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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.
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