User:JoDiamonds/armor ignoring

armor ignoringness
I see two ways out:

1. Consider armor ignoringness as a property of damage type, and point out when exceptions occure. Advantage is that we only need to talk about it on the damage article and when exceptions occure.

2. Consider armor ignoringness as a property of the skill, and for EVERY SINGLE skill that causes, specify whether the damage ignores armor or not.

Personally, I find the former case much preferred. -PanSola 04:36, 17 March 2006 (CST)


 * I'm happy enough presenting things the way they are, with a footnote as it is. I have no intent to crusade all the skills, or to generally make any larger changes than I already have.  If you feel the changes I've already made have gone to far, well, I guess we can discuss that.
 * However, it was my fairly firm understanding (and perhaps I'm uninformed) that the game actually treats it the second way. It seemed like the information presented, sans footnote, was simply wrong, and I thought there should at least be clarification.  As far as I can tell, it's just not true that Holy Damage ignores armor.  Players should know that nearly all sources of Holy Damage ignore armor, but it's not something magic about Holy Damage.
 * There seem to have been many people confused about this, especially when it came to Lightning damage, and presumed that Lightning damage had a built in 25% armor penetration. Anyone who is looking hard enough should be able to easily find out that damage types don't have inherent properties at all (excepting the sub-classifications for physical and elemental), and I felt it was misrepresented.      In short, while for most purposes #1 is fine, it's plain incorrect AFAIK, and the Wiki shouldn't say things that are just wrong.
 * Let me at least say that even I feel like I'm being semantic and nitpicky, but that seems appropriate for the Damage article.
 * --JoDiamonds 04:48, 17 March 2006 (CST)


 * The difference between the case of Lightning damage's armor penetration vs Holy/Shadow's armor ignoringness:
 * For skills that deal lightning damage, if it has armor penetration, it is always (to the best of my knowledge) specified in the skill description.
 * There are also skils that deal lightning damage, does not have armor penetration, and their skill description does not mention penetration.
 * For skills that ignore armor, and if it is Holy/Shadow, it is NEVER specified in the skill description (and there is only one known case where holy does not ignore armor)
 * For skills that don't ignore armor, it is NEVER specified in the skill description.
 * Elementalist skills that ignore armor is ALWAYS specified.


 * Anet never revealed how the engine internally work. Regardless of how the engine internally works, there is a consistency strong enough IMHO to make it a rule, and name the exceptions.
 * It is expected that if a skill dealing lightning damage has armor penetration then the skill description will specify it (no known exceptions to me)
 * It is expected that if a skill dealing lightning damage does not have armor penetration then the skill description will NOT bother to mention it.
 * It is expected that if a skill dealing holy/shadow/untyped damage ignores armor, the skill description will NOT bother specifying it (so far only one exception - crystal wave)
 * There is only one skill with holy/shadow/untyped damage that doesn't ignore armor, not enough to establish an expectation of what skill descriptions in general would do in this case.
 * It is expected that if a skill dealing physical/elemental damage ignores armor, then the skill description will specify it (so far only one known exception - Talk:Dust Trap)
 * It is expected that if a skill dealing physical/elemental damage does not ignore armor, then the skill description will NOT bother to specify it (no known exceptions)


 * Thus, lightning damage and armor penetration can be properlly called a common misconception. When it penetrates, it specifies.  When it doesn't penetrate, it doesn't say "This skill does not have armor penetration".  On the other hand, physical/elemental damage ARE rationally expected to not ignore armor unless otherwise specified, and holy/shadow/untyped ARE rationally expected to ignore armor unless otherwise specified.
 * Saying Holy doesn't inheritly ignore armor because there is the JI exception, is like claiming "Winter doesn't inheriently convert all elemental damage to cold. It depends on the source (skill/upgrade).  If you look hard enough, you will notice not all elemental damage gets converted to cold (the case of Talk:Dust Trap).  Any one saying Winter automatically converts elemental damage to cold is plain wrong."  And I hope you find the claim about Winter extremely absurd (but the example true).
 * When I first read SonOfRah's damage article, and saw he treated armor ignoringness as "depends on the skill, not the skill type" but offering no way to tell how to decide if a skills damage ignores armor, it stroke me as being very irresponsible.
 * "Use the damage type to figure out if it ignores armor, unless there is an exception which we will tell you in the skill's own article" seems to be the best policy to me. However if you start telling people it's the skill, not the damage type, that decides armor-ignoringness, then we aren't offering anything concrete to the users even if we say "most holy/shadow ignores armor". -PanSola 05:31, 17 March 2006 (CST)


 * Boy, we're both wordy.
 * Anyway, I do understand your point. And I'm all for straightfowardly stating, "All skills causing shadow damage ignore armor", as both you and I have said multiple times.
 * However, I guess my major issue is with saying things that we simply don't have a reason to believe is true. We don't know how it's programmer, for sure.  But there are many examples where skills obviously ignore damage, both explicitly and implicitly.  It really just seems like we're making stuff up by saying that a damage type ignores damage.  The entire concept of damage types ignoring damage isn't even alluded to by anything in Guild Wars or things stated by Arena Net (again, as far as I know).  This is really the crux of my issue (and I'll admit it's my issue =).  Damage types, as far as anything is stated, are strictly labels that only matter when other things say they matter (like increased Warrior armor vs. Physical damage, increased Ranger armor vs. Elemental armor, etc.)
 * In short, as far as I can tell, damage types have no inherent in game effects at all. Saying that some of them ignore armor feels like we're inventing an entire category of things that damage types could do, when in fact they do nothing on their own.
 * Also, for all the volume of words we write, I really feel like there's a good compromise. I'm very happy to say on the Shadow damage page that "All skills causing shadow damage ignore armor", because it's simply true until proven otherwise, and similarly for Holy damage, with the JI exception.  In other words, I'm gung ho for stating a rule for how the game works, but I feel the rule is "Skills causing shadow damage ignore armor", and nitpickily against the rule being "Shadow damage ignores armor", because that will only mislead people into thinking that damage types do something (which, ignoring this particular issue, is generally untrue, despite our lack of knowledge about the game's innards).
 * --JoDiamonds 05:57, 17 March 2006 (CST)
 * the old online manual, scroll down for Holy Damage. Granted, the official website is often wrong, which is why I'm not using this as proof, but just as an evidence in favor of my view.  It might be wrong, but I didn't invent the concept that damage types may ignore armor.  Anet did.
 * Throughout the game there are minor bugs and inconsistencies in skill/quest descriptions and mechanics. To me, 3 exceptions (dust trap, whirling defence which I forgot to count last time, and JI) out of probably 200+ damage dealing skills, is strong enough to consider it a "rule" (containing exceptions/bugs) that armor-ignoringness depends on damage type.  The ratio of 1 exception vs number of elemental damage sources is probably a far worse number to make it a rule saying "Winter converts all elemental damage to cold".  We know it's simply untrue that Winter just checks the damage type, and if it's elemental, turn it to cold.  We know something else is going on, but that's not stopping us. -PanSola 06:31, 17 March 2006 (CST)
 * Alternately, I have an issue with the entire concept of "individual skills ignoring armor", when most skills don't allude to whether they ignore armor or not. Again, this leads to an expectation of having default behaviors, as opposed depending on skills.-PanSola 06:31, 17 March 2006 (CST)
 * Finally I think I am happy with the compromise. -PanSola 06:31, 17 March 2006 (CST)


 * OK. I had an edit conflict while you were putting in the last couple of sentences, but I'm happy to stop and accept the compromise (though I'll note that there aren't 200+ skills setting precedent here -- there's only about 20 skills, the Holy damage and Shadow damage skills, that theoretically break the rule "Damage types don't inherently mean anything".)
 * And I certainly agree in practice about not including text on each specific skill. It's an issue because the game behaves in subtly different ways that the game doesn't make clear through its text.  There's no particular reason to think (just from reading the skill description, including here on GuildWiki) that Dark Pact should ignore armor while Flare takes it into account.  In that respect, I consider the game just broken, and it is our job to inform players of that discrepancy.  I think the compromise deals with this in a reasonable way that doesn't require editing the 20 Holy/Shadow skills (which should presumably still link to the Holy damage and Shadow damage pages, getting the job done).
 * --JoDiamonds 06:42, 17 March 2006 (CST)