Players intuitively understand "Immunity to Electrical Attacks." They do not intuitively understand "This armor always triggers and prevents all damage from Electrical Attacks," which is the text on Grounding Plates. Text like this isn't even uniform. "This armor always prevents all damage from Acid, Poison, Electricity or Fire" is the text on Resistant Hide: note Grounding Plates uses the word "Attacks," but Resistant Hide doesn't. Only Bones and Amorphous Body include the word "attacks" (in lowercase . . . ), but these four are split half-and-half on use of the word "triggers"! I'm far from the first person to note this, so I just suggest simplifying all these cards (edit: plus Tough Bark and Scaly Armor) with a keyword/phrase. Shorten it to a few words, then explain the "triggering" thing in a tooltip.
This sort of change would definitely be a nice little quality of life improvement for understanding the nature of certain blocking effects. In the rare case of wearing your resistant hide while wading around in something like acid, a sligtly different wording may be necessary, since "immunity to acid" may still lead people to believe that the armor won't be destroyed by acid's armor destroying effects. It's one of those confusing unstoppable forces vs an immovable object type situations where it just so happens that the unstoppable force wins in this scenerio, but I wouldn't have called the outcome terribly obvious.
The text should be Immune to Electricity Damage. The tooltip should be "This effect always triggers regardless of the armor roll. It negates the damage part of electricity attacks." The important distinction is that other effects of electricity attacks, such as push on a force bolt, still apply.
I understand what you mean but as to your specific example, Force Bolt, Force Blast and Force Cone aren't Electrical damage cards, they're Arcane. Player controlled Electrical damage cards have no other effects than the damage. The NPC card Lightning Bolt has Stun, though.
Yeah, I figured all these extra effects need to be addressed somehow. Thankfully, using a tooltip takes such clutter away from the basic text field: you can just add a line about "Other effects on the card still apply" to the tooltip without running out of precious space. (And we know the devs struggle to save space.)
I support the creation of a new keyword like "Immunity to" or "Protection from" with the tooltip "This card always prevents all <x> damage". And I'd like cards that also provide normal Armor (like Resistant Hide) to have two rule boxes: Immunity to Acid, Poison, Electricity and Fire. Keep. Armor 2. Keep. [3+] so it's clearer that the card has two different reactions.
Came here because I was confused about the text on Grounding Plates. I agree. Create a uniform way of communicating certain item abilities, like elemental immunity. The phrasing "always triggers" is confusing as hell when there is 4+ die symbol.