[HJ]

Originally posted by ywl:
Some more questions while licker is still at it.

How about the various magical spells and attacks? The armor negating ones (e.g. lightning) are fine. But how about the ones which are affected by protection or only armor piercing (1/2 protection, I guess): various forms of fire, "Geyser", "Cold bolt", "Blade Wind", "Gifts from Heaven", "Acid Rain", "Magma Eruption"?

How about monsters? Life drain of undead (armor piercing only), breaths weapons, crushing of Water Elementals (also armor piercing only)? Also, how much piercing and slashing should we assign to the monster and animal bites and claws? Piercing for longer claws and slashing for shorter?

The problem is classification of damage to piercing, slashing and bashing are only good (to a limited extent) for melee weapons. It fails (badly IMHO) if we want to use it on wider circumstances. Using a single protection number may be rough, but it's at least simple and approximate most situations equally well (or bad).

Why would that be a problem? The same way you attribute damage to melee weapons, you can also attribute it to other things, depending on how someone (the devs) envision them. It's the same thing like saying "how do we attribute defense to different armours?" in the present state of the game. Yet it has been done, and they decided that this shield will have a defense value of 2. In the same way they can say that bite does crushing damage, and that particular spell does slashing damage. That is, if the system works by attributing only a single type of damage only per weapon.