[Question] Armor Ignoringness of damages

(first of all, life stealing, sacrifice, and degen are not damages)

Theory 1: Depends on damage type
This is the current theory GuildWiki uses

Holy, Shadow, and unspecified type (mostly Mesmer skills) damage ignores armor. Physical, Elemental, Light, Dark, and Chaos damage do not ignore armor.

Exception:
1. Judge's Insight converts damage to Holy, but does not ignore armor.
2. Dust Trap deals earth damage, but ignores armor
3. Whirling Defense, deals piercing damage, but ignores armor

Theory 2: Depends on the skill
This is what SonOfRah wrote in his damage article hosted on GWOnline. However he did not furthur explain how to differenciate whether the skill ignores armor or not. This results in the exasperating implication that, if you are looking at a list of new Chapter 38 skills, deciding which one you want to unlock, you cannot tell if the skill deals damage-ignoring damage or not (unless like Obsidian Flame and Crystal Wave they explicitly state it).

Theory 2.5: If skill descrption says "deal" or "struck for" x damage, it doesn't ignore armor. If skill description says "take" x damage, it ignores armor. (non-skill damage never ignore armor)

Exceptions:
?

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I have also heard of the existence of other theories, but have not had the pleasure of learning the details. Theory 1 is almost perfect, with that one excepting glaring at me in the face. Thus I would like to learn of other theories, or report Judge's Insight as a bug (either in functionality or textual description).

So, how do you determine if a particular damage ignores armor?

As a general rule, read the description. No damage type inherently ignores armor. Armor ignoring is always a flag set on a skill. Skills that ignore armor will *generally* say "target takes X damage", as opposed to "target is struck for X damage". See Mesmer skills, Smiting skills, Dust Trap and most other armor ignoring skills. There's a few exceptions, but they're generally legacy descriptions that never got cleaned up when they moved to more standardized mechanic descriptions.

+damage from attacks like Eviscerate also ignore armor, although the main weapon damage doesn't.

I'd just like to point out that in your theory 1, you have dark listed as both ignoring and non-ignoring.

Fixed. First instance was supposed to be Shadow

So, if it has more exceptions than Theory 1, is there an official source vouching for the take/struck distinction over the damage type distinction? Or is this just a more generally accepted theory?

Mesmer spell damage I think is just classed as chaos damage. To my understanding it does ignore armor.

No damage type, such as holy or fire, ignore armor. It always depends on the skill.

None of the mesmer skills say the damage type is Chaos.

On the other hand, mesmer weapons, which never ignores armor, always deal Chaos damage.

Um... Are you agreeing with Theory 2 or are you agreeing with post 2? If you agree with post 2, can you help with my follow-up question in post 6?

chaos storm does chaos damage and i believe it is ignoring on that skill.

also to comp,icate things there are certain skills that reduce armor ignoring damage and certain skills that dont. Life barrier for example can reduce a lot of armor ignoring damage but not life stealing (i think i dont know)

also aura of the lich trumps all it reduces everything, and source of damage

the chaos stormness is either a misprint by the programmers, or a misreading by you. either way it DOES NOT deal chaos damage and ignores armour

Chaos Storm does ignore armor, but its damage is untyped. The skill description does not say it's chaos damage.

Technically Life Stealing isn't damage, so it is natural form Life Stealing to ignore protection skills. Protection skills introduce no complications with respect to armor-ignoring damage. Those that add armor gets ignored. Those that reduce damage don't get ignored (since they are not armor-related).

Aura of the Lich does NOT reduce health loss due to life stealing. However it does reduce health loss due to sacrifice (not simply because max health is decreased), and since sacrifice isn't technically damage, I think that skill has a text bug.

My guess is that that theory dates back to when many mesmer skills described themselves as dealing chaos damage.

Hmm, if that is the case (I used to play on Beta Weekends but didn't notice), perhaps the removal of chaos damage type from the mesmer skills can actually be used to argue in favor of Theory 1?

Something along the lines of "It was decided that chaos damage should not ignore armor, but mesmer skills should ignore armor, so mesmer skills where changed from dealing chaos damage to dealing untyped damage."

wrong......put on aura of the leich and run up to a couple life-stealing necros. they steal full damage worth

I've learned basically..it depends on the skill.

I think we can be less pedestrian than "depends on skill". Perhaps we can say that HP Loss falls into the following types:

1. Degeneration
2. Damage
   1. Resistable Damage (elemental, dark, light, chaos)
   2. Unresistable Damage (shadow, holy, untyped)
3. HP Stealing
4. HP Sacrifice
5. HP Reduction

Armor counteracts only Resistable Damage. Sacrifice (necro and ritualist skills) and Reduction (Infuse Health, Illusion of Weakness) are distinguished because Scourge Sacrifice doesn't affect the second kind.

mesmer dmg (chaos or not) is like life stealing, were it ignore armor, and it is not really like the other magics. its more on the line of life stealing were its not a dmg since it always does the same amount of dmg reguardless. Plus mesmer dmg is either degn or instant. The staffs and wands dont follow this decription they are dmg (chaos) and dont ignore armor

Well, the entire point of this thread is asking what are the theories concering distinguishing Resistable Damage vs Unresistable Damage...

And you are obviously going with Theory 1 (which isn't correct 100% of the time), and I'm asking for details on the other theories.

1. Degen is NOT damage (in terms of game mechanics), so its beyond the scope of this discussion (and they obviously never care about armor)

2. Mesmer damage (from Backfire, Empathy, IW etc) is DIFFERENT from life stealing, becuase protective spirit/bond and other damage-triggered spells will react to mesmer damage. They act like regular armor-ignoring damage.