Dunno how much defence proofings give, but if they give more defence against fire than great robes give against physical, then yeah, but I doubt that's true.

Proofings were 10% last I heard. So it shouldn't matter that much.

2372h, 3360m, 2708e, 9p elrxk-

Geb makes a fist and punches towards you, releasing a blast of pure elemental
energy that slams into you, searing your flesh.
895h, 3360m, 2708e, 9p elrxk-

You can get a rough estimate of how much the damage boost was by comparing the damage taken as a % of maxhealth. Marsu took 46% of his total health with a level 3 weakness, whereas Ixion took 32% of his total health without any weaknesses. But yeah, as others have said, the best way to test is only by getting people with similar health.

Geb has a TF and a Level 3 sceptor.

Well, there's that. But if you look at Kalahar and myself, I took 500 extra damage.

Geb is just overpowered.

I think their should be a chart or somethign you can look at to tell how much like weaknesses and stuff do plus the norm damage, but thats me.

You and I aren't disagreeing here. I know that is why they were downgraded, and I was making the point (perhaps before you were even clear about it, given Roark's response) that it was the relation of elemental weakness and weapon runes that was really a point of curiosity.

My point to Roark was that testing via a 'pure' elemental damage attack might be interesting mathmatically, but it doesn't really address your curiosity, which you've said was in large part because of artifact runes.

I also don't think it is correct (as Shorlen said) that "elemental runes are meant to be useless against someone with no physical defenses." The reason for this is precisely the reason Daevos is posting: A person who is taking elemental damage and has a weakness to it should take ABOVE the benchmark damage. In your example, if they were taking 1000 cutting and 500 lightning damage with a level 3 weakness, they should be taking (1000+(500 x X)) where X is a function that determines how much the lightning damage is increased. This is a specific example of when lightning runes are useful against a person with no physical defenses, disproving your point.

In fact, a more accurate description would be that "Elemental runes are supposed to be most effective against people with good physical protection and elemental weaknesses." You bypass the common cutting/bludgeon defenses and only deal with the elemental ones for a portion of damage. Even this overstates the case, since the defenses for physical damage are at least usually more poweful than elemental defenses. Thus, it should be uncommon that a person with an elemental rune would do LESS damage then if they did not have it. After all, these people are paying how much money?

If Daevos' testing shows that the gains from elemental runes, even against those with weaknesses to that element, are insignificant, that should cause rethinking of either elemental weaknesses or elemental runes. I'm guessing unless it was a bug in the weaknesses, that isn't going to get changed. But the runes might. If they're almost entirely useless, and hurt your damage output more often than not, why do they COST credits?

Proportionally, though, Marsu took 14% more damage with the same armour, resilience, etc. I can't see where that's hurting damage. In fact, it indicates that a level 3 weakness confers a 45% vulnerability to the element, if these things are scaled in a linear way.

Moreover, in practice these things should be more useful against warriors, because warriors have better physical protection than other archetypes so bypassing it does more to help your case.

Exactly, my thought of elemental runes was always that they'd give an advantage against heavily armoured opponents, if you're hitting a fullplate with your sword, it's not going to do a lot of damage, but if you put elemental runes on it, 50% of the fullplate is ignored, which is a lot.

But ignoring 50% of a leather armour for example isn't worth anything, so the difference in damage with and without elemental runes is going to increase the better the armour is, against people without any armour, there should be barely any difference. So if you're testing vulnerabilities, the increase in damage by elemental runes will be a lot higher with good armour than without armour. Giving a rather skewed and unclear view of vulerability effects.