How do "Fire Greaves" stack?

[Wizzly_Bear]

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[Wizzly_Bear]

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[Blazer]

Love to help ya out here W_B, but sadly, I don't have a set to test. Guildie of mine does, I can ask him how they work. I seem to recall a thread that discussed this a while back, but I'm old and could be mistaken.

[Lithic]

no takers yet?

how about damage done by lava? if i had a constant number of fire damage then i could test it myself.

shallow lava (walking animation) does 4d6 per 2 seconds

deep lava (swimming animation) does 20d6 per 2 seconds, or every time you jump out and in.

as for constant fire damage... just get a caster to throw you some fireballs. They always do pretty close to the same damage. Or an incendiary cloud (maxed/empowered) might give you close to a constant fire source. You'll have to go to one of the pvp arenas though (not the tavern brawl, the places the guy sends you to).

[Lithic]

I can tell you that pro from fire is the first source used up. Any damage you take is reduced by this. Resist will not reduce your damage unless you have a better resist than your protection (say when you have 5pts of fire pro left, with a resist 30, then you would prevent 30pts).

Cold shield and the greaves then reduce the actual damage you would take.

So if you had a 100pt pro, 30pt resist, and cold shield on (-50%), and got hit by a 200pt fireball, you would first wipe out 100pts of your protection, your resistance is ignored, and the cold shiled leaves you with 50pts of fire damage.

As for cold shield and greaves, no idea.

[Wizzly_Bear]

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[DaveyCrockett]

The general rule on what happens when you have an ablative defense (protection from energy, stoneskin) and an absolute defense (resistance to energy, barbarian DR):

The incoming damage is reduced by the _larger_ of you ablative or absolute defense.
The remaining points on the ablative defense are reduced by the smaller of how much was blocked or how much was remaining on the defense.
The remaining portion of the attack, if any, hits any multipliers ("take half damage from fire" kicks in at this point).

So:
1) You have a 120 point protection and a 30 point resist, and get hit with a 100 point fireball. The protection is larger, so it applies; it blocks all 100 points, you take no damage, and you have 20 points remaining on your protection.

2) Now you've got 20 points left on your protection and a 30 point resist, and you get hit with a 100 point fireball. The protection is smaller, so the resistance kicks in and blocks 30 points. The remaining protection is zero (alternately, you can think of it as "the protection stopped 20 points of damage, then the resistance stopped the next 10, if that makes you less confused).

3) If the attack is a type that ignores the protection, it doesn't ding the amount remaining (so adamantine attacks don't reduce your remaining stoneskin, cold attacks don't reduce you remaining protection from fire).

4) If you have more than one relevant ablative protection, only the largest one applies (I don't think it is possible now because I don't think we have any way to have more than one relevant protection for PCs, but imagine if you had protection from fire and protection from ninjas, and a ninja fireballs you.... only one of them will apply).

None of this has changed in a long time.
And yes, we realize it would be much more advantageous to you for the defenses to work in exactly the opposite order.

There's some info

[woodrick]

reading the description on the greaves, as u have now have a pair u did. i seem to recall that they state something along the lines of, absorbing 33% of fire damage taken once all over effects have been taken into account. (it's something like that i think) the descriptions on the items are usually a give away as to their effect
as for stacking with fire shield blue never actually tried them both together. (but one reduces damage taken (FSB) and one absorbs damge taken (greaves) so yeah it is possible that they stack)

[Wizzly_Bear]

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[Brynjolf]

The last time I tested it, cold shield reduced by 50% and then the greaves reduced what was left. An example might be:

220 points of fire damage
-100 for a fire prot.

120 points left
reduced by 50% for cold shield

60 points left
reduced by 33% for greaves

you take 40 points.

Again, that's what it did when last I tested it ( a few months ago IIRC) and I have no reason to think it has changed (though it could, I suppose).

[Mhykke]

The last time I tested it, cold shield reduced by 50% and then the greaves reduced what was left. An example might be:

220 points of fire damage
-100 for a fire prot.

120 points left
reduced by 50% for cold shield

60 points left
reduced by 33% for greaves

you take 40 points.

Again, that's what it did when last I tested it ( a few months ago IIRC) and I have no reason to think it has changed (though it could, I suppose).

Hmmm,
That shouldn't be the way it works.

According to DG, they shouldn't "stack". The cold shield would stop 50%, b/c it's larger, and fire greaves would do nothing. Then, when the cold shield runs out, the fire greaves would stop 33% of fire damage.

[Brynjolf]

DG's description did hold true for protection vs. resist in my tests. However, DG appears to be addressing "ablative" and "absolute" types of stacking protection rather than "mutiplier" types which he indicates apply after the ablative/absolute types he's discussing. At least that's how I read the quote. All I know is that at the time of my tests putting on both cold shield and the greaves consistently yielded less damage.

It might have changed (or been corrected if it was considered a bug) so I'll check again when I get a chance, but it may be after GenCon till I get to it. It's worth noting, however, that the description of the greaves says:

"This effect absorbs one-third of all fire damage the character would have taken, after all other protections have been penetrated." (underline added)

As such I wasn't really surprised to find that they further reduced the damage taken in my tests.

For anyone interested, the tests I ran involved having a guildy lob fireballs at me in a pvp pit. We tried it many times with no protections of any sort in order to establish his average damage and damage range. Then, without changing his settings (such as max/empower/potency item) we began adding various combos of protections to me and comparing the damage numbers. There was a measurable difference in average damage taken when using cold shield and the greaves together. Given the wording on the greaves, I thought this "stacking" must be intentional.

[Wizzly_Bear]

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