Shattered Kingdoms

It's been said elsewhere that hellfire was recently stealth nerfed. I came here looking to find a reason but could not find any post that asked.

Help hellfire wrote:

It's not true. There is a log showing a sprite taking measurably less damage from hellfire when resist elements is being used. This means the damage is fire instead of negative. This is definitely a change to hellfire and I also don't see any announcement about it. Please explain and/or fix.

I just investigated. My first reaction was that hellfire hasn't been changed in many years and I verified that by looking at the code commit history.

But I figured it out after debugging. It turns out there WAS an announced change which is responsible for the new behavior:
Code Update 12/7/2015 - Fire/cold/lightning damage is not reduced by racial magic resistance

Sprites are resistant to magic which means that prior to this change they effectively had both resist fire and resist negative. Hellfire defaults to negative but switches to fire if it's better. Because both types were resisted, the code stuck with negative energy.

After the code change, sprites no longer have resist fire but still have resist negative. Therefore hellfire selects fire instead of negative. The same is true for deep-elves.

If it's being implied that hellfire is never negative, you can test that's not true by using it against an elf and see that it works as it did before. Elves are resistant to magic but they are also vulnerable to negative energy, so hellfire stays with negative.

I hadn't really considered this behavior when I made the change, but it follows logically from the announcement. So you can't call this a stealth nerf.

Note that hellfire has never checked for the presence of the 'resist elements' spell when determining which type to use. It has only ever used innate racial resistance. Should it do so? I don't have a strong opinion, so the community can feel free to weigh in.

I strongly feel that it should calculate the damage that using either type would do and choose the higher number.

Helpfile wise, it suggests that each cast is "fire mixed with the energies of the lower plane" - even if the code has to do some logic to pick one or the other for calculation purposes, the helpfile clearly says the enemies are getting roasted with both.

Practically, resist elements already renders warlocks hilariously useless, it shouldn't also provide that kind of protection from a second profession's main nuke.

Also practically, hellions are pretty terrible and nerfing hellfire like this only makes them more terrible, which they don't need.

Keep in mind that:

• this edge case will usually only apply to sprite and halfling warlocks (because resist elements is hard to come by if not a warlock and how often do hellions attack deep-elves?)
• even if you account for resist elements and switch back to negative, the race is ALSO resistant to negative so the difference in damage will be pretty small

So I don't think this is as big a deal as you are implying.

Because it is a mixing of the energy and not some sort of divination of needing to know about resist elements, I do lean toward including a resist elements modifier from a 'game physics realism' standpoint. But not sure it's worth the effort. Any other opinions?

Thanks for the explanation. I think you should calculate for resist elements. Even small factors like this add up and can be the difference between winning and losing.

I agree with the others in that hellfire should switch to negative energy if the target has RE, for the majority of the reasons already stated in this thread. The only argument against it I would have is that I wouldn't put it above any other bugfix that's in the same ballpark with required coding yet affects more of the pbase, like the "high-end gear death-rot" bug that's currently going around.

From the few hellions I've had, I've never found hellfire EXTREMELY useful, though it very well should be deadly. Perhaps it was a lack of int, or perhaps I just never found much use for it. Was always partial to blinding and weakening enemies, though it seemed hellfire would do about as much damage as a middle between cause serious and cause critical. I always envisioned that hellfire would be maybe 3/4 the power of a harm spell if used against a lightie, especially a paladin. When I played a pally and was hellfired, a simple cure serious seemed to cover that up.