games go through their development process, check out our article on how video games are made.