Mastery of Life and Death

[Jared Thaler - Personal Opinion]

mastery of life and death wrote:

You have studied the delicate balance of life and death
to such a point that you can dance between them with
ease. Whenever you cast a spell or use an ability that
would deal void or vitality damage, use the weaker of the
target’s resistance or immunity to void or to vitality. For
instance, if the creature were immune to void and had no
resistance or immunity to vitality damage, it would take
vitality damage from the spell or ability. Resistance or
immunity to both (or to all damage) applies as normal.

I am guessing it would let you bypass "Resist Void" (such as the barbarian spiit instinct.)

But how does the immunity bypass work? Void Damage only ever targets living creatures, and Vitality Damage only ever targets the undead. I think the only creature that is immune *only* to void damage that I can thing of is possessed constructs.

Does that mean your void damage spells would harm both living and dead?

Also it doesn't say "from spell slots" so what happens if you somehow get a 3 action heal spell from something. Does it just hit everything?

[siegfriedliner]

Mastery of Life and Death currently only seems to do anything for necromancy grave spells and feats where it lets you ignore immunity to void damage from being undead and immunity vitality damage from being alive. As necromancy grave spells and features don't call out living or undead target specifications.

Pretty much all the spells that do void or vitality damage call out targets and this ability doesn't do anything for them.

Thematically this is kind of annoying but it does stop spells like vitality lash and sunburst suddenly becoming way better because of removing the target limitation that were a part of the balance of those spells so probably it's intended.

[Tridus]

I'm hoping there's going to be a wider errata coming to clean all this up, because yeah... right now it doesn't do much. It doesn't matter if you get to use a lesser resistance if the spell you're using flat out can't target the enemy, which is true of almost all spells that do vitality/void damage.

See also: Bones Oracle and what its curse actually does.

Parts of the rules seem to want to actually just target things based on void healing/vitality healing, while other parts target living/undead, and then stuff like this that wants to do both at the same time but doesn't play nice with the others.

[Jared Thaler - Personal Opinion]

siegfriedliner wrote:

Mastery of Life and Death currently only seems to do anything for necromancy grave spells and feats where it lets you ignore immunity to void damage from being undead and immunity vitality damage from being alive. As necromancy grave spells and features don't call out living or undead target specifications.

If you look at the immunity block for undead, they don't actually have immunity to void. Immunity to void would mean they would neither be harmed or healed by it. (For comparison, they do have immunity to healing effects.) Even reading void healing, it doesn't say anything about being immune to void. Just that they are healed by it.