Death vs. Fire bless

[cleveland]

konming said:
While you are right secondary effects only applied with a successful strike of the primary weapon (verified using -ddddd), you are wrong about the to-hit probability thing.

How can I be right about the 1st and wrong about the 2nd?

I said that the secondary F9/D9 effect is only called upon a successful Attack roll of the primary weapon. If the primary weapon is not AN, then the primary weapon must defeat the shield parry, so the to-hit probability for the secondary F9/D9 attack does not change.

I suppose people are confusing the Attack and Damage rolls. My comments were specifically referencing the Attack rolls. Baalz stated that AN weapons ignore shield parry during Attack roll, and therefore implied that the D9 bless will produce a successful Attack roll more often against a shielded opponent than the F9 bless. While he's 100% correct that AN Attack rolls ignore shield parry, the F9/D9 damage are SECONDARY EFFECTS, and therefore do no have Attack rolls...only Damage rolls. Your to-hit probability (i.e. the probability of a successful Attack roll) doesn't change with a D9 bless.

[thejeff]

But an attack stopped by a shield parry is still a hit and can even do damage. It's just that the Shield protection is added in to the regular armor protection so even AP damage is unlikely to get through. The AN attack hits the shield, but ignores it's protection.

If you examine debugging output, you should see damage being rolled for a shield parry.

[krpeters]

So a death bless negates the armor value of shields? That explains a *lot*.

It also means that archers with a death blessing would deal catastrophic damage to opponents. Are there any blessable archers in the game?

[thejeff]

No, the 2AN damage part of the death blessing doesn't apply to archers or spells. Only the extra chance of afflictions counts.

LA T'ien Ch'is Ancestor Vessels are heavy cavalry archers and very nice with a death bless.

[Baalz]

Just to be clear since there seems to be a bit of confusion about what I said, what I meant is just what Jim said...the vast majority of times a shield hit is *effectively* a miss (causes no damage) for a fire bless but *effectively* a hit for a death bless (causes 2AN damage). So *effectively* a death bless ignores the shield defense, and thus any time the shield defense is greater than 4 it's *effectively* better than the attack bonus for a fire bless. I guess I was a bit ambiguous, I think of a "hit" in this context as an attack which causes damage.

[cleveland]

Gotcha. Sorry for misinterpreting.

An interesting, lesser known effect of the D9 bless is that Death Weapons cause disease directly. The weapon "bless death" (wpn #448) calls its own secondary effect "Disease" (wpn #143), which doesn't seem to check MR and gives the target the Diseased affliction...in addition to the +350% chance of other afflictions.

Of course the targets are only affected by disease if they fail the original MR roll, so it's not as devastating as it sounds. But it'll make your opponent think twice about sending his elephants against your lowly flaggies.

[Omnirizon]

krpeters said:
So a death bless negates the armor value of shields? That explains a *lot*.

It also means that archers with a death blessing would deal catastrophic damage to opponents. Are there any blessable archers in the game?

EA Kailasa's Yavana Archers

until now thought completely useless. I think A10D9 might work with them.

they could work quite nicely by themselves, or with chaff if necessary; and Kail has no shortage of chaff to choose from

No need to rush for Gandharvas or Arrow Fend, you could get Celestial music fast. D9 blessed longbow archers with the high precision of the Yavanas firing twice a turn, you could place em so far to the back, and with a little chaff to stall stuff, they would empty their quivers. anything left alive would get killed by them in melee once they were finally reached.

[Tifone]

i think they said this D bless doesn't apply to archers

[Omnirizon]

i know F bless doesn't, so D bless may not either. not too sure.

that's a pity though, because it means Yavana Archers would remain mostly useless.

[Endoperez]

Death Weapons from Death 9 only affects melee weapons. Improved affliction chance from D9 (350%) works for melee, missile, magic and perhaps other sources of damage as well if there are any. I'm not sure about fire shield.