Take a Dark Elf who is racially 50% resistant to fire now give them a shield with the Block perk Elemental protection which gives 50% resistance to elements


Now said Elf is fighting a dragon, puts the shield up and the dragon breathes fire


Now is the elf now completely immune to the fire 50% + 50% = 100% immune or is it some sort of multiplicative effect and is no where near 100%



Just wondering its keeping me up

I think so, yes. It's usually additive

From the avaiable info the perk description says it reduces by 50%,so its problably multiplicative, wich seems more balanced.

But still you do have enchantments with +% resistance, and in those cases it seems to be additive.

In Oblivion, resistances and weaknesses of the same type were all added together. In the case of multiple resistance types applying to something, they wouldn't add together, instead applying in order.

Examples:
50% fire resistance plus another 50% fire resistance is fire immunity.
50% fire resistance plus 25% fire weakness is 25% resistance to fire.
50% fire resistance plus 50% magic resistance is 75% resistance to fire magic.
50% fire resistance plus 50% poison resistance is 75% resistance to fire poisons.

Does it work this way in Skyrim? I don't know. It makes sense it would work the same way.

While I have absolutely no idea what fire poisons are, I agree with the rest and assume it will be the same here

Otherwise you could get 1,000 fire resistance effects and they'd just asymptotically trend towards, but never reach full resistance - which doesn't make sense IMO

Ingredients with fire damage, from the wiki:

Novice
Fire Salts

Apprentice
Congealed Putrescence (SI)
Flame Stalk (SI)
Steel-Blue Entoloma Cap

Journeyman
Hunger Tongue (SI)
Spiddal Stick

Expert
Imp Gall

Nice!

Form a game balance point of view it makes sense.

Suppose you have three items each with 50% magic resistance to something

First enchantment: 50% of resistance
Second enchantment: 50% of the remaining vulnerability = 75% total resistance
Third enchantment: 50% of the remaining vulnerability = 87,5 total resistance
...and so on.

See where am I getting to?

You'll have pretty high resistance without creating godlike characters that may unbalance the game in the long run.

im thinking it may actually be multiplicative due to the fact that Armour seems to now be a rating rather than a set percentage ie the videos from Mangg had leather chests as giving 30 odd armour while he was only lvl6 and ive seen pictures of daedric chests giving something like 180 armour

So most people here think its going to be multiplicative

Ok, thanks

Usually it is, and usually that makes the game way harder.

Sensible argument, all things considered!

It's been additive in both Morrowind and Oblivion. Additionally, resistances were additive in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, parts of whose game engine have been used for Skyrim. The armor system has been overhauled, but resistances are still percentage based and are probably still additive.