Description
Overkill is the damage dealt to a unit beyond what was needed to kill it.
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This excess portion would otherwise be wasted. Some abilities, items and augments capture it. They redirect the excess as new damage to nearby enemies.
Items that benefit from Overkill (1)
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- +55% AD
- +55% AP
100% of overkill damage plus 130 is dealt as magic damage to the two enemies nearest the target.
Frequently asked questions
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What does "overkill" actually mean in TFT?
Overkill is the slice of a damage instance that lands beyond what was needed to kill the target. It is the excess that would otherwise be wasted on a corpse.
By itself, it is not a damage type or a global mechanic. Nothing happens to overkill unless a specific source explicitly captures it.
What turns overkill into a payoff is a per-source clause. Examples:
- An ability with an "if this kills, the projectile continues" rider.
- An artifact whose passive reads "100% of overkill damage plus 100 is dealt as magic damage to nearby enemies".
- An augment that redirects a percentage of overkill to the nearest enemy.
Note: Without one of those clauses, the excess simply does not exist as a usable quantity.
Sources
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Does damage past a Shield count as overkill?
No. Overkill is measured against the target's underlying Health pool, not the Shield bar on top of it.
A normal Shield in TFT absorbs incoming damage in place of Health. It is documented as absorbing physical, magic, and true damage equally.
- Only the portion of a damage instance that survives the Shield reaches Health.
- Only the portion that exceeds the target's remaining Health then qualifies as overkill.
Note: In practice, if a target has lots of Shield left when the killing-blow ability resolves, the overkill payoff is small. That holds even when the headline damage number is huge. Most of the instance was eaten by the Shield first.
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How is overkill different from execute?
Execute is a kill outcome. Overkill is the leftover slice after a normal kill.
- Execute is a threshold check. If it passes, it deletes the unit by routing 100% of its current Health through the raw-damage source type, ignoring resists and mitigations.
- Overkill is the leftover slice after a normal damage instance has already killed the target. It only matters if the source has a clause that captures it.
Two consequences fall out:
- An execute by definition produces zero overkill. The kill was raw, not via excess damage.
- An overkill-converting source needs the killing damage to come from a regular damage instance, not a threshold-execute kill.
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Does overkill carry over from one target to the next?
Only when the source explicitly says so.
- Some abilities are written so that, if a projectile kills the first target, it continues and deals overkill to the next enemy hit.
- Some artifacts redirect overkill as magic damage to a fixed number of nearby enemies.
- Some hero abilities have a projectile-style or summon-style ricochet that bounces the excess to the closest enemy.
None of these carryovers are global behavior. They live in the individual entity's text.
Note: If an ability has no overkill clause, hitting for far more than the target's remaining Health is just wasted damage on a corpse.
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Does Damage Amp or Crit double-dip on overkill carryover damage?
No, at least on the carryover case Riot patched.
There, overkill damage "no longer further multiplies its damage with Damage Amp and Crit". A second amplification path during Overtime was closed too.
The intended rule is that Damage Amp and Crit apply once, on the original damage instance that produced the overkill. The carried-over portion is then redirected at face value rather than re-amplified at the new target.
Note: Interactions where overkill scales larger than the initial hit are treated as bugs and corrected. If you see one, it is not intended behaviour.
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Is there a cap on how much overkill can carry over?
There is no global TFT-wide cap published on the wiki.
The cap is whatever the source's text says, and it varies:
- Some sources convert 100% of overkill plus a flat bonus and split it among a fixed number of nearby enemies.
- Some augments convert only a fraction of overkill, for example a partial percentage to the nearest single enemy.
- Some ability-based carryovers continue at full value into the next enemy a projectile hits, but stop there.
Note: The text you should trust is the entity's own tooltip. There is no hidden "overkill is capped at X% of next target's max HP" rule to read into it.
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I dealt huge damage but only a tiny bit carried over — why?
Two things to check.
First, overkill is measured against the target's remaining Health, not its max. If it was already low when the killing instance landed, the overkill slice is small no matter how big the headline number was.
Second, only the source that actually produced the killing damage instance carries. Suppose a different ability had already chunked the target down to single digits, and your carrier merely tapped it dead. Then the overkill on that final tap is what gets converted, not the giant hit that came before.
Note: Overkill is per-source and per-killing-instance, not a running total of the fight.