Damage Types. What do they mean?

So, I’ve searched and read and I've found nothing that answers the topic fully. This is all that I found:

Physical: Slashing (swords and axes), Blunt (hammers), Piercing (bows)
Elemental: Fire, Lightning, Cold, Earth
Other: Chaos, Shadow(Dark), Holy(Light)

PERFECT! Now, what does that do for me. How can I use that in PVP. How will slashing help me compared to blunt or piercing? When will chaos or holy damage help me in PVP?

I understand that some armor protects you from Physical or Elemental damage, BUT what does slashing do compared to blunt and piercing?

Does slashing do more than blunt, does it do something different, if its all the same, why are there even different types?

Also, what about some skills that say JUST damage, like a mesmer spell that says "deal XX damage," well what kind of damage is it (physical, fire, chaos, what)?

I haven't found any guide or FAQ on why there are even different physical damage and what does it all mean in PVP. OR how armor reduces that damage. There are many other dead topics like this where no one has answered these questions. I hope someone could please answer these questions.

So in a nutshell my questions are:
How do the 3 physical sub-types differ?
How much does armor reduce damage by?
What damage does a skill deal (example, what damage does a mesmer hex deal)?

Thank you.

Those are very good questions. Unfortunately I cant answer any of them =p

i believe skill damage does exactly what it says it does though. All of my nuke spells seem to ignore armor.

perhaps you will be the one to figure it out, i would not be to hastey to ask for ansers that you might be happer finding on your own

that sounded cool didnt it, like lord of the rings or somthing.

1: not totally sure, they could do nothing, but then again, as there are armor tiers cloth/leather/scale-chain??/plate finals being 60/70/80/85? at 20 as I recall. it is possible that diff types get a bonus against a given armor type.

2: fairly easy to calculate this yourself, find something strong enough to hurt you with max armor, but not so strong it will insta kill you with no armor, next wear no armor, get the average of its to you damage over 100+ hits. then put on one set of armor all of a given armor value. get the average again, get another set of higher armor, do this again. Now compair the 3 results against each-other and you'll have a rough average of what armor does. Rough because unless you make your average 1000+ hits odd are the amount of crits per sample could differ greatly leading to invalid results.

3: damage is usually specified in the spell, if not it is usually based upon the class/skill line from where the spell came. I would imagine most if not all mesmer spells that do dmg, do chaos dmg

Thanks for all the speculation guys, but this helped the most:

What sucks is, we don't have hardcore facts so all we can do is speculate what damage types do, same when it comes to pets etc.

The article touches upon a lot of things, even elementalists spell damage, but it didn't talk about a mesmer's damage. It does answer how much damage an attack does and how armor reduces that damage, but it forgets to talk about the other types of damage.

So these questions still remain:
How do the three physical damage sub-types differ (also chaos etc)?
What type of damage does a mesmer hex deal?

Mesmer hexes deal chaos damage. In general, the damage from the hexes will go through armour, but stuff like absorption will still add full modifiers.

As for damage types, except for skills that ignore armour, damage is dealt against the listed armour value. For example, against a necromancer wearing bonelace armour (60 AL, +15 vs piercing), piercing attacks deal damage against AL75, while slashing attacks deal damage against AL60. With the exception of holy, which deals double damage to undead, the damage sub-types have no inherent difference beyond what's explicitly listed in the armour of the damage's target. All the statistical damages are listed.

As for versus NPCs, it should be fairly clear what works and what doesn't. Warrior class mobs take more from ele damage, ranger class take more from physical, ice elementals take more from fire, and soforth.