After numerous tests involving basic pirates shooting elemental missiles of fixed 50 damage (of water, fire, and air variety), and a lv99 hero that can cast many spells and alternate her resistance and armor class at will, I have found this out:

Contrary to MM6 and MM7, elemental ranged attacks (NOT spells) ARE affected by your armor class!

So not only are they vastly reduced by your elemental resistance, but they have a very high chance to miss as well.

This hugely affects:
- Priests of the sun
- Necromancers (though their fireball spells DO hurt)
- Pirate mages
- Bone dragons
- Willow Wisps
- Ether knights!

*goes back to edit his monsters.txt file to increase those attack's damage even more

Further observations:

- There are two types of physical arrow attacks: normal, and flaming.

- The flaming arrow is still a physical attack: it's unaffected by the fire resistance, but is reduced by the Plate Mastery / Chain grandmastery

- the normal type arrow can be evaded with Armor class, but they flaming type always hits!

- The shield spell doesn't work at all. It never halves damage.

Are all of these observations applicable to the vanilla MM8 (including patches) or also to the Greyface-patched version?

All of those "features" have been fully tested on both Grayface's version, and the original CD version from 3DO/NWC.


Tested the chain and plate armor against pirates shooting 50 damage fire/air/water projectiles, and physical arrows. (at GM level)

Ok, at least those work right. They cut the damage of arrows (both kinds) but not the elemental projectiles, whew.

Maybe the AC allowing evasion of elemental projectiles wasn't a bug and was intended.

Additional bug found yesterday: weapons enchanted with "+ body damage" deal water damage instead.

http://www.celestialheavens.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12042