[Question] Armor Ignoringness of damages

Backfire does is not effected my spirit bond (dont know about essance), i just had used it an hour ago.

ok sorry about the spelling.......................spirit bond does not effect backfire.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the only skill in the game that is inconsistent with this theory is Judge's Insight. I personally think the skill description is wrong. Judge's Insight changes the damage type to Light, not Holy.

You are correct in that Judge's Insight is the only exception to Theory 1. However, just because it is the sole exception, doesn't PROVE the description to be wrong (it might just be coincedental that all other holy damage skills are armor-ignorning), and this is why I am trying to learn about the other theories out there.

Essence bond only triggers on physical and elemental damage, so it would not work on Backfire regardless.

I just tested now both Protective Spirit and Protective Bond against Backfire, using the doppleganger. Protective Spirit/Bond both work in reducing damage from Backfire (tested them separately), as I have claimed. If you were playing with some other skill whose name resembles "sprit bond", please let me know the actual name/description of that skill. There is no real skill (for chapter 1 at least) called "Spirit Bond".

About JI and Holy/Light damage: Light weapons do the extra damage versus Necrotic armor. Light/Holy and Dark/Shadow are the same types as far as the game's concerned, and it's one of the things that bugs me about how most people describe the damage types.

Actually I was wrong.

Dust Trap, which deals earth damage, ignores armor. You can test it by placing the trap betweel the 100 Armor and the 60 Armor on Isle of the Nameless and read the damage.

The other three traps don't display their damage to the caster when going off, so I'll need to use Doppleganger to test it (Pacifism to prevent his regular attacks, then trigger his traps while wearing diff armor).

"Holy" damage from ji is treated s light damage. It does not trigger the +10/20 vs physical on most war armor.

You have basically just said, "Oranges are not apples. Therefore, they must be grapefruit." This is totally flawed reasoning. Physical resistance on armor has nothing to do with Holy/Light damage.
It's like talking about an elemental attack, and saying that because a fire spell doesn't activate on +Al vs physical, it must be Cold damage. It just doesn't work like that...

i didnt put "spirt bond" i worte spirt bond as spirt/bond. i shorted the skills, and im still not seeing the dmg change (always getting same amount). looks like i need to work this out some more then

You say Judge's is flawed in that it doesn't deal armour ignoring damage according to your theory 1. The way I see it is that it all depends when it converts the damage to Holy Damage, before or after the game mechanics calculate the damage to be received. The convert to holy could be after the damage calculation, and therefore the fact that it is armour ignoring not taken in the calculation. Just a thought.

You and I have had this discussion before, but nothing conclusive came of it then...

I'm still wondering, though - what is there in the game to support what you say? It seems to me that "holy ignores armor, light doesn't, JI's description uses the wrong word" is just as reasonable a conclusion as "holy and light are the same, holy/light skills that aren't attacks ignore armor but don't say they do" - but you insist on the latter, and I'm not clear on why.

To test Light/Holy damage: go run around with Tormentor's armor near Grendich Courthouse and get hit by a Charr Martyr. You'll get nailed for 20+ damage with a full set of Tormentor's. Judge's Insight isn't wrong or bugged. Presumably, Dark and Shadow, as well as Chaos and "typeless", are the exact same, but without a way to test them I couldn't say with absolute certainty. I wish they would change the type descriptions so that there are only 3 "typeless" damages, but that's irrelevant.

It's not the damage type, it's the specific attack or skill that the game takes into account for armor. Theory 1 is wrong but unfortunately is also how most people view the damage types/armor system. Regardless of your weapon's type, it doesn't ignore armor at all; only select skills have armor-ignoring damage, as Pharalon said.

This only proves that light damage is increased by Tormentor's (and that perhaps Tormentor's has an inaccurate description as well), not that light and holy are the same thing.

Um, you definitely did not put the slash there, which caused me to misunderstand you.

Anyways, when testing, make sure you are not testing by:
1. Hexed by Backfire.
2. Cast Protective Spirit (or Protective Bond).
3. look at the damage you take from Backfire when performing step 2.

That's the only way I can see how someone could mess up the test and think Protective Spirit (or Protective Bond) does not reduce damage from Backfire...

I think it's more people trying to pull some sense of order out of the skill descriptinos where very little exists, the way we used to with AoE descriptions. If you judged the AoE of a skill from the description, you had a 75% chance of being right. Obviously that makes it next to useless if you really care, but if you just want a general guideline with some exceptions to remember, it's good enough.

The problem with theory 1 is that there are no supporting cases ( I can't think of a single non-skill based armor ignoring damage source ), and several counter examples (JI, Dust Trap, Whirling Defense etc). That leaves you with the somewhat distasteful situation of Theory 2 being the most correct one, and having to look forward to adding a bunch of new exceptions and several hours skill testing come the release of each chapter.

My support case (not the way you expect the support to be):
http://manual.guildwars.com/other/glossary.html (look up Holy damage). Granted, the official website stuff aren't always correct, and technically manual.guildwars.com is no longer linked to from the new official site, but it's *some* form of supporting evidence.

The lack of non-skill based armor ignoring damage source unfortunately coincide with explicitly non-overlapping damage type between weapon and skill damages for Mesmer, Monk, and Necromancers. One can say there are no weapon attacks that ignore armor; but one can also say there are no armor-ignoring skills that deal "Light", "Chaos", or "Dark" damage (notice the double quote, the argument that they are the same as Holy, Shadow is part of the theory 2 bundle IMHO); Different facet of the same situation turns it from "lack of support" to "support", and with the number of typos in skill descriptions throughout the history of the game, "counter examples" are just anti-support, and do not decisively prove the contary.

Anyways, in terms of only looking at the evidence that have been presented in this thread so far, it seems the best course of action (to me at least) is to keep a tally of which theory leads to less exceptions, and adapt when new chapters come out that change the tally. Or until official word supporting one of the theories comes out publicly (and we report all the exceptions as bugs).

Hmm, so Whirling Defense's damage also ignore armor? I'll need to figure out a way to test it with Mr. Dopple.

Score:
Theory 1: 3+ (Judge's Insight, Dust Trap, Whirling Defense, ... more?)
Theory 2: ?

(edit: I'm editing the first post of this thread to keep the tally on exceptions for each theory)

Both the manual and the Prima Strat guide are pretty unreliable sources of info. They both even contain info straight from some of Rah's older game mechanics articles, which is perhaps where the "Holy ignores armor" came from (as this was the early conclusion Rah came to). Interestingly, the manual also says Strike and Strike Damage take armor into consideration, when all the warrior attack skills generally have "strike for" as the description for the armor ignoring bonus damage.

Just run out into the great northern wall. It'll hit everything for the same damage, regardless of AL or level. Of course, it's probably worth testing if it's actually doing piercing damage in the first place. Because it ignores armor, you'd probably have to run Greater Conflag + Mantra of Flame to do that.

I really don't think you'll find any exceptions to theory 2 (I've looked for them for a while). You'd need a source of armor ignoring non-skill damage, and as far as i know, one doesn't exist.

Blah, sorry, I was thinking of exceptions to theory 2.5 as opposed to 2. Of course there are no exceptions to theory 2, doh >_<" !

I'm still going to tally exceptions to theory 1 vs theory 2.5. Even knowing neither is 100% correct, it's helpful as an advisory tool to depend on the theory with less exceptions.

Well, theory 2.5 isn't so much a theory, more of a rule of thumb to help you deal with how ambiguous theory 2 is. There's a lot of exceptions to that rule of thumb (see all warrior attack skills, that "strike" for armor ignoring damage), a bunch of old skills that used to be armor ignoring, but don't anymore and didn't have their description updated ( and viceversa), and skills that just had their descriptions written arbitrarily by some work experience kid in the first place
The only thing I'd personally depend on is what you see when you hit the 100AL test dummy.