Fire/Cold vs. Magic Fire/Cold
Tresset
Member, Moderator Posts: 8,268
Seriously. What is the difference between these two things? I noticed that many protection from fire/cold spells give like 100% resist to normal fire/cold and 50% resist to magic fire/cold but I don't get the difference. I know the spells say that magic fire/cold is from spells like fireball and cone of cold yet those spells are blocked 100% so they can't really be magic fire/cold damage sources... Are there even any magic fire/cold damage sources in BG1 (or BG2 for that matter)?
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The whole magical/non-magical fire discussion is a rules lawyer wet dream anyway. When you cast fireball are you summoning magical fire? Or simply creating combustibles that result in regular fire? The current setup lets us avoid the 14 pages of citations from the PHB, Ravenloft, Next, the Necronomicon, and My Pet Goat that will inevitably follow.
"There are several types of magical damage in BG2, and several types of physical damage as well. The magical types of damage are: Fire, Cold, Electricity, Acid, Magic Damage. The sixth type of magical damage is Poison. Your resistances on the character sheet should give you some info about the types of resistances. There are spells which protect vs each of the magical damage types, except Poison - for which there are five vanilla items (possibly more if you play with an item upgrade mod).
Spells which inflict Magic damage are: Magic Missile, Skull Trap, Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Bolt of Glory, Cause Wounds, Finger of Death, Slay Living, False Dawn (i think), Sunray, and pobably some more, although I cannot remember all of them.
Physical damage has 4 different categories too - slashing, piercing, crushing and missile. Actually, missile fire is a subtype of piercing damage (meaning, if you have 50% piercing damage resistance, this will absorb 50% of damage your character takes from missile fire too, but if you have 50% missile damage resistance, this won't stop any of the damage dealt to you by piercing weapons such as spears or short swords)."
And there are no spells in the game that deal 'Magical Fire' or 'Magical Cold'
Generally, any high power effect, like fireballs will be evocation, since it's difficult to think up where the explosion could be called from. On the other hand, simple flames can some times be invocation, called from the plane of fire to light something, but doesn't sustain it requiring proper fuel, while evocation would continue to fuel the flames with magic. Call Flames, if memory serves, is invocation. It just deals 1d6 non-magical fire damage, and if the target is wearing flammable material (or is something like a large pile of brush or the like), will set said material on fire, which continues to burn for as long as it has enough fuel or until snuffed.
Cloud kill is one of those spells that has cause a lot of discussion in the past. The PnP version is more clear. It's part the Evocation school, but Invocation sub-school. It calls a cloud of toxic gas from else where, and that's it. The gas acts in all ways like a heavy toxic gas normally would, dissipating depending on wind or other conditions. The gas is non-magical, and works via any form of contact (Physical, inhalation, or ingestion), unless the creature has some form of general poison immunity or is wearing an amulet of adaptation or the like which surrounds the target in a thin barrier of clean air that prevents contact with the gas.
The BG version version is just listed as evocation, and stays in the radius it's cast for a set time, before dissipating and is prevented by successful magic resistance checks per round (but not spell protections, making it fairly devastating vs most non-drow casters/liches). That said, the duration is roughly the same as the time it would take for a weak breeze to disperse the cloud, so it technically performs almost the same as the PnP version, BG just doesn't account for wind speeds and the cloud doesn't move.
Logic tells me, that missile should be separate type of damage, therefore I need a confirmation of intel taken from Bioware forum.
There are other types of damage in the engine but they are rarely, if ever, actually used in the game. One of the ones that is used is slashing+piercing damage. This is used by all halberds. In the case of this damage type the game uses whichever one is better in terms of hitting and damaging the opponent.
All player usable ranged weapons in the game do missile damage. There are some creature only ranged weapons that do crushing damage instead (such as a mustard jelly's attack) but this is rare.
Sorry for reviving this as well, but I ran into this as well. I think I can clarify as well as get some answers on for me as well.
I honestly thing Devs just lifted Descriptions from PnP and never bothered(or just abandoned through creation) to put in Fire/Magic Fire. Fire would be putting your hand in a fire place of a tavern or running through a burning building. Cold is like standing naked in a blizzard and being unaffected by it. Magic Fire and Cold is from actual casters and such. Which draws extra energy and punch.
So was this ever updated and put in with the EE? Cause I have 100 Fire Resist and then 40 Magic Fire Resist(I think it falls on the Ring of Fire Resist where I am getting Magic Fire from)
I do not understand various Protection from Fire/Cold spell descriptions (26158; 30213; 30215; etc.).
What does it mean complete protection from normal damage (torches; snow) and partial protection from magical damage?
Are there normal fire/cold damage in the game (arrows; explosive potions)?
Shouldn't Beamdog make spell texts cleaner with only gameplay references?
The bits in the spell descript is just leftover copy-and-paste from their PnP descriptions. Protection spells provide an x% reduction in fire/cold damage regardless of source.
The description mustn't lie about how the spells and resistances function. Players cannot imagine that.
but yeah. it would definitely be a good little fix.
The descriptions are certainly not correct. Actually, they even contradict themselves. For example, the description of "Protection from fire" states that it "confers complete invulnerability" to things like Fireball, and at the same time it says that it "absorbs 50% of all their damage". Of course the first statement is correct and the second one is not.
You're making the assumption that new players consistently complain about things that confuse them. That's most likely not the case. Most new players don't complain about anything at all, actually they don't even write in online forums. And even those few that do tend to complain about things like game crashes, not wrong spell descriptions. But that certainly doesn't mean they are not confused. It's safe to assume that virtually all new players have been confused when they read a description that tells them that a spell both "confers complete invulnerability" to fire AND "absorbs 50% of the damage". And that means millions of players confused over the years.
Also taking the chance to shamelessly promote my Corrected spell descriptions mod, which corrects and improves the descriptions of most spells and special abilities in BG2EE, including the one mentioned here.