FoH / Holy Bolt and -enemy magic resistance

The bolts from

Fist of the Heavens and

Holy Bolt ignore the enemy magic resistance of undead and demons and can even kill magic immune monster like

Achmel the Cursed.
Is the damage of the bolts affected by -enemy magic resistance from items like

Gheed's Wager,

Hellwarden's Will,

Sling ring or

Guardian's Light or is -enemy magic resistance pointless since the magic resistance is ignored?

Holy

Bolts deal MAGIC DAMAGE and because of this if you have -% to Enemy magic resistance stacked up, it will cause the

Bolts function better as far as I am aware.

I could be wrong, please someone smarter do correct my error if this is the case.

According to the amazon basin

Holy Bolt and

Fist of the Heavens bolts "magic damage is applied as though undead have MR 0%, even when Immune to Magic [...] but it does not pierce demon Magic Resist and Immune to Magic demons take no damage (Pit Lords in the

Furnace of Pain and

Tristram are the only Immune to Magic demons in the unmodified game)."

So -enemy magic resist should increase the damage against demons.

atari wrote: 2 months ago

According to the amazon basin

Holy Bolt and

Fist of the Heavens bolts "magic damage is applied as though undead have MR 0%, even when Immune to Magic [...] but it does not pierce demon Magic Resist and Immune to Magic demons take no damage (Pit Lords in the

Furnace of Pain and

Tristram are the only Immune to Magic demons in the unmodified game)."

So -enemy magic resist should increase the damage against demons.

This is my understanding. I played a lot of FoH when they first introduced changes to it in D2R, testing in different areas and situations, and concluded exactly as you have above. I haven't tested with -enemy magic resist but in theory this should work against demons.

This'd require some specific testing.

Back in the day, there was no need to ever confirm/deny that one, simply because -magic res didn't really exist. So

Bolts "acting as though it was 0" were just that with no corner cases to really worry about.

Today though, now that -magic res is finally available, it actually matters and that previously irrelevant question is a valid one. Could be that they simply hard-coded it as effectively 0. Could also be that they coded it the same way that sunders work, too except setting the starting res to 0 as opposed to a sunder's 95. Prior to -magic res gear, both approaches would've yielded the same result as it'd simply always be 0. Now, the first would still leave it at 0 and that's it while the second would set it to 0 and then allow -res to apply on top of that.

But unless someone's specifically tested that, you won't find an answer here I'm afraid. And you more likely than not won't find a reliable (if any) answer in any of the old references as there was simply never a need to look at that back in the day.

Yeah EMR on Holy

Bolts just works against Demons as

Holy Bolt ignores Undead MR entirely and EMR items cannot reduce this below zero because it bypasses this entire step (it doesn't modify it to 0% - otherwise you'd rightfully assume any res modification function can simply incorporate EMR during a calculation).

Or in simpler terms: a magic immune undead is seen as a normal undead - the game doesn't even read how much magic resistance any undead even have when calculating

Holy Bolt damage - and therefore any magic res modifiers aren't applied to a target which isn't read for magic res at all.

EMR also can't break a demon immunity on its own tho (Sunder required)