Damage types

Damage is any means by which unit's current health can be reduced. The 3 main damage classifications are Physical, Magical and Pure.

Damage Sources
Damage can come from attacks, abilities and items. Attack damage is the damage dealt per attack, and is displayed on the sword icon in the HUD. Generally, damage sources are split into two big categories — Attack Damage and Spell Damage.

Most attack damage are physical damage, however, there are some exceptions to this.

Damage Classification
All forms of damage in Dota 2 are classified by damage types. There are 3 primary damage types: Physical, Magical, and Pure.

Physical Damage is reduced by Armor or Damage Block, Magical Damage is reduced by Magic Resistance and Magical Damage Barrier, while Pure Damage is not generally reduced by anything (except for damage reduction, e.g. and, which affects all damage types).

All 3 damage types have some interaction with other damage-related game mechanics as noted in the table below. Some damage sources may also have the HP Removal flag, causing the damage to ignore some mechanics which would manipulate it otherwise.

Spell Immunity


Spell immunity itself does not interact with damage at all. If an ability pierces spell immunity and has a damage component, its damage will still be applied normally, regardless of its damage type. Therefore, spell immunity only governs if an ability has any effect, not its damage types (nor its damage values).

A 0 damage instance is still registered and still may proc on-damage effect, unless it is flagged as HP Removal.

If an ability does not pierce spell immunity, it does not attempt to damage spell immune units either, regardless of the damage type. In order for an ability to damage spell immune units, it must be set to pierce spell immunity, or it must be already affecting it in case of buffs/debuffs.

Physical
Most attack damage from all units (including buildings) and certain abilities deal physical damage, unless stated otherwise. The total physical damage dealt to a unit is affected by armor (percentage reductions) and damage block (flat reductions). Units under ethereal are not affected by physical damage.

Some abilities (e.g. and ) provides physical damage immunity, although they can still be targeted by attacks and abilities.

Physical damage from abilities (and theoretically items) is usually unaffected by defense class. Unless it directly manipulates the attack damage (i.e. attack damage increasing abilities or ). Physical damage (except for ) from these attack damage increasing abilities are affected by armor, but are not affected by evasion and damage block.

The following abilities deal physical damage (summoning abilities and attack damage buffs are not listed):

Magical
Magical Damage sources primarily come from abilities. The majority of abilities in game deal magical damage, unless stated otherwise. Magical damage is reduced by magic resistance, and its damage is amplified against ethereal units. The majority of abilities in Dota 2 deal magical damage.

Pure
Pure Damage is a damage type that is not reduced by Armor or Magic Resistance. It is also not amplified by magical damage amplification abilities, fully ignores Armor and Damage Block. It does not affect invulnerable units.

There are a few sources that can manipulate Pure Damage, with being one of them. This mechanic is called damage reduction. Pure damage affects units with Spell Immunity (because spell immunity does not block damage), but that does not mean that an ability that deals pure damage is able to target spell immune units.

For example, deals pure damage, but cannot be cast on units with spell immunity.

Flags
Several abilities have certain flags that cause them to behave differently in certain situations, all abilities can be flagged, regardless of damage types. There are four different flags used — the HP Removal, the No-reflection, the No-Spell-Lifesteal and the No-Spell-Amplification flag.

HP Removal
Abilities with the HP Removal flag fully ignore any form of damage manipulation (with a few exceptions listed below), damage from these abilities cannot be amplified, reduced nor negated. It also ignores and do not trigger any on-damage effects, making them unable to cancel consumables (e.g. ). In some cases, it ignores invulnerability as well. Damage ignored this way is still registered as such and may be counted for statistic purposes.

However, the ability's damage values can still be affected by its damage classification as usual (i.e. Magical damage with HP Removal can still be affected by magic resistance and magical damage barriers).

On-Damage Effects
Besides all sources of damage manipulation and spell lifesteal, the following abilities do not react on damage which has the HP Removal flag:

No-reflection
The no-reflection flag causes on-damage events not to interact with the damage of abilities which have the no-reflection flag. This is to prevent infinite damage loops in case of 2 opposing heroes with.

The following abilities do not react to abilities with the No-reflection flag:

No-Spell-Lifesteal
Abilities with the no-spell-lifesteal flag cannot spell lifesteal, even though their damage is categorised as spell damage.

No-Spell-Amplification
Abilities with the no-spell-amplification flag ignore all sources of spell damage amplification (except for ), even though their damage is categorised as spell damage.

Instant Kill
This mechanic kill units without the actual use of damage. Similar to HP Removal, the instant kill effect ignore almost all damage manipulations and can only be prevented by a few abilities.

The most prominent example that uses this mechanic is expiring summoned units and illusions, which are killed once their set duration ends. Summons and illusions that get replaced on cast are killed this way as well. Min health via damage manipulation does not prevent instant kill.

Abilities that prevents or bypass instant killing usually have its special interactions hard-coded into the abilities.

Illusions
These abilities instantly destroy illusions when used on them, unless the illusions are strong illusions.



Trivia
The following damage types were removed in version 6.82.

Composite
Composite damage (also known as mixed damage) was a damage type that was reduced by both armor and magic resistance. It pierced spell immunity and did not affect ethereal units. This damage type was used by, , , 's backlash damage, and.

All of them were changed to physical damage, except for the backlash damage from the Spirit Bear, which was changed to pure damage.

Universal
Universal damage was a damage type that pierced spell immunity and was affected by magic resistance. This damage type was previously used by, , 's initial damage, , ,  and.

Doom, Midnight Pulse, Flaming Fists and Laguna Blade were changed to deal pure damage, allowing them to still pierce spell immunity, while Pulverize, Echo Slam's initial damage and March of the Machines were changed to deal magical damage, and thus no longer pierce spell immunity.

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