Damage Soak

From NexusWiki

Damage soak is an effect that reduces the damage dealt to one's character.

There are two kinds of damage soak: unstackable soak and stackable soak. To work out how much soak a character has against a particular damage type, take the best single source of unstackable soak for that type of damage (or 0 if you have no such sources of soak), and then add on all the stackable soak the character has.

Sources of unstackable soak include: Wearable items such as armor, permanent innate armors such as Divine Armor and Tattoo of Resilience. Note that as innate armors generally offer a large amount of soak, wearable items often do not have any effect on the soak of a character with innate armor. So if a character has Way of Earth for example, wearing a suit of armor will provide no additional benefit.

Sources of stackable soak include: taking Dose of Painkillers, Turtle Shell, Dark Oppressors' Stygian bonus, Potions of Invulnerability, Cloak of Steel and the effects of Weaken. Weaken actually reduces soak, and as a result it is possible to have less than 0 soak.

Characters attacking someone who possesses a positive damage soak against the damage type used will receive a message saying "You attack X with an X for X damage. Their armor soaked X of that damage". A successful attack will always deal a minimum of one point of damage, regardless of soak. If the character with negative soak gets hit, for example due to Weaken, the attacker will not be told about the soak, but their attack will do extra damage according to the amount of negative soak. Experience points are awarded according to the damage that the attacker actually deals, so high/low soak will also reduce/increase the amount of XP they gain.

Doors have a damage soak of 3 by default.

Some damage is unsoakable or "fundamental", such as the damage from traveling on the planes of Stygia and Paradise.

The maximum soak any player may have is 20 points versus any damage type.