hoping Xaa might know more about this

[grobblewobble]

One peculiar thing about the DS siege is the way damage works. The longer I play DS and its mods, the more it strikes me how unreliable "stated damage" is as an indicator of the actual damage a weapon or especially spell will deal.

For example, Firespray is a spell that looks great on paper. The damage that is stated is for each bolt, so if you multiply that by six you see a huge theoretical damage potential.

However, in practice I found that it only deals slightly more damage than Explosive Powder, IF all the bolts actually hit target. Explosive powder is one example of those spells that seem to have some kind of armor piercing effect, just like Bomb and Clusterbomb later on. That makes explosive powder a far superior spell to firespray in my opinion, since it has far better range and takes far less time to travel to its target.

Anyway, the question: could anyone tell more about the relationship between nominal damage, type of damage, monster armor etcetera? Xaa?

[Liantedan]

I think this is related to "fragment damage", rather than any other form of damage.

You'll see the same type of extra damage happen from the Explosive Potion ( throwing weapon ), Flaming Deferder, Hammer of Thunder, Flash, Pestilence, Firering, Flameshield, Pillar of Fire,...
These kind of damages have in common that they do the so-called"fragment damage". On top of their initial direct damage, they do additional damage to surrounding targets. The original target is caught in the area in which the damage splashes, so gets more of this "fragment damage" on themselves on top of the direct damage it already got. Secondly, this AE damage ( yes, even Pestilence damages nearby mobs ) ticks for a brief duration. In the case of the explosion types ( Explosive Powder, Explosive Potion, Flash, ... ) the duration is about 1 second. But considering how many instructions per second a pc can do ( I have no clue how many "ticks" go into a second ), that can mean the mobs get damaged quite often within that one second timeframe.
For Pestilence, which sits for about a full minute on the target, you can see it pretty clearly. Cast it on a mob, just once, and look at their health. Now cast it 5 to 10 more times, and see what is happening. That's the same as what the explosions do, except only for a single second, and in a larger radius.

In short, "fragment damage" hits harder than the stated damage.
( This probably was unintentional. )

That being said, there still is a notable difference between actual Piercing damage and regular damage, and I have no idea how it's calculated.