Smash and multi-hit are judgements, not skill requirements
✍️ Alice・愛麗沙
It is not a dead rune. The #smash and #multi-hit printed on a rune are damage judgements, not skills. Taiwan’s official game guide defines them without ambiguity and without ever using the word “skill”: a smash is judged when one instance of damage reaches a set ratio of your attack power; a multi-hit is judged when enough hits land inside a short window. Both conditions are purely arithmetic — how hard, how fast — so any class, using any attack, triggers them whenever the numbers clear. The system that genuinely reads skill tags is a different one: gem carving, where a Star Prism’s tag lines only pay on skills carrying the matching tag. Two systems, one shared vocabulary. That collision is the entire misconception. This page is Taiwan-server data throughout, and the threshold numbers below are Korean-community measurements at medium confidence — the official text never publishes them.
Why so many players get caught by this
There is a thread on Taiwan’s main board devoted to exactly this question, and it has been read nearly ten thousand times. That view count is the useful fact: this is not a few confused players, it is an interface that invites the confusion. Rune descriptions print tags like #smash and #multi-hit, skill descriptions print small tags underneath them, and the two look identical. So the natural inference is “this rune wants a skill I do not have” — followed by the expensive conclusion that the rune is wasted on your class.
The correction starts with what the official text actually says.
What the official guide defines — and what it conspicuously does not
Taiwan’s official game guide carries a dedicated article on damage judgements. Its definitions are short enough to summarise exactly:
- Smash is judged when a single instance of dealt damage reaches a certain ratio of your attack power. Raising STR, or the smash-enhancement stat, increases the power of smash-judged attacks.
- Multi-hit is judged when your attacks reach a certain count within a short period. Raising DEX, or the multi-hit-enhancement stat, increases the power of multi-hit-judged attacks.
Read those two sentences for what they contain: a threshold on damage size, a threshold on hit count, and two scaling stats. Now read them for what they omit. Neither definition names a skill, a class, or a tag. The judgement is evaluated on the hit that just landed — basic attacks, skill hits, damage-over-time ticks, bonus hits from other runes, all of it. Clear the condition and the judgement fires; the label on whatever produced the hit is never consulted.
Which means: as long as you are hitting something, you are continuously producing smash and multi-hit judgements. No specific skill is required, and none can be. A #smash tag on a rune means “this effect pays out when a smash judgement lands”, not “this rune only works with a smash-tagged skill”.
The guide stops at “a certain ratio” and “a certain number” — the actual figures have never been published. What circulates is Korean-community measurement, medium confidence, not independently re-verified on the Taiwan server:
| Hit type | Trigger gate | In-bucket rate | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smash | A single hit must deal ≥40% of your attack power before smash enhancement applies | per +100 ≈ +1.18% | MED |
| Multi-hit | 6+ hits within 3 seconds, then later hits count as multi-hit | per +100 ≈ +1.18% | MED |
| AoE | One strike must hit 2+ targets before AoE enhancement applies | per +100 ≈ +1.18% | MED |
| Combo | Four combo bands: 1–10 pays 1/4, 11–50 pays 2/4, 51–100 pays 3/4, only 101+ pays in full | per +100 ≈ +0.57% | MED |
All four enhancements share one bucket with the same divisors (multi/smash/AoE 8500, combo 17500), but each hides its own trigger gate. Any calculator that assumes they always apply in full will systematically over-report damage. Gate numbers are KR-community findings, medium confidence.
Two of those four rows go beyond the pair everyone argues about, and they matter. AoE needs a single hit to land on two or more targets — which is why an AoE-enhancement stat is close to dead weight on a pure single-target boss fight. Combo does not gate on or off at all; it pays in tiers, a quarter of its value in the 1–10 band, half at 11–50, three-quarters at 51–100, and only full value past 101. Every one of these four enhancements lives in the same damage bucket with the same divisors, so a spreadsheet that assumes all four always apply in full will over-report your damage systematically. The gates are the reason the bucket is not simply additive in practice.
The structural proof: rage and counter
If the definitions still feel like a lawyer’s reading, the official guide supplies a second article that settles it by construction.
Boss monsters carry two special states. Rage — a red aura — makes the target fragile against smash-judged attacks and resistant to multi-hit-judged ones, and is cleared by landing repeated smash damage. Counter — a blue aura — is the exact mirror: fragile to multi-hit, resistant to smash, cleared by repeated multi-hit damage. Both are transcribed verbatim from the official guide and sit at high confidence in our combat dataset.
Now consider what that system requires in order to function. It reads the type of damage you just dealt and adjusts what the boss takes. If smash and multi-hit were class-restricted skill categories, this mechanic would be incoherent — half the roster could never clear a rage aura, and the encounter design would have to gate party composition instead of gating damage profile. It does not. Nexon built a monster state that asks “what kind of hit was that”, which is only a sensible question if every class can produce both kinds. The mechanic’s existence is the proof.
It also gives the reading a practical edge: when a boss goes red, the answer is not “swap classes”, it is “land bigger individual hits” — and when it goes blue, “land more of them”. That is a rotation decision available to everyone.
So when do skill tags actually matter?
The overcorrection would be to conclude skill tags are decorative. They are not. There is exactly one system in the game that consumes them, and it is gem carving.
A Star Prism’s tag-damage lines only apply to skills whose printed tags match. That is a genuine lookup: you check what your class’s main skills are actually tagged, and you carve accordingly, because a line matching nothing on your bar pays nothing. Per-class recommended tag orders live in our gem dataset, drawn from Korean community sheets — and the dataset’s own note draws the boundary this article is about: only smash and multi-hit have Taiwan-confirmed tag names; the remaining six tags are Korean-derived glosses, and the gem tag system is a separate system from rune damage judgements. Classes the source sheet skipped are recorded as missing rather than invented.
One sentence for the whole division of labour: runes ask “was that hit heavy enough, fast enough, wide enough” — gems ask “what word is printed on this skill”. The first question includes essentially every class. Only the second one needs the table.
What we do not know
The official definitions are solid; the numbers on them are not. The 40%-of-attack-power and six-hits-in-three-seconds thresholds are Korean-community findings at medium confidence, never published by Nexon and never re-measured on the Taiwan client by us. They stay flagged MED in our data and they should stay flagged in your head — use them to reason about whether a build clears a gate, not to compute a damage number to two decimal places. The combo tier boundaries carry the same caveat. And the size of rage’s and counter’s damage modifiers is undisclosed entirely: we know the direction, not the magnitude.
The cost side of this misconception — what it actually runs up when a player acts on it and feeds a legendary into an irreversible fusion — is its own article, and worth reading before you dismantle anything.
Our verdict
Do not let the tag on a rune scare you off. #smash and #multi-hit are damage judgements with purely arithmetic trigger conditions: one hit heavy enough is a smash, enough hits fast enough is a multi-hit. Any class and any attack can satisfy them, and the rune’s bonus pays out exactly the same. The place where you genuinely match against your class’s skill tags is gem carving, which is a different system with a different lookup table. When a rune printed with #smash or #multi-hit drops, judge it on whether its effect is worth a slot — never on whether you “have that skill”.
A claim you can overturn: smash and multi-hit judgements are not restricted to any skill or class. That follows directly from the two official definitions, word for word, neither of which contains the word “skill”, and structurally from a boss-state system keyed on damage type. If any rune in the Taiwan client is demonstrated to fire only under a specifically tagged skill rather than on any qualifying hit, bring the screenshots — we will list that rune as an exception and rewrite this page with the correction dated.
