I’m in the middle of playing through Risen 3: Titan Lords and have just acquired some offensive magic spells by joining one of three factions in the game. I’ll try to keep spoilers at a low level here, so I won’t go too much into specifics. (A minutia blog post about the game will be uploaded when I’ve completed it.)
After joining up with the faction, I was given a trial of killing a golem with an offensive spell. The trainer recommended using a fire spell that i could buy from him now, but then my experience with a ton of RPG immediately begged to differ. In most of these games a common denominator often say that creatures are probably immune to elemental spell damage that matches their own affinity. Fire demons ignore fire damage, ice golems ignore frost damage, that kind of thing.
But the trick is that in most RPG, beings immune to lightning are actually quite rare – most of the time even nonexistent. Lightning often works well against all elemental creatures, including fire and ice. And for that reason, I’ve favored this type of magic for quite a while.
So I ignored his recommendations, went to another trainer, and bought a lightning spell!
I was excited. The faction had been very secretive about their magic and this would be the very first time I used an offensive spell like this in the game. More than 14 hours played, and finally, finally I could do some damage without getting slapped around. So I ran down to an area further down on the island, found the trial golem, and gave him my best impersonation of Darth Sidious.
WHAT!? IMMUNE!? But… but… my experience with RPG… damn! The only damage the golem lost was from the melee hits caused by my companion. I accepted the defeat of my wisdom, and ran back.
That’s better. So the golem was indeed designed to only be damaged by fire. And since this was the only enemy attached to this trial quest, it immediately completed as soon as it was killed.
And then, as I saw the quest title, I understood why it had to be killed with fire:
Divinity: Original Sin actually let you do some really cool stuff with different elemental spells interacting with the environment and each other. I wish you could do some epic spell combos like first super cooling a golem, then blasting it with heat so it blows up from the sudden temperature change :D.
Remember back in WoW when elemental resistance was a thing? Stacking up on fire resistance for Raggy and farming for level 40 gear for AQ40 just so you’d get that 15 extra nature resistance for Huhuran? 😛
Oh yes, some of that stuff in WoW was insane. Especially reputation grinding. But strangely, it’s also part of my fond memories for that game. Weird, isn’t it? 😉