…while hoping it’s not Lum anymore. God, they must be tired. From the Grab Bag:

Q: My question regards the Realm Ability, Avoidance of Magic. It states that(copy/pasted): “Reduces all magic damage taken by the listed percentage. (This only works on damage. Does not work on disease, dots, or debuffs and does not affect the duration of crowd control spells). Lvl1 – 2% / Lvl2 – 5% / Lvl3 – 10%…….”

I know that resist rates cap at 26% from item/spell crafted bonuses, does AoM’s bonuses stack ontop of that, making my imaginary 26% Energy Resist now count as 28% Energy due to AoM1. Or does AoM not stack with a capped 26%, but is instead designed to help my imaginary ‘gimped’ 15% Matter Resist, making it a 17% Resist due to AoM1?? Thanks in advance.

A: Oh, yeah, this one went straight to the Code Warrior: “Realm ability resist buffs (such as Avoidance of Magic) and spell resists are added seperately from item/spellcrafted bonuses. This is why in the bonus window they display seperately; in his example, if he had level 3 Avoidance of Magic and capped Energy resist bonus from items, he would see “26% / 10%” in his bonus window for a total of 36% Energy resist.

It’s not true that the total resist is 36%.

This was changed long ago (after endless discussions) as a band-aid to the insane high resists in the game and some “I-win” buttons like the old version of “Bunker of Faith”.

Firstly you apply the first value (26%) to the damage. Then you take the result and apply to it the second value (10%) to obtain the actual damage you receive.

To explain. Let’s say you are hit for 200 damage unmodified. And let’s assume you have 50% resist from items and 50% from Realm Abilities.

Following the explanation on the Herald you would have a total of 100% resist (50+50). Resulting in zero damage.

But this is false. In fact the game first applies the first 50% resist. So a 200 damage becomes 100. Then this 100 is again applied to the second 50% resist. For a total of 50 damage.

Which is obviously different from zero damage and that is coherent with the need to reduce the effectiveness of the resists.

But what is actually more important to understand is how clunky and overly complicated are DAoC’s mechanics. Just another example of those bleeding band-aids.

(“Balance Boy” got it right exactly two years ago)