#7268 - Poisoned attacks bypass stoneskins

Aranthys

Current behaviour : A poisonous attack bypasses stoneskin entirely (IE : Poison weapon from blackguard/assassin or from a spider)
Expected behaviour : Stoneskin prevents poisoned attacks caused through physical attacks from affecting the target

Tresset

This is intended behavior. Stoneskin was meant to block the primary damage from the attack itself and not additional effects from the attack like poison or ghoul hold.

Ryofu

elemental damage is supposed to get through stoneskin, poison damage in bg2 is considered elemental damage too i guess

[Deleted User]

I've always found this to be a bit weird as implemented. Theoretically, your skin gets turned to stone that can deflect crushing blows from Adamantite Golems and vicious slashing attacks. But somehow poison still hurts the stone? Also, illithids shouldn't be able to get to the juicy brain inside your crunchy coating.

Note: I think it's probably working as the devs intended it, but the intent just feels odd to me.

Aranthys

Tresset said:

This is intended behavior. Stoneskin was meant to block the primary damage from the attack itself and not additional effects from the attack like poison or ghoul hold.

It wasn't working that way in BG2 if my memory serves well, hence why I consider this a bug. (But I could be mistaken - I could check tonight)

Ryofu

i remember weapons such as the sword of flame and flail of the ages were particularly useful when i was playing the old BG2 because the elemental damage went through stoneskin allowing you to disrupt spellcasting.

poison is probably lumped together with fire, cold, electric damage as elemental damage

Aranthys

Elemental damage always bypassed physical immunity, but poisons didn't back then (Unless I'm mistaken, but the fact that it happened in BG2:EE shocked me enough to believe that it didn't used to be the case in vanilla BG2)

Aranthys

Thanks @Gate70 ! I knew I wasn't dreaming

Aranthys

I hope it isn't intentional : Current implementation turns wizards that aren't naturally immune to natural weapons canon-fodder against any blackguard, assassin or spider-morphed character, even if it's protected by mirror image + stoneskin.
Edit.: I just changed the thread title to add the reference to the tracking number.

Tresset

@Gate70 I have actually been involved with this issue before but in regards to mirror image. The issue then was that mirror image would protect from poison even if you hit the real one. This of course did not seem right so they decided to change the behavior so that even if you hit a fake image the creature would get poisoned. This may have had the effect of poison bypassing stoneskin as well. Since this could very well be a case of engine limitation, the developers may just have to go with whichever seemingly incorrect function is the lesser of two evils.