(For an extremely brief summary of this first post read the second post)
Let me start by saying this right off the bat:







Valor does not simply double your damage output.








Skill description:

Seems like a pretty straightforward description right? Nope. The only part of that description that you can take at face value is the part that says it lasts for 10 seconds.

What Valor actually does:
Valor affects the damage stat of your attacks so the effects are applied to not just your attack stat but to your 3 elemental damage stats as well (the 3 damage values you see in the character window under "Rune Attribute").
It also affects your Hit Crit and Crit Damage stats because nothing says "git rekt" like having your attack accuracy crit rate and crit damage tripled. Yes I said tripled.

As it turns out that 2x multiplier on Valor is additive so it takes your stat (ie. crit) doubles it and then adds that on top of your original stat effectively making it 300% of what it was originally. To give an actual example if your attack was 500 and then you activated Valor then you'd be running around with 1500 attack.

At this point some of you might be thinking something along the lines of "that was a long-winded way of saying Valor triples my damage instead of doubling it" and you'd be right...if you were just looking at regular hits. With elemental skills your damage output is calculated a bit differently compared to normal attacks. Skill damage is based on 3 values: the base damage of the rune skill (levelling the runes) the multiplier from passive skills (lightning/fire/frost rune buff) and the additional elemental damage stat (obtained from 3* and higher avatars as well as from certain wings). Instead of tripling the final damage output which is: base*multiplier+add damage it only triples the additional elemental damage stat. It might seem minor at first glance due to it not being affected by the passive skill multiplier but the actual difference can be pretty alarming when you throw Valor into the equation.

Just to bring the above 2 screenshots into perspective...
My lightning rune is level 100 and the lightning damage passive is level 14 which gives it a 11x modifier in total (that passive is also additive so base damage of 100% + 1000%).
My frost rune is only level 20 and my frost damage passive is level 2 which gives it a 1.4x modifier.
Without valor active my lightning skills hit roughly 3x harder than my frost skills (no surprise there) but with Valor active that gap narrows by a large amount; my lightning skills only gained about 60k damage while my frost skills nearly tripled in damage and is only 100k behind my lightning skills.

So if you've got all 3 lightning skills equipped and bring Valor for the sole purpose of increasing your lightning damage output you might want to consider another avatar skill (unless you've got saint wings unlocked in which case go nuts).