Sanctified one discrepancy

Question

Recently, I encountered one of the abilities of Sanctified One:

Holy Fire (Su): Whenever you cast a spell with the fire subtype, you can choose to change all the fire damage it deals into raw divine damage that is treated as good-aligned for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction. This choice must be made at the time of casting.

(Complete Champion, emphasis mine)

However, the points about damage reduction seems kind of moot, as the d20srd says:

The creature takes normal damage from energy attacks (even nonmagical ones), spells, spell-like abilities, and supernatural abilities.

(d20 System Reference Document)

The way I see it is that the spell in question is not concerned with DR anyways, so it really doesn't need to and cannot overcome it. Am I missing something, or did the writers of this class miss something?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, that is a real rule discrepancy.

3.5's authors frequently made such oversights, not having had the benefit of years of internet scrutiny before publishing.

Another example of the authors not always being clear on how spells and DR interact is in the Evard's Black Tentacles spell, which superfluously mentions that it does bludgeoning damage.

Answer 2

I think the DR thing could be needed in some specific cases that might actually happen during a D&D game. Let's take a fire spell that creates a wepon, such as Flame Blade.

The spell creates a weapon which is normally dealing energy damage (fire is one type of energy along with cold, acid, lightning and sonic, as evident from most energy spells descriptions). Now the SU ability turns that fire damage into "raw divine damage".

This damage is not energy, it's not coming from a spell (which summons a blade that, in turn, deals damage*), it's not coming from the SU ability itself (which merely turns one type of damage into another) and it's not coming from a SLA.

So, this attack would normally be influenced by DR, but if the creature's DR is trumped by good it is not thanks to the very text you emphasized.

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*this is arguable but looks like a valid interpretation to me.

Answer 3

It’s a mistake

They meant Resistance, not Damage Reduction. Damage Reduction does not apply to energy attacks, as you note, but Resistance does. Divine-energy damage would ignore Fire Resistance, even if the divine energy looks or even feels flame-like.

Answer 4

This is not an issue about damage reduction, but more of a question about resistances and vulnerabilities. If a creature has resistance or immunity to fire, you could easily damage it by changing the damage to divine.

Fire Immunity -> http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#fireImmunity