Malhavoc wrote:
Now going off of that, when you add fire to a fire elemental, a being brought from another plane where air nor fuel is needed to survive, it would not be robbing it. At worst it would just sit there and do nothing as beings of fire take no fire damage. The issue at hand is Flamestrike is divine and fire, and thus divine damage affects a fire elemental.
If it is true that fire elementals come from a plane of existence in which fire can burn forever without using up fuel or air, then the essential question becomes whether this is a property of the plane or a property of the fire on that plane.
That is to say, when you take fire out of a plane where it needs no fuel or air, is it able to survive on a plane where fire requires fuel and air? If it is, then it would be immune to flame, but otherwise, exposure to additional flames would increase the depletion of the fuel source thereby shortening its stay on the material plane.
The inverse of this question is addressed by the SRD description of the plane of fire but not in a very clear way:
SRD V3.5 wrote:
Fire survives here without need for fuel or air, but flammables brought onto the plane are consumed readily.
This suggests that material brought from other planes is "consumed" by the flames, but in the same sentence says that the flames do not require fuel. What is it then, that consumes these flammable fuel sources? Does the fire actually burn up the fuel sources, but continues to "survive" afterwards as a non-material force creating limitless energy from nothing? Does the fire "choose" whether to use fuel or oxygen? What happens to the leftover carbon charcoal after the fuel is burned in an oxygen-depleted fire, or is there an eternal source of oxygen that the existing fires choose to use only when destroying adventuring gear?
It also says that flames survive
here without fuel or air, but does not say that flames
from here survive
anywhere without them.
It seems that there are some internal inconsistencies that may suggest a small chance that the plane of fire may not actually exist, or at least that the writers of the SRD do not have a completely clear understanding of its existance.