Well both these skills have a defensive advantage. I have a couple of sets of questions with regard to each.

The bonus is determined on a scale of lessons invested rather than skill levels right?

As far as physical versus magical damage, how does that work exactly beyond the obvious. I mean weapon attacks by a warrior are obviously physical and things like musical attacks are magical. However, where do things like hailstones or night kiss fall into the mix?

Definitely based on lessons spent and not skill rank.

For simple skills that are 100% magical (i.e. moonburst) or 100% physical (knight attacks), it's a flat percentage of the damage done. So, if a knight sword hits for 1000 damage normally, and your resilience offers you a 10% decrease in physical damage, you would take only 900 damage.

A lot of skills are split between several different damage types. For example, geomancer staff does 50% Poison, 25% Cutting, 25% Asphyxiation damage. Let's say that the staff does an even 1000 damage normally. 25% of that (250 damage) is from Cutting. If your resilience offers you a 10% decrease on physical damage, then the cutting portion would be reduced from 250 to 225. Resilience would not apply to the poison or the asphyxiation damage, so you would take a total of 975 damage.

Other protection skills work the same way - if you were to hold your breath when you're hit with a geomancer staff (which lowers asphyxiation damage) you can reduce the damage you take even further.

Skills like hailstones are split between multiple damage types. Resilience will affect only the portion of damage which is "physical" (blunt or cutting). Magic will affect whatever portion is "magical" (lightning, cold, fire, etc).

If you're trying to decide which to learn, you should transe resilience before learning magic. You can get proofs against magic damage, and most people don't kill with magic damage anyway. Also, resilience allows you to shrug off poisons, which comes in handy.

To correct a few common misconceptions: Resilience blocks cutting, blunt, and poison damage. It does not resist physical source attacks (strength based) unless they have as their damage type cutting, blunt, or poison. Obviously, it also protects against magical source attacks, if the damage type is cutting, blunt, or poison. Trans resilience is 25% resistant to all three of these damage types. Thus, if you were trans resilience and would normally take 1,000 damage from a geo staff, you would take 812 instead.

Magic blocks only the magic damage type. Magic does not block magical source attacks unless the attacks' damage type is magic. Magic also grants resistance against succumb, and shortens the duration that fleshstone, bubble, and toadcurse last. I do not know what other skills it effects.

Really? That's new info to me. Last I heard, resilience increased your resistance to poisons (i.e. venoms), but did not increase resistance to poison damage. I was always told that this idea was a misunderstanding of the help file on resilience. Obviously I've never tested it myself, but I was always under the impression that poison damage resistance was a rumor.

Also, I always get confused between damage type and source. Are physical and magical the only two sources?

I tested it on the test server by getting hit by pollute, forgetting resilience, and getting hit by pollute again. Resilience definitely works against poison damage, and honestly, it's balanced that way. You can get 25% resistance to cutting, blunt, poison, fire, and frost with common skills, and 35% resistance to magic. You can also get 100% resistance to asphyixiation of course, but only while on balance. You can only get 10% electrisity resistance, and no psychic resistance with common skills. Magic does extra damage with increased int (or so I hear from Laysus) relative to other damage types, and frost does 10-25% extra damage underwater (I need to test this). Thus, in my opinion, electrical is the most unbalanced damage type (but that's mitigated by the current rarity of the damage type), and frost is unbalanced due to the very significant bonus it gets at no penalty relative to the other damage types. The rest, however, are all balanced against one another. The above also ignores armor, of course. I need to test what armor does and doesn't protect against, because it certainly doesn't protect against Fury, but Fury might just be special.


Physical source damage means strength effects the amount of damage.
Magical source damage means intelligence effects the amount of damage, and that magical source damage increasing artifacts effect the amount of damage.
None source damage means that the amont of damage is not based on the user's stats at all.

These are the only three damage sources at the moment. Psychological (charisma) source might be interesting to add at some point...