A Little Black Flame Research

Hello Forums

I just want to report a few tests on black flame I performed the other night.

Firstly, many of you know this, but for those who browse forums instead of the wiki home, black flame has been confirmed to do Fire damage. There are a few spots around the wiki that lists it as physical and some youtubers seem adamant about it dealing physical.

I decided to test black flames stamina reduction potential v.s. shield stability. The toon used is sl 50 with 64.8 stamina (14 end fap ring). I choose to test on him so I could see how black flame would affect mid level questers who may not be pvping.

8 Shields were tested. The criteria was how many casts does it take to break guard

No Grass was used during the tests
Format: shield name/stability/# of casts to break guard at 64.8 stamina

Silver Knight/76/2
Grass Crest/61/2
Black Iron/80/4
Crest/66/2
Spider/56/1
Wooden/62/1
Dark Hand/30/1
Havels/84/5-8

Havels shield as expected performed the best. The 5-8 is due to me letting go of the shield on some runs to see how much stam I could recover between spams. For all other shields I never let the shield down during the spams.

I decided to test poise and black flame as well..

The tests confirmed that one would need 62 poise at the minimum in order to tank one cast.

Iron Flesh on a 0 poise toon absorbed 4 casts. I suspect it could have taken more however my toon died from taking 5 while naked lol.

Also, the bellowing ring and dusk's crown do not increase the guard breaking affect,only its damage dealt.

The glove used was ascended +5.

I tested the usefulness of Flash Sweat as well...

with Fire Def 95 my 1022 hp toon was reduced to 532 hp after one black flame no buffs added. 490 dmg inflicted

with Fire Def 95 my 1022 hp toon was reduced to 707 hp with Flash Sweats protection
315 dmg inflicted

A difference of 175 dmg!

That about sums up my research. HUGE thanks to Chibininja for frying my toon helping me gather the info

This was done at the request of some forum members, let me know if you guys would like more in depth tests. I wanted to see if there was any interest before I went all out.

Holy crap...Guess we have something pretty serious to worry about again. Props on doing this, +1.

test its str scaling maybe? try it a 16 str and maybe 50 str? with the same grade of pyro hand...

Very nice work there, mind if I throw this into the resources thread?

Tolvo wrote:Very nice work there, mind if I throw this into the resources thread?

Please go right ahead Tolvo thanks

It has been added to the PvP section.

Thanks Lord this was really useful!

Rosie

Due to an accidental test just now, I'm actually not sure if Black Flame does Fire damage.

Y'know those bloated hollows in the Painted World that toxic you when you kill them? If you use fire on them, then you won't get toxic'd. I just killed 1 with Black Flame and the toxic juices spurted out and inflicted Toxic on me as if I had killed it with something other than Fire.

XachAttack wrote:Due to an accidental test just now, I'm actually not sure if Black Flame does Fire damage.

Y'know those bloated hollows in the Painted World that toxic you when you kill them? If you use fire on them, then you won't get toxic'd. I just killed 1 with Black Flame and the toxic juices spurted out and inflicted Toxic on me as if I had killed it with something other than Fire.

Flash sweat only reduces fire damage+flash sweat reduces back flame damage=Black flame deals fire damage.

But then why did they spurt toxic stuff when they don't do that when they die to fire damage?

I'm not trying to disprove anything, it just caught my attention.

Fire will stun them or knock them back. That is why you don't get toxic. It has more to do with the animation than the exact type of damage done.

I'm not so sure about that...I'll have to do some real testing now.

Ok, new results from a better test.

I hit Quelaag with Black Flame and it actually did 25 damage. I know for a fact that Quelaag is immune to fire, and to double check I threw a Great Fireball and it did no damage.

What if Black Flame has a bit of Physical damage mixed in along with the Fire? Like an Elemental Weapon.

Pardon the double post.

XachAttack wrote:Ok, new results from a better test.

I hit Quelaag with Black Flame and it actually did 25 damage. I know for a fact that Quelaag is immune to fire, and to double check I threw a Great Fireball and it did no damage.

What if Black Flame has a bit of Physical damage mixed in along with the Fire? Like an Elemental Weapon.

Pardon the double post.

Thats interesting to know, also with the bloated zombies, because they dont spew toxic when killed with the furysword (havent tried other weps but I assume fire/chaos elemental weps will be the same as they are split)

Do you know of any enemy that is immune to magic damage? I would like to test the theory of dark magic being part physical.

Rosie =)

Red Rosie Sugar wrote:

XachAttack wrote:Ok, new results from a better test.

I hit Quelaag with Black Flame and it actually did 25 damage. I know for a fact that Quelaag is immune to fire, and to double check I threw a Great Fireball and it did no damage.

What if Black Flame has a bit of Physical damage mixed in along with the Fire? Like an Elemental Weapon.

Pardon the double post.

Thats interesting to know, also with the bloated zombies, because they dont spew toxic when killed with the furysword (havent tried other weps but I assume fire/chaos elemental weps will be the same as they are split)

Do you know of any enemy that is immune to magic damage? I would like to test the theory of dark magic being part physical.

Rosie =)

the crystal golems have extremely high magic defense, but I don't know if there is any mob that is completely immune.

I'm also curious to know if dark magic works better against people with high magic defense than crystal magic

I did on crystal golems with GHSA and Dark Orb. They both did very low damage (around 70). A crazy theory could be that as Manus Catalyst increases dark sorcery damage by increasing Str, it could be increasing the physical "part" of the dark sorceries.

reim0027 wrote:Fire will stun them or knock them back. That is why you don't get toxic. It has more to do with the animation than the exact type of damage done.

Sorry to say this but you are wrong. I can confirm that the bloated zombies DO NOT spew toxic stuff AT ALL if you use a fire weapon. The last time I went through Painted World I used a fire spear and they never spewed their stuff.

I suspect the Black Flame is like Kalameet's flame, something similar to fire but not quite, so since the game doesn't consider it regular fire the zombies got him toxic.

Something else I noticed too. Enemies don't suffer from the death animation of being killed by a Fire attack when Black Flame kills them.

Y'know, when they kinda flail their arms and hold them up to their neck or something as they drop, or have 1 arm outstretched towards the sky. These examples are from any player sized humanoid, like the Hollow Soldiers/Warriors or other players, such as Phantoms or someone in Human form.

Black flame dealing split damage eh? That is something I never considered Xach.

I suppose a way of testing would go as follows:

Equip black flame and great combustion

Use them on test subject, record damage inflicted

Use them again after test subject has cast flash sweat, record damage inflicted.

The reduction of great combustion will be about 45%
We know great combustion does 100% fire damage

Figure the reduction percentage of black flame

In my tests, it appears that black flames damage inflicted was only reduced by approx 35.7% 490 dmg down to 315 dmg. 175 dmg reduction.

So perhaps Xach is correct.

Just another thought here but, you mentioned Quelaag eating 25 dmg from black flame (I assume maxed glove)? One could use various weak physical weps until they find one dealing around 25 dmg with its one handed r 1 attack and safely say black flame's physical AR is mighty close to that particular weapons AR. Using the 35.7% reduction number you could then figure out a rough ratio of fire to physical that black flame actually does (with a maxed glove). Time to ng+ so I can test this

I should've mentioned the level of the glove after testing.

I don't remember off the top of my head, but I THINK it was a either a +15 or +0-+1 Ascended. Sorry ._. .

Maybe when you get close to 120 you could summon me for testing against Quelaag again, since my Flame is maxed out now and I've already killed Quelaag in my game. Just a thought.

Tomhet wrote:

reim0027 wrote:Fire will stun them or knock them back. That is why you don't get toxic. It has more to do with the animation than the exact type of damage done.

Sorry to say this but you are wrong. I can confirm that the bloated zombies DO NOT spew toxic stuff AT ALL if you use a fire weapon. The last time I went through Painted World I used a fire spear and they never spewed their stuff.

XachAttack wrote:Something else I noticed too. Enemies don't suffer from the death animation of being killed by a Fire attack when Black Flame kills them.

Y'know, when they kinda flail their arms and hold them up to their neck or something as they drop, or have 1 arm outstretched towards the sky. These examples are from any player sized humanoid, like the Hollow Soldiers/Warriors or other players, such as Phantoms or someone in Human form.

^^That's probably what I was thinking then. I assumed it was the different animation.

I was wondering about the science behing Black Flame for some time.
Thank you for your hard work.

WyrmHero wrote:I did on crystal golems with GHSA and Dark Orb. They both did very low damage (around 70). A crazy theory could be that as Manus Catalyst increases dark sorcery damage by increasing Str, it could be increasing the physical "part" of the dark sorceries.

Apologies for being off topic with this reply, but ive actually just tested this dark magic/Manus catalyst in a new post, check it out =)