Does impale ignore resistances?

The Impale ability computes the damage as if you made a physical attack for the total combined rating of your unit's attack. Thus, for your Air Elemental, the Impale damage was calculated as if your Air Elemental Spear had a physical attack rating of 30 rather than a physical attack rating of 2 and a lightning attack rating of 28. In other words, your unit's attack got converted to a physical-only attack when you made use of Impale.

 If you wanted to change this, you could go to CoreSpells.xml and change this

-<SpellDef InternalName="Impale_Ability"> <DisplayName>Impale</DisplayName> <Description>Stikes the target unit and the one behind him.</Description> <FormattedDescription>Stikes the target unit and the one behind him for a %d Attack.</FormattedDescription> <IconFG>Ability_Impale_Icon.png</IconFG> <Cooldown>5</Cooldown> <SpellBookSortCategory>Unit</SpellBookSortCategory> <SpellBookSortSubCategory>UnitDamage</SpellBookSortSubCategory> <SpellType>Tactical</SpellType> <SpellClass>Offensive</SpellClass> <SpellSubClass>Damage</SpellSubClass> <SpellTargetType>EnemyUnit</SpellTargetType> <HideInHiergamenon>1</HideInHiergamenon> <IgnoreInvalidTargetsInRadius>1</IgnoreInvalidTargetsInRadius> <IsCastable>0</IsCastable> <CanBeDodged>1</CanBeDodged> <IsSpecialAbility>1</IsSpecialAbility> <Radius>1</Radius> <RadiusType>LINE_FORWARD</RadiusType> <Range>1</Range> -<GameModifier> <ModType>Unit</ModType> <Attribute>DefendableDamage</Attribute> <AttackStat>UnitStat_Attack_Pierce</AttackStat> <IsForFormattedDescription>1</IsForFormattedDescription> -<Calculate InternalName="Calc" ValueOwner="CastingUnit"> -<Expression>
<![CDATA[[UnitStat_CombinedAttack] * [UnitStat_BonusImpale]]]>
</Expression> </Calculate> -<Calculate InternalName="Value"> -<Expression>
<![CDATA[[Calc]]]>
</Expression> </Calculate> -<Calculate InternalName="ValueForFormattedDescription"> -<Expression>
<![CDATA[[Calc]]]>
</Expression> </Calculate> </GameModifier> -<AIData AIPersonality="AI_General"> <AIPriority>5</AIPriority> <AIMinSpellTargets>2</AIMinSpellTargets> </AIData> <HitSoundFX>Ability_Impale</HitSoundFX> </SpellDef>

so that the highlighted part gets computed for each separate damage type (you'd compute attack damage for Attack_Lightning, Attack_Fire, Attack_Cold, Attack_Pierce, and Attack_Poison, and you'd have separate damage blocks for each of those). You would change UnitStat_CombinedAttack to instead look at each possible damage type.

Someone else, such as Parrotmath or Heavanfall, can probably tell you how to do so better than I can

Yeah, I fixed this back in April. Not just impale, but the other ones as well.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75549875/Fallen%20Enchantress/Abilities/impalecrushingcleavefix.zip

It was more of a problem when you attack a Banshee

I've tested this fix with the Air Elemental spear as a level 16 character. 43 attack.

Attacked an Air Shrill normally did roughly 7-9 damage (as it should)

Used the Impale attack did 9 - 11 damage. Obviously this would have been MUCH higher on the lightening damage alone without the fix. So I would say that it doing the correct damage.

wonder if Stardock plans to fix this or leave it as is?

Not trying to sound like a jerk but it kind of takes away a lot of the strategy part of combat when i can pretty much ignore resistances of monsters by using my special attacks of weapons like impale and cleave and others...

I'm sure Stardock plans to fix ALL of these bugs. They do not just ignore what they produced and they try to improve what they can. In the mean time you can use my fix, just extract those files into your mods folder (or the items folder (that seems to work if you don't want to play with mods))

thanks parrottmath i appreciate it

 
there have been a lot of patches since I originally posted this back in may 2013, was just wondering if this has ever been changed or fixed in any of the patches?

Looking at the XML file, it appears that Impale has not been changed.