Losing sleep: Righteous Soul and resistance to constitution afflictions

[omgFIREBALLS]

How much overlap is there between these two? I've been wondering for years

[dgray62]

They're totally different. The Paladin ability Iron Gut gives you resistance to CON afflictions, so you can shrug off sickened and downgrade weakened and enfeebled, which is good because these afflictions are rough given the penalty to healing. Righteous Soul on the other hand makes you immune to abilities (such as many druid spells and rogue abilities) that have the poison and disease keywords. It's nice too because some of these effects, like toxic strike, can be nasty. The overlap is that many of the poison/disease abilities attack fortitude, which is lowered by CON afflictions, so getting hit with the latter can make you more vulnerable to the former.

[omgFIREBALLS]

Thank you. I cannot actually find abilities with Poison/Disease keywords, but your post helped me define the search. For example, Wall of Thorns says it applies a Poison that causes Weakened. This would constitute an overlap, as Iron Gut would downgrade Weakened but Righteous Soul would (should) prevent it from causing any affliction at all.

[Boeroer]

Most of times when an ability says poison or disease in the description you can assume that it's keyworded accordingly. There are some exceptions but not too many. Unfortunately those keywords themselves don't get displayed in the tooltips. But when you see something that says that "Antidote" will counter it then you are safe that Righteous Soul also would.

When a hostile attack is poison or disease then it won't hit you. If this attack also carries a CON affliction then you are right: resistance won't matter because the attack won't hit you in the first place. But there are a lot of attack rolls that carry a CON affliction but are not labeled poison (see Ryngrim's spells or some Concelhaut spells for example) - here Iron Gut will help.

On the other hand it's rel. easy to get a CON resistance via items - and they don't stack. But then on your third hand (huh? ;)) you might want to give those items to party members who cannot get a resistance any other way...  

Edited August 9, 2022 by Boeroer

[thelee]

7 hours ago, omgFIREBALLS said:

Thank you. I cannot actually find abilities with Poison/Disease keywords, but your post helped me define the search. For example, Wall of Thorns says it applies a Poison that causes Weakened. This would constitute an overlap, as Iron Gut would downgrade Weakened but Righteous Soul would (should) prevent it from causing any affliction at all.

there's also tons of enemy abilities that you won't be able to find that are poison/disease keyworded.

honestly the paladin ability is probably underrated because of how difficult it is to reason about it. but there's like tons of paralyzing poisons (very common early-mid game from xaurip skirmishers), high-level naga with poison-based attacks, slimes with disease based effects, a couple of undead effects, etc. when i pick it up i'm rarely ever disappointed with it, it's an almost must-have. 

[dgray62]

A dose of khapa tea, which confers immunity to poison/disease effects, is available in the Port Maje Governor's house. It was almost certainly placed there to prepare the MC for the dig site. It makes you immune to the spider's paralysis attack, and also the Xaurip's paralytic poison later. It's definitely worth using as your food for your first rest before heading to the dig site.