Got'a ask...

Question 1: Yes because of warding.
Question 2: Yes because of high attunement. Warding is defensive only.
Question 3: Yes

High attunement in a tree is supposed to make skills in that tree more potent when you use them and less potent when they are used against you. For example: If your Fire attunement is really high, your fire spells will be stronger and other peoples fire against you weaker theoretically. I say that because some things are quietly broken and hard to test.

Fire is also able to ward against Water, greatly increasing your resistance to Water being used against you while lowering your attunement to Water to the point that your own Water spells are very weak. Warding is mainly for people that don't use magic much. Again theoretically.

You're right about the manual. It's not as up to date as the in game tool-tips. And the tool-tips even need more information added, but they are mostly correct. There has been some talk of improving them when it can be squeezed in.

 

In my specific case I don't use offensive fire spells and have hardly any skill points in the fire tree. The old elemental resistance system sucked for me for this reason, you needed then to invest heavily in the fire tree to improve your fire resistance.

The new warding system works much better imo since I'm heavily into the water tree anyway. And it makes perfect sense that a specialized water mage will give fire mages a harder time than most opponents.

 

Attunement makes the spells in a magic tree more powerful. In addition, 50% of your attunement contributes toward resistance to that magic. Warding skills and gems contribute 100% toward resistance but lower your attunement an equal ammount, so warding also effectively contributes 50% since you're loosing that other 50% via attunement loss.

 

To me, it is a very hard system to understand because it forces you to never have opposing magic trees AND if you use Warding items...

Studying my chr skills: I decided to make "Life" magic my specialty, therefore there is no benefit to my chr to continue having "Death" magic on them... In addition I purchased an expensive Longbow (14+k gold) which has +20 Life attunement, then I made a Warding ring that says it has +15 Death Warding AND -5 Death attunement (so there is 5 points attunement penalty), I just have to sit here and say: What? But, that's the way it is, weather I understand the logic or not... On 2nd thought, this does seem understandable: You can't have Death Warding AND Death attunement on the same chr without some penalty...

It's starting to become clearer now that this conversation has happened, that's to all of you...

 

@SmokerKGB this discussion has brought me new insights as well. The new warding system makes the Sun tree a nice-to-have but no longer a necessity for me. It's nice to be able to concentrate on the trees I really want.

My avatar finally got defined after years of waiting.