In Dominions three types of resistances exist:

1. Magic Resistance (MR) helps protect a unit against spells or abilities with the Magic Resistance Negates keyword.
2. Elemental Resistances protects against elemental sources of damage. Elemental resistance can be either Fire Resistance (FR), Shock Resistance (SR), Cold Resistance (CR) or Poison Resistance (PR).
3. Physical Resistances halves damage, rounded up, from physical sources of damage which can be either Blunt, Slash or Pierce.

A key element in winning battles in Dominions is to mitigate your opponent's damage output by making sure your armies have access to the appropriate resistances. Resistances can be applied through taking a resistance bless, buffing your troops with magic spells that grant resistance, fielding units with inherent resistances and, in the case of commanders, equipping items that grant resistances.

Some spells and abilities check a target’s magic resistance (MR). Magic resistance is most often binary in nature, it either protects the target or it does not, with nothing in-between. Against some spells a successful resistance check merely means crippling injuries rather than instant death.

Some spells (mostly Astral) require the caster to defeat the target’s magic resistance before the spell can take effect. If a spell description states that “Magic resistance negates” then the following check is made:

Note that not all targets will have any magic skill, much less skill in that spell’s path, so often the target will simply add Magic Resistance and the DRN.

Magic boosts obtained from a communion are not considered in the above.

If a spell description states that “Magic resistance negates easily” then the caster suffers a –4 modifier to his or her penetration roll. This is the same as "easy to resist." "Hard to resist" gives a +4 to penetration roll.

A notable exception to the above is the check to avoid death at the end of petrification: this always done at a roll of 13 + DRN vs MR + DRN + (earth skill) / 2.

All units have a Magic Resistance rating. If your opponent is using spells that target MR it may be worthwhile to buff the magic resistance of your troops and commanders. Magic resistance can be buffed in the following ways:

1. An Astral bless can give up to +3 to MR. This stacks with other sources of MR.
2. A number of spells give +4 MR. The generic spells are Resist Magic, Iron Will, Antimagic and Army of Lead. None of these spells stack with each other, but do stack with non-spell sources of MR.
3. Some items, such as Amulet of Antimagic, Lead Shield and Armor of Souls, give bonuses to MR. Bonus MR from items stack with bonuses from other items as well as other sources. Multiple copies of the same item do not stack.
4. Fighting in provinces with Drain gives a bonus to MR. Conversely, fighting in provinces with Magic gives a penalty to MR.

There are four elemental resistances and, correspondingly, four elemental vulnerabilities

The elemental resistances provide a flat reduction to the elemental damage suffered. The appropriate resistance ability reduces fatigue damage from heat and chill auras by double these values.

The damage reduction takes place after DRN is rolled but before any multipliers are added. This is most commonly the case with Fire spells that often do Fire AP (armor piercing) damage.

• E.g. a unit with 5 FR and 20 prot is hit with 20 Fire + AP damage. First the damage is reduced to 15 because of the Fire Resistance. The unit ends up taking (15 - 20/2 5 damage.

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Elemental vulnerablities double the relevant damage recieved, with the maximum increase being the size of the vulnerability. In the case of poison damage, only the initial poisoning is affected, rather than each subsequent poison tick.

When considering capped damage, vulnerability to the relevant damage type does not increase the damage cap. For example, 1 capped armor negating shock damage can never deal more than 1 damage, even to a unit with shock vulnerability.

Just like MR, Elemental Resistances can be buffed in a number of ways:

• A bless can give access to increased resistances.
• Items can provide elemental resistances. Note that duplicates do not stack, while resistance from different items do stack.
• Certain thrones can provide elemental resistances, such as the Throne of Thorns (+10 PR).
• A number of spells provide elemental resistances. These spells provide either +5 or +10 elemental resistance. Note that spells that provide the same amount of elemental resistance do not stack, but a +10 spell will stack with a +5 spell. I.e. if a commander casts Protection from Lightning and is then buffed with Ground Army they get a total of +15 SR.

When buffing resistances with spells it is important to be aware of the quirks of the Dominions casting AI. Before casting a spell the casting AI will take a unit's current resistance into consideration. If the AI considers the unit's elemental resistance to be high enough it may refuse to cast the resistance buffing spell.

E.g. a commander with high inherent CR (like a Jotun Skratti), a magic item that grants CR (like a Ring of Frost) or CR from a bless might skip casting Protection from Cold or Winter Ward. To avoid this it can be useful to cast battlefield-wide resistance spells or to cast resistance spells before blessing.

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The physical resistances halve damage taken from their respective types, rounded up. This reduction is applied after factoring in protection. For this reason physical resistances amplify the value of Regeneration and spells that mitigate raw damage (e.g. Mistform and Mossbody)

When buffing physical resitances, the player has fewer choices than when buffing magical or elemental resistances. For this reason units with inherent physical resistances can be quite valuable throughout the game. The following buffs physical resistances:

1. Picking up the Fortitude Bless during pretender creation.
2. Some spells grant various physical resistances.