The beasts have claws and teeth, but you? You have fire, you have Zeus like bolts...
Following is a braindump and infodump on various aspects of the game. Some of this is rather scattershot, because it consists of various questions that I asked over time, some from my own questions, some from fan questions that I relayed.
Modifiers to damage types from
an item,
an active buff (Call of the Wild),
an active aura (Earth Enchantment, etc),
a self buff (Blade Honing, etc),
an unattached passive skill (Anatomy, Volativity, etc), and all three of your attributes affect ALL types of that damage. Generally, the only types of modifiers that do NOT affect all types of damage dealt are the
passive modifiers to base skills, such as the damage bonuses to Ice Shard or Flame Surge.
That means your sword hit, your staff shot, your bow shot, your spell, whatever. If the damage types match up, they get boosted. +25% Fire damage from a ring? More staff damage if your staff deals fire damage. More fire damage from an axe with fire damage on it. More fire damage from a spell that deals fire damage. Same for any of the other modifiers. The only exceptions are the specific cases where Str or Dex do not boost some skill damages, or amplify the effects of +flat damage bonuses from equipment.
Curiously, this does mean that in a case where an item has more
types of damage, it can potentially benefit from more modifiers. That is, a staff that deals fire damage, but has an affix giving it lightning damage gets the boost from Intelligence twice (once on each elemental damage type), and again from modifiers that boost lightning OR fire damage. The same goes for Piercing weapons. Assuming you're playing a melee character with high str and dex, a weapon with no Piercing % (Most clubs or an axes for example) loses out on the % and +flat Piercing damage bonuses from Dex, items, skills, etc.
Remember, +% modifiers require that damage type to already be present. +flat modifiers add that damage amount, and can be modified by ANY enhancement to that damage type.
+% Damage is PHYSICAL damage. Other +% damage types list the specific type (+% Bleed Damage, +% Poison Damage, +% Fire Damage, +% Life Leech, and so on)
Buffs that only affect you don't help your pets, but auras do (Earth Enchantment, Heart of Oak, etc). Pets do get stronger on Epic and Legendary! Note that traps and briar ward are 'pets' of a sort.
Damage Resistance items are applied to the incoming physical damage in an additive. That is, if you have 100% TOTAL Damage Resistance, it's going to be eliminating incoming Physical damage completely. afaik, this also applies to most other sources of direct damage reduction (particularly +% resist from monster types like Undead/Beast/etc!)
Another point related to Damage Resistance - Piercing damage is converted from Physical BEFORE your resists are calculated from the hit - that is, even if you reduce Physical damage a ton, the Piercing is still going to punch right through at full strength, unless you have high Piercing Resistance.
Damage over Time effects (Burn, Frostburn, Electrical Burn, Poison, Bleed) that are on your gear/skills are shown in the DPS and Average Damage display as though the first second of damage was being applied immediately on hit. This is not what is actually occuring, rather, the display is attempting to give you a rough idea of how much the added damage over time is actually adding. It still takes a second for that effective damage to occur (and any dot damage beyond that first second). Beware of comparing two weapons in terms of damage per hit if one has a high amount of dot damage!
Remember also that all five dot types have their damages boosted by +% dot damage mods, not by Int (in the case of the 'elemental' dot types).
On Crits - they affect Physical (and as a result, Piercing), but they do NOT show the Piercing damage in the yellow crit, only the Physical damage.
Vitality Damage, Life Leech, % Damage Converted to Health, and % Life Lost can be a bit confusing. First off, there is resistance to Vitality damage, then there is resistance to Life Leech damage, even though only one display shows up on your character screen. Additionally, Undead tend to be immune to all forms of Vitality Damage, Leech, AND % Life Lost effects (Doom Horn, Take Down, etc), and many bosses are resistant to the effects.
The +% Life Leech modifier, as with other similar % based modifiers ONLY works if you ALREADY have Life Leech - yes, it is possible to get +% Life Leech and have no Life Leech damage over time. Note that this modifier does NOT work on % Damage converted to health! It does NOT work on % Life Lost (Plague, Take Down, etc).
The % Damage converted to health mod takes all forms of 'flat' damage into account for the health conversion, but it does not include any form of damage over time.
Vitality damage is NOT boosted by Intelligence. And to be clear, ONLY Elemental (Fire, Cold, Lightning, in any form) is boosted by Intelligence. The main benefit to Vitality damage is that very few types of creatures (besides Undead of course) have any resistance to it at all.
When you have multiple chances to stun % or dodge % from gear/skills, the chances are added together. Note that Dodge Ranged is a separate modifier from Dodge, Dodge only works on Melee hits. Neither helps with spell attacks. Note that Dodged Ranged helps against many objects that Titan Quest treats as projectiles, including staff bolts and Eruption boulders.
% Damage Reduction from a specific creature type is incredibly powerful - it works in an additive manner! Get 100% Undead Damage Resistance and you take 0 damage! Not only that, it applies to ALL types of damage dealt by that creature type. Similarly, this works in reverse - bonus damage against a monster type adds to all types of damage dealt to that type of monster.
This one is sort of roundabout - I was asking a question about the order of damage dealt, in an effort to find out if the Health % reduction from Take Down occured before or after other damage. The answer was that it happens AFTER Physical, Pierce, Elemental, and Poison. That might point towards the damage type order, but it doesn't include Bleed, Vitality, or Energy Burn.
Every 100 points of Dexterity adds 10% to the chance to avoid projectiles (?!). This one really surprised me, it needs to be tested.
Enemy resistances CAN be driven negative, boosting your damage output. Note that enemies get a global resistance bonus in Epic/Legendary.
And for your random skill tidbit: Storm Nimbus has a 70% chance of dealing Cold damage, and a 30% chance of dealing Lightning damage.
Armor is only useful against Physical damage, Elemental and (particularly) Piercing resists are very important in Epic/Legendary.
Farming boss chests is good for unique items, but gives you no chance at all to find monster rare items. You MUST fight monsters of that specific type to find rare monster items, many of which have extremely powerful modifiers (and note that these modifiers DO increase in power in each difficulty level, so the same pair of Sentinel's Armbands from a Gorgon or the suit of Exotic Armor from a Tropical Spider in Normal are less powerful than those found in Legendary). On top of that, monster items CAN have affixes, including rare affixes, potentially a rare suffix and a rare prefix, and they CAN be modified by Relics/Charms, unlike uniques... just something to think about for those of you mercilessly farming Typhon on Legendary
