Gameplay Help and Discussion - Pls help me to figure out how "damage taken as" works. - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

Hello.

Before all -

I find lacking myself of knowledge about such mechanic as "Damage taken as" while preparing my new build.
A Wiki page on the topic is a little low on specifics. But perhaps my questions are not entirely from this ctegory.

So. Down below is my question visualised.

Situation:
Character will be Hit by monster
Monster's damage has equal amount of Fire, Lightning, Cold, Chaos and Physycal components in it

A character with:
- equipped unique armour The fourth vow

- equipped unique shield Dawnbreaker(max roll)

- allocated Keystone Divine Flesh

- allocated Ascendancy notable Unbreakable

To visualise damage in it's different states I try to use simple paints.

Step one:
Here is the damage Monster Hit us with.
Each big box resembles a damage type. Each small box is an equal portion of this damage, for visual simplicity.

Step two:
Character recive specific parts of the Hit damage "Taken as" different damage type.
A Wiki page states that "damage taken as" is NOT a conversion.
As far as I understand this means that damage type is remains itself, but some part of it will be mitigated with values usually associated to other specific damage type.
In other words:

Becouse damage is NOT converting, I do not change damage type (big box) for it's portions (and thus they remains in the same boxes) and only change damage's element for it's portions (small boxes)

Step three (the questionable one):
A Wiki page clearly states, tha any shifts in damage type happens before any mitigation.
The story would ended here if not our last hero - the Unbreakable Ascendancy notable. It works as the extra layer of defence and encourages players to divide incoming elemental damage to as many small parts as possible.
Each of such parts will recive an individual mitigation with help of 8% armour.
Because armor mitigation counts much differently than elemental/chaos resistance it is vise to take many small damage portions simultaneously rather than one big of the same summurized value.

This make me question myself - how exactly damage "Taken as" would be distributerd and counted by this 8% of armour?

On this picture above, it is obviously that Red mitigation will be applyed to red small boxes and the rest will be similar.
However it is NOT clear how many groups of each damage will be formed. More groups=more effectivness of Unbreakable and vise versa.

There is two variants equally logical for me but I can not prove any of it.

Assumption 1: We take summary of all same-colored small boxes and work with one group of each color.
In this case:

Assumption 2: Becouse our recived damage is NOT converted, therefor it still count every BIG box individually. And, due to each damage type(big box) contains various damage chunks of different element - I suppose all of these damage chunks will be mitigated individually as part of thier damage type
In that case:

I will be thankfull for the answers.
Cheers.

Let's assume you take 100 damage of every type, fire, cold, lightning, physical and chaos for a total of 500 hit damage.

1. Divine Flesh and Dawnbreaker (assume perfect 20% roll, no corruption) apply first. However, damage taken can only be converted once.

This results in 30 cold, 30 lightning, 110 fire, 80 physical and 250 chaos damage.

2. Resistances would apply now.

3. Fourth Vow and Unbreakable happens. 100% of your armour value gets applied to chaos damage, 92% of your armour value gets applied to physical damage and 8% of your armour value gets applied to elemental damage using the usual armour scaling.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Armour

TL;DR: Armour gains a lot of value but additional fire damage mitigation also becomes more important.

"

Scarletsword wrote:

Let's assume you take 100 damage of every type, fire, cold, lightning, physical and chaos for a total of 500 hit damage.

1. Divine Flesh and Dawnbreaker (assume perfect 20% roll, no corruption) apply first. However, damage taken can only be converted once.

This results in 30 cold, 30 lightning, 110 fire, 80 physical and 250 chaos damage.

2. Resistances would apply now.

3. Fourth Vow and Unbreakable happens. 100% of your armour value gets applied to chaos damage, 92% of your armour value gets applied to physical damage and 8% of your armour value gets applied to elemental damage using the usual armour scaling.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Armour

TL;DR: Armour gains a lot of value but additional fire damage mitigation also becomes more important.

Thank you.
Unfortunally I accedently post this post befor completeng it.
Non the less, I have even more questions now.
Why do you say that "92% of your armour value gets applied to physical damage" ?
I do belive you, but I do not understand the logic here. Ascendancy states only about 8% being applyed to ele-damage. It did not say anything about taking this 8% from physical mitigation...

My brain is melting)

"

MadGoodGorb wrote:

Why do you say that "92% of your armour value gets applied to physical damage" ?
I do belive you, but I do not understand the logic here. Ascendancy states only about 8% being applyed to ele-damage. It did not say anything about taking this 8% from physical mitigation...

That claim may be based on the different wordings. The chaos one has "also" in it but the Juggernaut one does not. If it really is so then the Juggernaut wording is bad because it should have an "instead" in there which it doesnt. See Transcendence wording. And if it is not so then the Juggernaut wording (and/or the chaos one) is also bad.

"

MadGoodGorb wrote:

I will be thankfull for the answers.

If you do not get a good answer you can test it yourself with some effort if you have a Divine Flesh (or maybe easier: Incandescent Heart) to test with.

"

MadGoodGorb wrote:

Step two:
Character recive specific parts of the Hit damage "Taken as" different damage type.
A Wiki page states that "damage taken as" is NOT a conversion.
As far as I understand this means that damage type is remains itself, but some part of it will be mitigated with values usually associated to other specific damage type.
In other words:

Spoiler

If character have "20% of Cold damage is taken as Fire",
then
80% of damage type "Cold" is mitigated by Cold resistance
20% of damage type "Cold" is mitigated by Fire resistance
this 20% loses thier original properties like freezing and gain fire properties instead(?)
Since it is NOT a conversion, I consider that this is strange and confusing.

Becouse damage is NOT converting, I do not change damage type (big box) for it's portions (and thus they remains in the same boxes) and only change damage's element for it's portions (small boxes)

Damage conversion is a mechanic with particular properties. Converted damage is affected by modifiers to both the previous damage type, and the damage type it becomes--including further conversions. This is why damage conversion is always one way, and never loops around: you can never convert fire damage to physical, for example.

"Damage taken as" only changes the damage type once, and all at the same time, so it doesn't have the same restriction to what damage types can change into what other types. This is why the unique body armour The Rat Cage can let you take 100% of fire damage as physical damage.

"Damage taken as" occuring in a single step before any mitigation takes place also means that you can't benefit from incoming damage mitigation multiple times. If you have 75% cold and fire resist, you would take the same amount of damage from a cold hit if you took it as cold or if you had 100% of cold damage taken as fire. If it were like damage conversion, both resists would have come into play if you took it as fire.

Because non-damaging ailments care about how much damage you take, taking cold or lightning damage as other types can reduce the magnitude of incoming Chill or Shock, or duration of Freeze. If you take a portion of physical damage as cold damage, then a purely physical damage hit can chill.

Damaging ailments, on the other hand, are based on the base damage being dealt. You can still be ignited by a fire hit even if you are taking 100% of fire as physical, and you cannot be ignited by a cold hit even if you are taking 100% of cold as fire.

In the terms of your visual aids: after reaching the above point, you would move all the smaller boxes into the matching colour big box. Because it is not damage conversion, the type of damage it was beforehand no longer has relevance--except for inflicting damaging ailments, which would start before the "damage taken as" step anyways.

"

Jadian wrote:

In the terms of your visual aids: after reaching the above point, you would move all the smaller boxes into the matching colour big box.

Do you have a source for that? (There may be a reddit post about this but I am not sure.)

"

Zrevnur wrote:

"

Jadian wrote:

In the terms of your visual aids: after reaching the above point, you would move all the smaller boxes into the matching colour big box.

Do you have a source for that? (There may be a reddit post about this but I am not sure.)

I can be foolish at times and not get the point being made or the question being asked, so I'll restate and answer.

My understanding of the question is "are you sure that the original damage type no longer matters?"

The wiki page for Damage taken as uses these posts by Mark_GGG as a source for these two sentences:

"

It is important to note that this is not damage conversion.[2] The shifted part of damage does not retain its original damage property so it won't get mitigated either twice or by the more favourable method.

While Mark's original post did not quote the post above it, this is the exchange that took place in the thread:

"

"

They could work like other forms of conversion, and apply both types of mitigation.

No, they could not. There's a reason that changing the type of damage taken is not described as a conversion - it's a fundamentally different thing from damage conversion.
Mitigation - particularly armour - can't work like that.

The concept of conversion here being "the damage type changes, but the original damage type still matters". For "Damage taken as", only the final type matters, and only the mitigation for that final type applies.

Going in a different direction, I mostly just browse the Bug Reports forum here, so here is a source from there:

User was dying to elemental reflect, but stopped dying after unallocating Divine Flesh. The "elemental damage taken as chaos damage" was not affected by "reduced reflected elemental damage taken". The original damage being elemental did not matter, only that the damage taken was now chaos damage.

If I'm still off the mark on what sort of confirmation you're looking for, could you try rephrasing the question?

"

Jadian wrote:

If I'm still off the mark on what sort of confirmation you're looking for, could you try rephrasing the question?

The relevant question is whether the "chunks" of (for example) chaos damage are added together before the Armour application or not.

Example: Char gets hit by 50 fire and 50 cold. Char has Divine Flesh and the ESA mastery "10% of Armour applies to chaos damage from hits". So char gets hit by 50 ele damage which I am not interested in in this example and by 50 chaos damage. But does the Armour get applied to 25 chaos and to 25 chaos. Or are those two chunks added together before the armour application and armour is applied once to 50 chaos damage. Far as I understand this is OPs question.