Ignore armor

To ignore armor means to set the armor effect, a multiplier in calculating damage, to 1. An offensive skill or action that ignores armor will thus cause the same amount of damage on all targets, regardless of their armor level. It is generally believed that any damage that is armor ignoring cannot also have any armor penetration (for both technical and semiotic reasons).

Identification
A few skills explicitly state whether they ignore armor or not.
 * Crystal Wave and Obsidian Flame are examples of skills that specifically mention that they ignore armor.
 * Judge's Insight states, by way of implication, that attacks under this enchantment will not ignore armor.

Because the number of skills in the game is fixed, one can simply enumerate all skills that cause armor ignoring damage. Although such an enumeration would be a completely faithful descriptive account of the game, it is also somewhat arbitrary. Many people prefer, instead, to categorize the skills based on certain properties of the skill and its description that give a hint as to whether the damage caused is armor ignoring or not. In this camp, there are at least two major competing theories -- one that classifies the skills by damage type, and the other that classifies them by the damage actuator mentioned in the skill descriptions.

The rest of this article outlines these three main schools of thought.

Damage type entails armor ignoringness
This school of thought holds that the type of damage caused by a skill or action determines whether the damage will be armor ignoring or not. Specifically,


 * Physical damage, elemental damage, light damage, dark damage, and chaos damage are not armor ignoring types; and
 * Holy damage, shadow damage, and damage with no specified type are armor ignoring types.

Criticism
Many critics claim that light damage and holy damage are (functionally) the same damage type (and, likewise, dark damage = shadow damage). This criticism is bolstered by the following observations: The difference in wording is sometimes attributed to the same logic that early US translations of Final Fantasy 2 (Japanese IV) translated "Holy" to "Light" to avoid religous connotations. Refutations of this criticism are typically based on the absurdity (in the opinion of the refuters) of using "light damage" for weapons and "holy damage" for skills for entirely arbitrary reasons (avoiding religious connotations in one case but not the other).
 * 1) Both light and holy damage have the same effect on undead monsters (doubling the damage) and on Tormentor's Armor (adding +5 bonus damage per piece).
 * 2) Because holy and shadow damage are only dealt by skills, it is just as possible that armor ignoring damage is only caused by skills.

Another major criticism of this theory is that it contains several exceptions.
 * Dust Trap - deals earth damage (a type of elemental damage) but ignores armor.
 * Whirling Defense - deals piercing damage (a type of physical damage) but ignores armor. Additionally, this skill is also unaffected by Greater Conflagration.
 * Obsidian Flame and Judge's Insight - their skill descriptions explicitly states/implies them to be exceptions.

Supporters of this theory claim that these skills are simply anomalous, possibly as a result of programming bugs.

Damage actuator entails armor ignoringness
This school of thought holds that for skills, whether or not the damage ignores armor depends on the words used to describe how the damage is actualized.


 * Verbs such as "deal" and "suffer" in the skill description signal armor ignoring damage; and
 * Verbs such as "take" and "struck for".in the descriptions signal armor noticing damage.

Criticism
Supporters of this theory typically only state a two-verb comparison, which makes the theory less than complete. To date there has not yet been a concrete theory of this school that takes all (or even a majority) of the skills into account. The lack of any complete proposed theory makes it impossible to study the exceptions.

The existence of exceptions is a probable cause of why a complete theory has not been proposed.

Armor ignoringness is empirical
This is the most accurate, and also the least pleasing, school of thought that holds that each skill or action determines whether or not it causes armor ignoring damage independently of all other skills. There is no golden rule to tell the damage type aside from testing the skill individually.

Criticism
This school of thought has been criticized as being useless and irresponsible. Most people, after all, do have expectations of (and should be entitled to know) whether a skill ignores armor before actually testing it.

Note that critics of this school are typically supporters of the "Damage type" school, who believe a system exists.