Blood Vengence and Damage Types plus Bringing down an Early Vastness

[shatner]

Say a Deep Seer (living, not a magical being) shoots a Vastness (magical being, blood vengence +3) with an Arcane Bolt (evo-2, damages only magical beings) and the Deep Seer fails the MR save. Does the Deep Seer take the damage?

Arcane bolt only harms magical beings, making the Deep Seer immune to the attack. Of course, blood vengence might function only to redirect the raw damage without paying attention to the nuances of the source. The same sort of question can be asked of a fire immune caster shooting a non-fire immune, blood vengence target, and I'm genuinely unsure of the answer.

Any insights?

[Corinthian]

Interesting question. Probably not. I think I heard that fire attacks that bounces against blood vengeance does not harm fire immune casters, so I guess it wont harm the Seer.

[Valerius]

A couple of tests:

Deep Seer casting Arcane Bolt at a Vastness does get harmed and eventually killed when failing the blood vengeance roll.

Also tested a soulless commander with brimstone boots (FR 100) and O'al Kan's sceptre (cast fireball) against a vastness. Same result: on failed MR roll the soulless was slain.

So unless there was a flaw with my tests it seems that regardless of whether the caster is immune to the damage type they will be harmed on a failed roll.

Might also be worth searching the forums as this topic seems familiar. Perhaps someone else ran more extensive tests.

[shatner]

Wow, thanks for running the tests on that; though I must admit I'm a little sad at the results.

I'm playing as MA Atlantis in an early (still in year 1) war with R'lyeh. Everything is progressing well enough but I noticed they managed to pull a Vastness out of that gate of theirs and I'm at a real loss for ways to bring the darn thing down. Excellent stats, ethereal, exceptional immunities and blood vengeance +3 make the thing darn near unkillable this early on.

[Valerius]

Ouch, that's tough. FWIW, Arcane Bolt did work well when it hit and if the caster didn't get hit with blood vengeance. And this was an old vanilla game so with CBM boosting the spell's precision and damage it seems like a good option if you script resist magic before you start in.

BTW, vastnesses are troops, not commanders, right? In my tests I wished for and GoRed one so I could script holdx5 and I noticed they get S3 as commanders (they also have a crazy map movement of 10).

[NooBliss]

Thug your Kings, boost their MR and equip them with some anti-SC weapons. Rlyeh is a ***** to fight, but still that's better than nothing.

[Dimaz]

I think there was a similar thread some time ago and it was eventually discovered that the order of things is following: first, damage to initial target is calculated (taking into account armor, resistances etc). Next, BV roll is made. If BV is successful, the damage calculated in step 1 goes to the attacker. That's why naked dakinis are actually more effective at chaff killing than armored ones - they "receive" more damage.

[BewareTheBarnacleGoose]

This is an interesting question. The wiki mentions that poison damage does not trigger BV, so you could throw a horde of milita (atlantis has poison spears), cast Antimagic to reduce the chance of BV, and hope that a couple make their saves, and cause some extra damage from poison. The wiki also says that Paralyze does not trigger it, so you could try spamming it, although the Vastness' MR is very high. If it has been GOR'd, then Magic Duel will work too. Unfortunately, any of these strategies force you to loose much more resources than your enemy, so it's a sort of a phyrric victory for you...

Of course, someone more clever than I probably has a better way...

[Knai]

Originally Posted by BewareTheBarnacleGoose

This is an interesting question. The wiki mentions that poison damage does not trigger BV, so you could throw a horde of milita (atlantis has poison spears), cast Antimagic to reduce the chance of BV, and hope that a couple make their saves, and cause some extra damage from poison. The wiki also says that Paralyze does not trigger it, so you could try spamming it, although the Vastness' MR is very high. If it has been GOR'd, then Magic Duel will work too. Unfortunately, any of these strategies force you to loose much more resources than your enemy, so it's a sort of a phyrric victory for you...

Of course, someone more clever than I probably has a better way...

Early vastnesses are inconvenient at best. That said, we have two big situations, each of which has a few options. These assume limited magic, and none are that great.
1) GoR vastness. This is the difficult one. Magic duel is possible, but you will probably lose troops in the process. If it's on its own though, there are other options. Spamming horror mark could work, as the Vastness isn't anywhere near the level of the better generic horrors, let alone things like the Eater of Gods. Poison damage can also work, particularly if you have a cloud of poison of some kind. Still, odds are this will be expensive.

2) Troop vastness. This is actually much easier. Murder the commanders in a province it is in, hit the province, watch it run away. Some preparation is required, but if you can make sure it doesn't have friendly territory, this is probably the easiest option.

Now, these assume that you are pretty limited magically. You might have a few more options, but these are highly dependent on nation and pretender.
1) Enslave Mind/Charm. This and some MR boosters will be pretty expensive, but its not a Pyrrhic victory when you come out of it with a Vastness and only lose a few troops.
2) SC pretender. The vastness's primary line of defense is BV. An SC pretender should have a pretty solid MR, should have more hit points than the vastness, and could easily have regeneration if you have decent magic.
3) Vengeance of the Dead. Normally, I prefer Mind Hunt, but Mind Hunt and BV on enemies do not mix well. However, penetration items are easy for remote casters, and Vengeance of the Dead is great at simply overwhelming enemies with numbers, particularly as retreats aren't a worry. The Vastness lacks staying power.
4) Sleep, Stellar Cascades. As far as I know, damage that goes through fatigue isn't affected by BV. Knock the vastness out and hit it with enough fatigue, and even it will collapse. Moreover, it makes it easier to kill with troops, though it will still be expensive (unless you are using Raise Dead or similar).

[shatner]

Good advice all, though I feel I should point out that the Vastness is poison immune. http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Vastness

It's not fire immune but that doesn't much matter when you are fighting underwater.