Board Thread:Dark Souls/@comment-31.51.43.145-20150902200911/@comment-71.23.225.154-20150903035744

Yes. In a way.

But both resistances (physical and otherwise) must be taken into account on your target.

For example, if you upgrade and upgrade your favorite bow, and even modify/ascend it to do additional fire or magical damage (at the appropriate blacksmith), before heading to the hellkite dragon on the hellkite bridge between Undead Burg and the (new) Undead Parish, you’ll be very very disappointed at how little damage each arrow does.

This is because each shot must overcome the dragon’s physical armor, and must “answer” to the appropriate resistance, too (magic resistance, fire resistance, or lightning resistance for example).

This is powerful knowledge to have indeed! Knowing this, you could design a pvp character whose specialty is backstabbing (called critical attacks in the game of Dark Souls). Stabbing the back of another human player’s character ignores much of his/her armor (physical defense), while also doing amplified/magnified damage. (You could equip a bandit’s knife to have a bonus to having your backstab “connect” while equipping the hornet’s ring to have the successful backstab do additional damage.) You could use a weapon that does lightning damage (or apply gold pine resin to any weapon to give it the lightning damage ability) since many low level characters have poor lightning resistances, or ask Andre nicely to make your weapon do raw damage. Raw damage means your weapon is “enchanted” with additional physical damage… which simply means you’re choosing to do physical damage and then physical damage AGAIN in a big pile, rather than physical/lightning mix, physical/magic mix, physical/fire mix, physical/bleed mix, physical/poison mix, etc. Raw weapons not only do amplified physical damage, but they only have to answer to one enemy “resistance” rating. (That of their armor’s combined total physical defense).

If your opponent had one hundred billion thousand million resistance in fire, lightning, magic, poison, bleed, and curse, your raw weapon would only take into account their physical armor rating! And, if I’m not mistaken backstabs (critical attacks) ignore 75% or 80% of their physical armor.

I hope this information helps you, and I hope I’ve answered your question clearly.