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A few months ago devs introduced Elemental Attacks and Defenses in Castle Age. These elemental powers now affect both pvp and several monsters, and if you care about either you will have to understand how they work.


A. Monster-wise

a1) Pierce/Resist system
Monsters that have physical resistance require that you use physical piercing to break their armor. You can get physical piercing either by buying a general that has it(like Aesir, Frost etc) or by forging physical piercing ingots in slotted gear.(general and/or gear MUST be equipped, not just owned)

If you do not have the required piercing to beat their resistance armor, then you will deal less damage to the monster.

a2) Elemental offense/defense system
Some of these new monsters also have elemental weaknesses and elemental resistancies.
Elemental Weakness is something that if "taken advantage of" gives you extra damage. If a monster has 5 fire weakness, then you need 5 fire elemental offense to take advantage of it and deal bonus damage to the monster.

Elemental resistance is something that can hinder your damage, but ONLY if you attack the monster with the wrong element. A monster having X elemental resistance, attacked with same X element, will reduce your damage by a certain %. If you attack the monster with ANY other element but X, then the elemental resistance will NOT affect your damage in any way.

a3) Elemental defense requirement
Poseidon currently also uses a unique system that actually requires that you have water elemental defense when attacking. If not, there's a chance that a Water element mini-boss will spawn which will seriously reduce the damage you deal to poseidon while it's alive. There are both advantages and disadvantages to having water element mobs appear.
Poseidon is currently the only monster that has a use for physical/elemental defense.

B) PvP-wise

b1) Physical resist/piercing system

An equipped general (or gear forged with physical resist/piercing ingot) will give you a % bonus to your effective attack and effective def for piercing.
This bonus is currently believed to be 1% for every 10 physical piercing or resistance. (if attacker and defender have equal physical piercing - resistance for defender - then the two will cancel each other out and nobody will get any bonus)
Source: http://www.castleageforums.com/cforum/showthread.php?t=61121

Physical piercing is what is needed to beat physical resistance.

b2) Elemental system

The element system works differently than the physical powers.

A player that has X elemental offense will get a % bonus to their effective attack against all players that have either no elemental defense or any elemental defense EXCEPT X.
This bonus is assumed to also be 1% for every 10 elemental offense, but unfortunately we've not seen any clear tests yet.

A player that has X elemental defense will get NO bonus to their effective defense unless their attacker is attacking them using the SAME element X. (if someone with earth offense attacks a person that has equal earth defense, then the attackers bonus to his effective attack will be canceled and the defender will get a bonus to his effective def instead)

This makes elemental defense less valuable than elemental offense. (personal opinion)

If you are considering forging elemental def gems into your gear, perhaps the best would be earth ones for pvp, because earth gems are easily obtained, so many serious pvpers will have elemental earth offense.
For monsters, it might be worth getting water defense gems(to help with Poseidon trident (personal opinion)


C) Forging
To see what gear you can forge in visit keep>forge
http://apps.facebook.com/castle_age/forge_item_power.php