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Does Holy Water harm incorporeal undead such as Ghosts, Poltergeists or Shadows?
They resist all damage "except force, ghost touch, or positive; double resistance against non-magical".
Holy Water deals "good" damage, not "positive", and as far as I can tell, it's non-magical.
I believe "Good damage" would be Good Aligned damage, and thus would be subject to the Resistance of Ghosts, Poltergeists and Shadows.
Positive Damage would be damage from a Necromancy spell with the Positive trait, like Disrupt Undead.
I think of it as a difference between Alignment and Life and Death.
Edited for Clarity.
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It's just weird since Holy Water specifically "damages only fiends, undead, and creatures that have a weakness to good damage", but the resistances of Incorporeal Undead seem to trump that.
I realize 1E and 2E are different games, but sprinkling Undead with Holy Water was a common tactic. Transitioning from ubiquitous to useless makes me curious whether it's been discussed by a Designer somewhere.
To be honest, when using holy water in our AoA campaign we were greatly underwhelmed and quickly went back to regular attacks. We found a couple of uses right before we encountered a couple of low level corporal undead but even against those the effect seemed pitiful in regards to action economy. Too many undead simply do not have respective weaknesses to capitalize on the splash effect.
Apart from that I think that holy water can damage incorporal undead as its description says "It damages only fiends, undead, and creatures that have a weakness to good damage.", however you would need a near maximum damage roll to overcome DR. Holy water is magical by the way because of the "Divine" trait.
Note that I too consider this strange and was likely to open a thread about it before you did. I understand that the "Good" trait and damage is there in order to be able to damage fiends, however the absence of the positive energy rider seems strange for the classical go-to weapon versus undead.
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Holy water is magical by the way because of the "Divine" trait.
Thank you for that! Learn something new every day ^_^