Stardock can you please address this...

Substantiate how this is a gameplay issue.

wish I could figure out a way to get around Ophidian immunity to spells to +Tame them ...

A game like Elemental is based around strategy. There should be strengths and weaknesses in different areas of the game and combat is a part of the game. Using different strategies is part of success. If I see a creature roaming the lands that is immune to fire lets say and my hero's main weapon is an axe that does a substantial amount of fire damage. Well most likely I will use my head and switch to a maybe weaker weapon in my arsenal that doesn't do a lot of fire damage but maybe does cold damage also.

But as it stands I can just simply use my same axe that does a lot more damage and use one of my special abilities like lets say cleave and I will get full damage done to this creature that has immunity to fire. Oh and my hero probably has plenty of other special attacks that I can use cause after i use cleave it will have a downtime before I can use it again. So i'll just use lets say eviscerate or true strike or whatever else ability.

The point is:

lets say my axe does 8 points of fire damage and 12 physical. With a normal swing this creature with fire immunity with no defense would take 12 points of physical damage only. Now with cleave my hero can hit him for 20 points of damage cause it will become all physical damage when using an ability. Now keep in mind that this is the same axe that my hero is swinging with.

This is not a gameplay issue? I don't know what you consider gameplay

True, nice little workaround. Only works for one attack, then you have to deal with his fire resistance again. If you're playing on expert or higher, an extra 8 points of damage hardly ends the battle. The scenario where you swap to a cold axe might still kill fire resistant/cold weak creatures faster.

What's that? You'll use eviscerate or true strike? Eviscerate does not bypass resistances, just gives a critical hit. True Strike does, but it does 75% damage, so have you even gotten ahead with damage dealt in that scenario? Only with rare weapons that do more than 25% of total damage in non-physical attack.

Not sure how you go from "This is a small exploit" to "Resistances are meaningless in this game," because even with this example resistances still matter in many cases in this game, and there are many strategic consequences to consider, play with, and win/lose by.

When do resistances matter?

-All the time with magic

-Anytime an ability converts attack to another unitstat, like channel lightning, flame tongue, etc.

-When you have run out of abilities that can exploit, you have to accept that your burning axe is subject to resistances (This is often)

-When using swords, bows, crossbows, staffs, there are no special abilities to allow this exploit

-Other. Physical damage resistance, spell resistance, etc, which come into play quite often

You say "A lot of skills and abilities need to be fixed revolving around this." If we take all the spells/abilities that use [UnitStat_CombinedAttack] in a way that might turn elemental damage into physical, what do we have?

(Many are hero only, meaning troops can't multiply the small advantage by troop count)

-Arching Shield Bash (Hero Only)

-Cleave

-Crushing Blow

-Deadly Bite (unlikely to be used by player)

-Decimate (Hero only, most useful against troops)

-Focus (Hero Only)

-Guarded Strike (Does 50% damage)

-Impale

-Shield Bash

-Sweep (Hero Only)

-True Strike (Hero Only, 75% damage)

The main 'offenders' are cleave, crushing blow, impale, and shield bash. So yes, you can spam these abilities to wrack some up small damage bonuses against fire elementals and air elementals.

But against a unit with significant defense, the benefit of swapping elemental attack for Unitstat_Attack_Pierce may not be so rewarding.

This is an exploit to get around resistances a little bit at a time. Works great on some elementals, not necessarily so much on enemy troops. Resistance stats remain relevant in many other situations.

Still waiting for you to explain how it became a "design flaw." 

Your knowledge of Legendary Heroes is real good I have to say. Didn't realize that overall its really not that many skills to exploit.

I still think that out of all the things that have been fixed in a lot of patches that this fix would not be hard and should be addressed. Calling it a game design flaw may have been over the top but it still feels like something that can be exploited and can be fairly easily fixed.

I think (can't be certain) that Derek likes it that way, and doesn't see it as broken.

There's a lot to discover in this game. I'd say keep playing and feeling it out - you are observant to see the potential of those abilities. But there's more to experience, and don't be afraid to up your difficulty past your comfort zone. Make those exploits your friend when you're up against nastier AI opponents.

Seems like these spells could just multiply all damage before performing a normal attack instead. You could even keep the tooltip number by calculating it from a separate gamemodifier. 

If I'm not mistaken, there's a huge issue with stacks of groups using the abilities as well. 3x30 attacks are inferior to one 90 attack because defense soaks much less against a 90 attack.

True, but each instance in the 3x30 attack rolls against dodge, so there are more chances to hit.

While I haven't tested things rigorously, the hit mechanic appears to allow a multi-figure unit to roll for attacks until it fails to score a hit or until it runs out of attacks, rather than making, in the example given, three independent rolls to hit.

One indication that the system does not use independent hit rolls is that against a 0-dodge target, a unit with 3 attacks and 60 accuracy will hit more than 93% of the time with at least one of its attacks and a unit with 3 attacks and 70 accuracy will hit more than 97% of the time with at least one of its attacks, if the system uses independent hit rolls. While I have not made any careful study in an attempt to determine the expected hit rates for multi-figure units, it certainly does not feel like they hit with that kind of regularity.