fire, ice, shocking and acid resistance and vulnerability

[othotbail]

1. If your armor is say resistant to acid. Does that mean your are harder to hit with acid, you take less damage when hit by acid or both of those.

2. You attack ice elementals with fire arrows. Do they hit more often and do more damage than shocking or acid arrows. Logic would say they do but do they in practice?

3.What about casting fireball on ice elementals etc does it do more damage, is it harder for the ice elementals to save from than say lightning based or acid based spells? Again logic says yes but what does it actually do in game.

4. If your vulnerable to fire what does that actually mean in game as it seems things either have a resistance to all elements or are vulnerable to them all for the most part.

Thanks in advance for any clarification of this

[Eklektikos]

1. If your armor is say resistant to acid. Does that mean your are harder to hit with acid, you take less damage when hit by acid or both of those.

Acid resist 5/- means that you ignore 5 points of any acid damage whenever you are hit by any kind of attack. Acid immunity 5% means that you ignore 5% of any acid damage every time you are hit by any kind of attack. How easy/hard you are to hit is completely unconnected.

2. You attack ice elementals with fire arrows. Do they hit more often and do more damage than shocking or acid arrows. Logic would say they do but do they in practice?

If the ice elementals have a 50% damage vulnerability to fire, then your fire arrows should do 50% more fire damage to them than normal. I honestly have no idea whether ice elementals IG have such a damage vulnerability or not, but that's how damage vulnerabilities work nonetheless. Again, it has no effect on how easy/hard it is for you to hit them.

3.What about casting fireball on ice elementals etc does it do more damage, is it harder for the ice elementals to save from than say lightning based or acid based spells? Again logic says yes but what does it actually do in game.

See above. If they have a % damage vulnerability to fire then any fire damage from the fireball will be increased accordingly. Saving throws are unaffected.

4. If your vulnerable to fire what does that actually mean in game as it seems things either have a resistance to all elements or are vulnerable to them all for the most part.

I think what I've written above ought to explain well enough.

[robocod]

2. You attack ice elementals with fire arrows. Do they hit more often and do more damage than shocking or acid arrows. Logic would say they do but do they in practice?

I don't honestly know. I could look in the monster manual, but they could be totally different in NWN or in Avlis. Best way to find out is to try it

[pincushionman]

Note also there are +X vs. <damage type> items. These make it harder for foes with those weapons to hit you. Assuming +X is larger than your current AC of that type (usually armor).

I myself have a +2 vs. slashing, 5 slashing resist armor. Which does both when I want to wear it. I think. I'm positive about the +2 vs slash, need to check on the other. So there are magic items that do each of the things you're talking about, and that's how to tell them apart.

[othotbail]

Thanks for all the feedback that clears alot of it up. I learned a few things about it I didn't know. So if I read this correctly you shoot an ice elemental with a fire arrow and it does 1d6 damage. This time you get a great roll and it does 6 fire damage. The ice elemental has a 50% fire vulnerability so now you actually do 6 + 3 or 9 fire damage to it.

[Fire Monkey]

Thanks for all the feedback that clears alot of it up. I learned a few things about it I didn't know. So if I read this correctly you shoot an ice elemental with a fire arrow and it does 1d6 damage. This time you get a great roll and it does 6 fire damage. The ice elemental has a 50% fire vulnerability so now you actually do 6 + 3 or 9 fire damage to it.

Effectively yes, but I have never been sure if it just adds 50% to your existing roll or gives you an extra one, so instead of being 1d6=6 +3 its more like 1d6 + 1d3= x.

[whirlin_merlin]

Thanks for all the feedback that clears alot of it up. I learned a few things about it I didn't know. So if I read this correctly you shoot an ice elemental with a fire arrow and it does 1d6 damage. This time you get a great roll and it does 6 fire damage. The ice elemental has a 50% fire vulnerability so now you actually do 6 + 3 or 9 fire damage to it.

Effectively yes, but I have never been sure if it just adds 50% to your existing roll or gives you an extra one, so instead of being 1d6=6 +3 its more like 1d6 + 1d3= x.

I think it adds 50% to the roll rather than making another one. The math is better for that than 1d6 becoming 1.5d6 for example.

[itsabughunt]

I've always been a little mystified by the abundance of equipment with 5% immunity (or vulnerability) to whatever type of damage. Does anyone seriously notice 5% either way? Am I just misunderstanding how this works?

Say an enemy can smack you down with 100 points of slashing damage, but you have 5% immunity. Then you take 95 points of damage instead right? Phhh....who cares? Are you really going to benefit from that? It always seemed like a waste of an equipment slot to me, but maybe someone can explain an advantage I'm missing.

[KinX]

I've always been a little mystified by the abundance of equipment with 5% immunity (or vulnerability) to whatever type of damage. Does anyone seriously notice 5% either way? Am I just misunderstanding how this works?

Say an enemy can smack you down with 100 points of slashing damage, but you have 5% immunity. Then you take 95 points of damage instead right? Phhh....who cares? Are you really going to benefit from that? It always seemed like a waste of an equipment slot to me, but maybe someone can explain an advantage I'm missing.

as far as i know, that's pretty much it. There aren't many opponents that do that much dmg, so you're looking at 1-5 dmg gone.

The main advantage that i can think of is that immunity kicks in before anything else. Someone might want to confirm that though.

Let's say you've got 10% immunity to slashing and a stoneskin active. The 10% will kick in before the stoneskin, so instead of the stoneskin absorbing 100 dmg, it's absorbing 90. Not exactly much of a difference, but it does mean the stoneskin will last a tiny bit longer.

Another example is if you've got 5/- slashing as well as the 10% immunity. You get hit for 10dmg, immunity knocks off 1 point and the slashing kicks in taking off another 5. So you end up taking a 4 dmg instead of 5. This example is more impressive if you had a higher percentage immunity.

I kind of agree though, 10% immunity doesn't really count for much

[Darkfire]

Ah but it does.

10% off of every hit adds up. Just like I've seen people tear through dungeons and gain life back using only 3 vampiric regen.

When you get hit 100+ times, even 1 damage makes a difference. So if you can knock off 10% of an attack, say they on AVG do 30 damage, that's 3 per hit. I've seen epic feats that give 3/- DR, and people love em. % also scales up for crits.

Even 5% has its uses. Of course, it's the lowest you can get so it's also more important for lower levels.

[Leertes]

10% off of every hit adds up.

When you get hit 100+ times, even 1 damage makes a difference.

Only too true. Dmg immunity to anything, no matter how little, is an excellent thing to have. It can especially help when a certain dungeon has an element-theme to the NPC's Dmg type.

For instance, you're in a dungeon facing ten NPCs. Each one has four attacks per round, and their weapons do 1d6 of an element type per hit. If you have any number of percent-5%, 10%, 15%- for Dmg immunity, then no matter what, you will reduce the Dmg recieved by at least one. If every NPC lands half of their attacks hit against you, that's at least twenty Dmg per round that you're negating due to a measely immunity, and even more if they're landing critical hits against you. Now granted you must an item that grants immunity to the Dmg type that you're facing, but if you do, it's well worth it to throw that item on.