Am I crazy or are many spells set to do Piercing damage?

lujo

Could someone experienced with Nearinfinity confirm or disprove this?

I've got Spiritual Hammer and who knows what else with their effects listing their damage as "Piercing"?

Here's an effect for Spiritual Hammer:

Type: Melee (1)
Type flags: ( None )
Ability location: Spell (2)
Icon: SP074.BAM
Target: Living actor (1)
# targets: 0
Range (feet): 480
Minimum level: 16
Casting speed: 1
Bonus to hit: 0
Dice size: 6
# dice thrown: 0
Damage bonus: 0
Damage type: Piercing (1)
# effects: 0
First effect index: 1
# charges: 1
When drained: Item vanishes (1)
Projectile: Spiritual Hammer (SPPR204.PRO) - 260

Am I reading this right? Is this really what governs the spells damage type?

Because if that's so, then manyy spells I've looked at out there are set to do Piercing.

But this looks like it can't be right, because it says that the dice size is 6, and Spiritual Hammer is supposed to be doing 4-10 per 3 levels of the caster. Although this would explain why it's barely doing anything in game, and that then would mean there's som seeeeeerious bugfixing needed on the spell front.

argent77

Damage type and dice fields in spell ability headers are not used. Since the spell doesn't contain any meaningful effects I can only assume that it's one of the many instances that are hardcoded in the game engine.

lujo

Ty. It's very confusing because it's difficult to know whether the description matches the effect and whether spells even do what they're supposed to do.

If it's not too much of a bother for you to take a look, is the animation speed / projectile speed of Adder's kiss moddable? It was practically unusable on one of my playthroughs because it traveled very, very slowly. This was even making the Many-as-one fight easier than it should be becuase M-a-O was using it.

argent77

Adder's Kiss appears to be hardcoded too.

kjeron

A lot of PSTEE you just have to check in-game:
It cannot affect party members.
It deals crushing damage in separate packets, once per 3 levels, and scales to max Level (127), but you won't see the remaining hits if the creature dies prematurely.
The damage does not scale, always dealing (3-10 + 3), save for half.