How to Fix Knockback Not Scaling With Damage Dealt in Unity

If a jab and a heavy slam knock an enemy back the same distance, your knockback ignores damage. Scaling the impulse by damage makes hits feel weighty. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Scale impulse by damage

Compute force = baseKnockback + damage * knockbackPerDamage so harder hits push further, instead of a single constant impulse.

2. Account for mass

Apply with rb.AddForce(dir * force / rb.mass, ForceMode.Impulse) or use VelocityChange so heavier targets resist knockback consistently.

3. Optionally use accumulated percent

For a launch-style system, multiply by a growing damage percent on the target so repeatedly hit enemies fly further, similar to platform fighters.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.