Shattered Kingdoms

Thought that sanc and devotion don't stack?

Dude was casting lightning bolt. If it was chain lightning or call lightning it would have murdered him.

I have never heard that. As far as I know, they do stack. Sanctuary cuts the damage down by 1/3, and then the devotion will cut that in half. Those two buffs alone would reduce 100 damage to 33 damage.

Oh, I thought he was casting something sexier.

I'm fairly certain that the game checks order of operations from greatest to lowest. <Adhesive medical strip> would be checked first since it cuts <redacted> damage, which is the highest. Then sanctuary would check. Sanctuary would be doing less work though since the damage has already been greatly reduced.

As long as we agree that damage reduction from spell effects (i.e. buffs) is multiplicative (which anecdotal and experimental evidence seems to confirm), it doesn't matter which is checked first - the end result will be the same.

An example using commonly accepted values: if sanctuary (x) reduces damage by 33% and devotion (y) reduces damage by 50%, damage reduction (DR) for the two would be: DR = 1 - (x * y) or DR = 1 - (0.50 * 0.67)

DR = 0.665 or 66.5%

The result will be the same even if the reductions are calculated independently. If a lightning bolt does 100 damage (D) and that damage is reduced by devotion by 50% (100 * 0.50), the resulting damage is 50. If you then reduce the remaining 50 damage by an additional 33% for sanctuary (50 * 0.67), the result is the same as if you reduced the 100 damage by 33% and then reduced the remaining 67 damage by 50%.

In both cases the remaining damage would be 33.5. Or you could use the formula above and multiply D * DR - arriving once again at 33.5. We know several years ago that Dulrik changed how damage reduction is calculated, with damage reduction from spell effects (like sanctuary, devotion, protection) taking place BEFORE reduction from armor - it previously worked vice versa.

If armor reduction was multiplicative, it wouldn't have mattered. This leads me to believe that damage reduction from armor is value that is likely subtracted from damage rather than being multiplicative. Needless theorizing at this point, but fun if you're into that sort of stuff.

We don't have to argue over it, Finney.

I just wanted to point out that there's a method to the madness.

I think that in this case, it would end up making a difference which buff is calculated first, just because it will affect how much damage the priest holding devotion takes. But it won't affect how much damage the target takes.

That seems unlikely. It seems much more likely the priest will take half the modified damage the target takes.

I would be curious to know if the priest holding devotion can also reduce the redirected damage via protective spells like sanctuary, etc. - in effect "double dipping" on damage reduction from both the target being hit and the priest holding the spell.

IIRC from my Aludran Priest(2-3 years ago), no damage reduction spells on the priest does not stack with damage reduction. Also from what I could tell it was a straight half of the percentage of damage taken after all damage reduction on the target, not a calculation of actual HP taken.