Which damage type useful against which enemies?

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

semiticgoddess

You can search through creature files in Near Infinity, but there is no compendium of vulnerabilities. Aside from skeletons' vulnerability to crushing damage, and Verbeegs' and Belhifet's resistance to missile damage, damage resistances are usually pretty even in IWD.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

lunar

There are very elemental oriented areas in IWD. If you are traversing icy caves and snowy peaks, cold damage spells will be of little use, except against cannon fodder like goblins/orcs/orogs (NOT the shadowed variants, which are undead!) Most ice based creatures and nearly all undead are immune to the ravages of cold. Fire works best against them in most cases. However, there are a few fire based areas as well, and the opposite is true there, fire based monsters are immune to fire and are vulnerable to cold. Some may even take bonus damage.

Skeletal undead are resistant to most physical attacks except crushing, and are immune to cold. Shadowed orc/goblin variants and other spectral undead are immune to cold. Cadaverous undead are varied. Ghouls are not immune to cold, while zombies, wights and ghasts are. Drowned dead are highly resistant to missile and somewhat resistant to melee weapons, but fire and cold works against them. Oddly they are also %50 electrical resistant despite being bloated by water. Chosen zombies are immune to cold/electricity and %50 resistant to fire. etc.

Some magical enemies require magical weapons. Notably, Yxunemoi requires +2, glabrezus require +2, iron golems require +3 weapons to hit. I don't know of any enemy that requires +4 to hit in IWD, there are few ones in BG2 and they are very dangerous.

Enemies you can assume poison won't work, are immune to poison damage. All undead and constructs, for example.

Acid damage works on pretty much anything. It is the rarest resistance. Crushing damage is the best physical damage type in that regard, too.

So the best magical damage is acid and pure magic. Few creatures resist these. There are few spells that deal these types of damages, though.
Fire damage is good against most undead and ice creatures, of them there are a lot of in IWD. Fire is good, there are a lot of fire spells. However there are some immune enemies.
Lightning damage is okay, there are a lot of resistant enemies but full immuntiy is much rare. Jellies/slimes are immune to lightning damage, some enemies have flat %50 resistance.
Cold damage is the least effective, nearly half of the enemies you face in IWD will be downright immune, it is only effective against a handful encounters in a few fire based areas, in which fire damage will be of no use. Which is a shame beacuse IWD has many nice cold spells.

joluv

Here's a list for BG2.

Sometimes I quicksave, use Ctrl+Q to add a monster to my party so I can check out its vulnerabilities, and then reload.