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In Dominions three types of resistances exist:
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:
Caster’s Penetration roll: 11
+ Penetration bonuses
+ Additional skill in spell path / 2 (rounding up)
+ DRN
+4 "Hard to resist" / -4 "Easy to resist"
Target’s MR roll: Magic Resistance
+ skill in spell path / 2 (rounding down)
+ DRN.
The caster wins ties!
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.
There was a bug in Dominions 4 that lead to communion masters losing penetration bonuses granted from items/bless. It looks like the bug might still exist in Dominions 5, tests seem to indicate -1 external penetration for 2 levels the caster misses (rounding down).
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:
Spells (+4 MR)
Generic:
National:
Items (Const 0-6)
Generic:
National:
Fire resistance
Shock resistance
Cold resistance
Poison resistance
Fire vulnerability
Shock vulnerability
Cold vulnerability
Poison vulnerability
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.
Someone confirm this calculation
Elemental vulnerablities double the relevant damage received, 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:
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.
fill in all the different spells
Fire resistance
+5 FR
+10 FR
Shock resistance
+5 SR
+10 SR
Cold resistance
+5 CR
+10 CR
Poison resistance
+10 FR
+15 FR
All resist spells
fill in all the different spells
Fire Vulnerability
-5 FR
-10 FR
Shock Vulnerability
-5 SR
-10 SR
Cold Vulnerability
-5 CR
-10 CR
Poison Vulnerability
-10 FR
-15 FR
All resist spells
Bludgeoning resistance (blunt)
Piercing resistance (pierce)
Slashing resistance (slash)
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)
Physmoss
A particular powerful defense against physical damage is to combine high Prot and physical resistances with the spell Mossbody. Mossbody reduces damage after all other damage reductions, meaning that a unit can potentially become immune to all physical damage for as long as the Mossbody effect lasts.
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:
Spells
Note: Lucid's Tematic Gemgen adds the Ghost Orb item that autocasts Skeletal Body