Elemental Damage Taken As Physical

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pneuma wrote:

Sadly it can never happen.

The game engine only allows for conversion graphs that are DAGs. If there are any cycles (say, cold to fire, fire to cold) then it just breaks down.

This is true for the damage conversion mechanic, but damage taken actually works differently enough for it to be possible.

In fact we have some unique armour with Fire Damage taken as Physical already.

The difference is basically that conversion is an iterative process from one damage type to the next, so if it goes backwards there'll be an infinite loop. Damage taken is all calculated in one step though, so no loops are possible.

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Maswasnos wrote:

The difference between player damage conversion and monster damage conversion is also interesting, and there is definitely room for more elemental to physical damage on armor. Maybe a body armour with a large amount of armor rating that had x% of elemental damage converted to physical?

Damage Taken isn't the same as monster Damage Conversion - it's still a separate mechanic. Monsters can have their damage converted in the normal way and it won't matter for the purposes of damage taken.

For example, a lot of the warbands have some of their physical damage converted to their respective elements. If I had a Mutewind (cold) warband, and gave them cold to fire conversion then that would follow damage conversion rules. I could still have a talisman that made me take fire damage as cold without causing an infinite loop if they hit me.

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pneuma wrote:

Oh shit, I had completely forgotten about Rat Cage. Torment was over too quickly. :P

Good to know that it doesn't use the same system. Is there ever a possibility of changing the conversion code for players or is it going to be stuck the way it is for the foreseeable future? It's certainly not necessarily impossible, especially since a lot of the conversion math has to be done up front in the case of >100% X -> Y conversion.

The conversion code isn't different for players. There are two separate mechanics here - one is "Damage Conversion", and the other is "Damage Taken". Monsters can take damage as other types as well, but I don't think we ever use it anywhere.

I wouldn't be in favour of making Damage Conversion work like Damage Taken unless we had a really good reason.

Damage Conversion is a fairly ubiquitous mechanic found in all sorts of skills, monsters and items, so replacing it is no easy task, and has huge gameplay/balance implications. I think the result would also be unintuitive even if you weren't familiar with the current system.

For example, you'd expect to be able to use Cold to Fire on Ice Crash, right? Well Ice Crash gets its cold damage by converting a portion of your physical damage. We can then convert a portion of that cold damage to fire using the current, iterative code.

This wouldn't be possible if we changed these mechanics to "50% of physical damage dealt as cold" and "50% of cold damage dealt as fire". Both of these operations would be performed simultaneously on the initial physical hit. So we'd be trying to deal cold as fire before any cold damage exists.