I believe there is a type of damage specifically called ‘magic’, such as what bone spear, bone spirit, and berserk do. Then there are the elemental damages of poison, cold, fire, and lightning. Then there is ‘physical’ damage, from melee and from many arrow/bolt/spear attacks.
Reading the tool-tip info of the amp damage curse. It states ‘…increasing the non-magic damage they receive’. I suspect that this means the damage specially called ‘magic’ and all the elemental damages. If so then the term ‘magic’ could refer to either the damage type specifically called ‘magic’, or it could mean magic and elemental damages, which would be rather confusing.
All sources of damage that aren’t “physical” it’s considered magic damage. At least on D2.
While there’s only a few sources of items who would provide improvements on “protection” for magic damage, but as general rule the base stat is 0 in any difficulty.
So, about your doubt. Any elemental damage is also magic damage and is calculated prior to even reach your resistances.
So, anything related to physical or non-magical attack would mean physical. There’s a ton of tooltips on d2 that needs some “revision” but I hope that can clarify your doubt
Magic immune monsters are exactly what it says, “magic damage”, elemental damage still works on them, but if you have a weapon like the assassins claw “chaos” runeword which specifically applies 216-471 Magic Damage. That “Magic damage” is nullifyed.
It would help if the damage type itself had a proper name, as in D3 this damage type got a proper classification as arcane/holy damage.
But if the term ‘magic’ includes all elemental sources, they should be immune to those also.
Ya you’re right, the root of the problem is that damages such as bone spear & berserk never received a proper sub classification such as arcane or holy. D2 plays fast and loose with the term ‘magic’ it seems. In D2 it could mean a specific sub type of magic, or it could mean all magic sub types…
On a side note, can physical immune monsters still be afflicted with ‘open wounds’?
Sometimes. It’s inconsistent. There is a standalone Magic damage type.
“Immune to Magic” monsters are not immune to fire, lightning, cold, poison. They’re only immune to Magic damage, e.g. Blessed Hammer.
But item affixes like “Magic damage reduced by X” do refer to fire, lightning, and cold. (Not poison, I assume.) Maybe actual Magic damage as well.
So to answer the OP’s original question, these terms are not used consistently, and you’ll have to dig into wikis or search old forum threads to understand the nuances. This is one area the D2R devs could bring some consistency to with better tool tips and such.
The easiest way to understand it is to watch this video. It’s incredibly inconsistent naming but this video makes it pretty clear, e.g. Lower Resistant works on “magical damage”, which includes cold, fire, light, and poison, but Magic Resistant includes “magic damage”, which include only cold, fire, and light. Then there’s straight Magic Immunes, which refer to our Blessed Hammer’s magic damage and is totally different. Magic DMG reduced refers to both magic damage types for some reason.
Isn’t, it’s just misslabeled. The game was a mess on development stage paired with lack of validation on their end.
“All elemental damage are magic, but magic immune are only immune to non-elemental magic damage.” - That’s the truth, the problem are that poison and magic damage itself are treated as oddity. Most likely to avoid foes to being immune to everything except physical, like the 2 immunity rule they planned like that.
The best way to explain is like this:
You have a set that has magic damage which consist in 2 sources of damage (elemental ones and non-elemental ones), then you have the set of physical damage who would have things like alive and non-alive target, paired with ow and cb.
Monster with “magic resistant” equals to all elemental affixes(with exception of poison), “magic immune” to magic non-elemental affix.
Seens to be counter intuitive, but as general rule are:
On character’s side, crafted safety kite shield are one of the few items that has magic damage reduction on it, that way you effectively reduce all magic damage (either elemental or not). Would reduce all damage except physical damage, contemplating the poison(as far I’m aware of), fire, cold, lightning and magic. Even before each one of them are applied meaning if you got hit by 3 elements like vengeance you apply the reduction 3 times(one for each element).
While if is a monster, the naming isn’t great just for the record. That happens to be Spectral hit (would increase fire,cold and lightning resist by 20%), Magic Resistant (would increase fire,cold and lightning resist by 40%).
On the other hand Mana Burn works on non-elemental magic damage (increasing magical non-elemental to resist +20%). That could help foes to be “immune” but are really rare ocasions that to happen and there’s no way to reduce magic “non-elemental” resist from a foe.
When a monster are “magic immune” it’s immune to “non-elemental magic” damage.
Poison are a oddity on the rule, because there’s no such thing as “poison enchanted” and neither monsters receive additional poison resist from any affix.
Even if poison it’s considered an elemental damage behaves oddly on those aspects. The best example it’s using Safety Shield and safety gear, that way you can gauge the real impact of it, mostly used on PVM and useless on PVP.
As general rule, all characters has 0 magic resist (that would contemplate all sources of magic, either elemental or not), because characters doesn’t have “magic non-elemental resist” all elements doesn’t have any additional reduction from the original value.
Monsters behave awkwardly, as “magic resistant/spectral hit” often used as fire/cold/lightning and “magic immune/mana burn” used to non-elemental magic damage.
TL:DR → All elemental damage are magic damage but not all magic damage are elemental damage, magic immune are immune to magical non-elemental damage and can be immune to non-elemental damage by gaining manaburn affix by example.
Poison (which are also elemental damage, but behave odly as dot or commonly used as bit)
Physical types:
Physical on alive (life/mana stealing foe)
Physical on non-alive (undead and non stealing foe - only steal-able with lifetap)
Immune to physical (will not receive any damage, cb, ow or provide any stealing, common example of foe being immunte to it by having Stone skin affix)
I hope that can help you to understand. The labels aren’t great and most likely were based on rushed development and lack of testing stuff.
It’s like X% damage goes to mana, some folks would understand as mana shield but in fact it’s just “generates mana”.
The only skill that breaks any kind of balance of non-elemental resist it’s blessed hammer, because of a later buff done by a single dev even if he nerfed the skill afterwards on later patch the nerf wasn’t enough to solve the “incomplete” system. Most magical non-elemental skills are weaker to the point of not needing much resistance or foes being heavily resistant to it.
That’s why hammerdins are most viable meta for farm with enigma on most cases and scenarios, because there’s barely any foe who would effectively reduce his damage too much.
…followed by a lot of text supporting what I and others are saying, that it’s an inconsistent mess.
The video linked by Tyrion illustrates the inconsistencies in a very easy to understand way. I recommend everyone watch that.
The D2R devs could bring some clarity by doing something like:
Defining “elemental damage” as cold, fire, and lightning damage.
Renaming the “Magic Resistant” monster modifier to something like “Element Resistant” or maybe something more creative, like an elemental analogue to “Stone Skin”.
Renaming the “Magic damage reduced by” item affix to “Magic and elemental damage reduced by”, although that starts to get verbose.
Updating the Conviction tooltip to say “elemental resistances”.
Updating the Lower Resistances tooltip to say “elemental and poison resistances”.
If you mean the naming there’s inconsitency. The system itself it’s not. Are just label issue. We said the same stuff while I focused on mechannics which are fine you focused on labels, so the inconsitency isn’t on mechannics but on labels, that was my point.
Poison is an element, the problem it’s often quoted as more similar to physical than other elements. Removing from elements would create lack of cohesion on resistance, natural resistance and elemental ones.
Magic also behaves that way. Being more near to physical than fire, cold and lightning.
Poison has instant damage and dot, cold has instant damage and cold length(sometimes even freeze), fire it’s like physical a single damage and lightning a huge range between min-max.
All forms of damage has perks on it.
Conviction, salvation and vengeance are related to holy resist elements on paladin’s tree, while cleansing are related to prayer doesn’t offer poison resist but instead reduces it’s duration.
Lower resist affects elemental resistances. Which fits with the character screen and barbarian natural resistance. Where all quote “elements”
Magic resist(on gear) would reduce the “holy” elements and magic
Magic reduced would reduce “holy” elements
Currently the system behaves like this:
Magic damage reduction = fire, cold, lightning
Mana burn and Magic Immune = pure magic
Magic resist = fire, cold, light and pure magic
Elemental resist = fire, cold, lightning and poison
Physical resist = physical
So, one way to solve it:
Elemental = fire, cold, lightning and poison
Magic = fire, cold, lightning
Inate = magic
Arcana = fire, cold, lightning and magic
Why? First elemental l would contemplate the resistances part well enough, second would fit the current monsters resist, the third would only change mana burn and magic immune to inate, that would change all pure non-elemental magic damage spells to inate. Lastly arcana would cover the secret part of magic and inate merging both.
Without effectively changing anything on gameplay, just labels. Not even interfaces would need to be revisited.
Yeah it’s just a labeling issue. The OP asked if the concepts of magic and elemental damage are used interchangeably in the game sometimes, and the answer is definitely yes. It could be cleared up with better tool tips along with maybe renaming the “Magic Resistant” monster modifier and “Magic damage reduced by” item affix. So that’s all just labeling.
I tried looking up if poison is considered an “element” in the RPG world, and I don’t think it typically is. Diablo 2 tends to treat it different from cold, fire, and lightning too. Only the necromancer’s Lower Resist treats them the same.
And pure magic.
The Magic Resistant monster modifier doesn’t include pure magic damage, just fire, cold, and lightning.
I don’t know where this terminology is currently used in-game. Only Lower Resist treats these four the same, and it refers to them as “all magical attacks.”
There are definitely a bunch of different ways to solve it. With your system, Blessed Hammer and Bone Spear would become “inate damage” and “Magic Immune” monsters would become “Inate Immune”. That might be confusing terminology. I still think it would be simpler to leave poison as its own separate category.
Words like “arcana” reek of modern fantasy RPGs though, it doesn’t feel very fitting in Diablo 2 which is more rooted in horror. So maybe another word could be used. But it’s the right idea anyway.
Mistyped the text on both, thanks for the correction. Not much used to type on smartphone.
More or less, the magic arrow, beserk, bone spear, teeth and mindblast would be in the same role. I used inate because are inate to class and really “perky” for the class itself.
Innate: existing as part of the basic nature of something
E.G : Innate quality of the class or character
The inate portion damage would be negated on foes imune to inate damage, manaburn would be inate resistant.
Could be, but the game has natural resist, resistances tab on character and lower resist related to poison, all resists working as “same source” as fire, lightning and cold. That’s why I tried to keep poison on elemental, because either we like or not it’s how the game deals with it, would be tricky to keep mentioning “and poison” everytime that something works also on poison or has some perk around it and other elements.
You have resist for it and works at same pattern as the other three. While magic and physical are oddballs in those situations.
I used innate because would be the nearest terminology for the perk itself being natural to the class (beserk, magic arrow, blessed hammer, mind blast, bone spear and teeth). Each one fo those skills has some identity from the class of originate it that you can identify the class by it.
Arcana would be the combination of both magical perks and inate. Creating a bit of mistery on this kind of affix that is extremelly rare to obtain having to be initiated like most of magic already needs.
The game itself “puts” fire, cold, lightning and poison away from physical by using another way to them behave. By reducing the character resistance for it each difficulty unlike pure magic and physical counterparts. But also doesn’t have any kind of physical effects either, cold and poison having length at same time of being treated similarly with resist and length reduction.
While I see that most rpg would associate poison with physical, most if not all of them are related to ailment statuses and the only perk that has that kind of trick it’s cold and open wounds.
But both cold and poison can be healed and prevented while open wounds cannot.
Arcana by it’s definition are related to:
“secrets or mysteries”
I considered being used instead of inate, but doesn’t sound right a barbarian having beserk as arcana spell, instead of inate spell.
That’s why I focused on Elemental (fire, cold, lightning and poison) to make easier to do “resist” wording also. While all player interactive sources of fire, cold, lightning are considered magical ones in the game. Made pure magic become inate and arcana was a wording for “mistery” thing, I considered other words like primordial or divine but neither of them were exactly coherent. Even tried to isolate poison as blight but didn’t “made” any sense by dealing on different category.
I understand that arcana became a terminology used often, even D3 uses it on wizard for “arcane” but differs from “arcana” in terms of “weight” arcana it’s more heavier than “arcane”
ARCANE = known or understood by only a few; designed for or comprehended by the specially initiated only; secret; hidden or mysterious.
ARCANA = secrets or mysteries; knowledge, detail, or information that is available or understood only by people in some special field and not by the average person.
(Note: ARCANA is the plural of ARCANUM, but the singular form is not illustrated here because it is rarely used.)
The game have several issues on terminology for sure, I tried to keep in a way that wouldn’t change anything for who got used with the internal mechannics of the game for the last 20 years, tbh I would change some behaviors instead of trying to come up with wording but the game itself needs to be more “intuitive” in terms of labels for sure.
I tried to avoid non-elemental magic and elemental magic because the text would be huge every time to address magic that would incorporate both things.
and reduces confusion. A win-win.