Here's what you need to know:

Calming: really helpful in making saves in any case, but probably you should think of it as something you throw on top of good saves, not something you do instead of gearing for saves. Useful against spells/communes/powers/etc. that have a typical saving throw, which is most of them.

Forsaken: good for dealing with holy/unholy damage and all kinds of communes; somewhat offsets but does not 'cover' a vulnerability.

Fortress: good for dealing with paralysis and mental attacks and damage; cumulative with anything else you can do on those fronts.

Everything past that is pretty much getting lost in the weeds of useless details.

Add saves to Communes or just reduce damage? Duration?

bsbsr

Calming is always good for something vs. them but it's not AS useful if you're making a paralysis save.

Which, sometimes you are, and sometimes you're not depending on the spell.

Mind you this is vague and might not be mechanically accurate but it should be enough for you to know how to incoporate them into a strategy.

Calming: Your chance of making a savings throw on spells/communes is significantly higher. At the far end of this (divine saves and high int) its plausible to expect to make close to 100% of your savings throws. What making a savings throw actually does is specific to individual spells/communes.

Forsaken: Damage protection from holy/unholy damage. Does not cover a vuln like a standard resist (if a fire giant has resist cold up its the same as a human having resist cold up, in the case of forsaken its going to get you to around not having the vuln)

Fortress: Resist mental that you can stack with actual resist mental.


basically think of forsaken as dam redux and the other two as increased savings throw chance and you know the practical affect of these legacies.

+20 saves is different than saving at a higher level.

Saving at a higher level is different than your opponent effectivly casting at a lower level.

I'm just trying to figure out if any of the ideas I've seen floated are accurate.

Respectfully: correcting your bad assumptions much less giving you a detailed enough accurate answer to this question is way more than I'm going to take on.

I didn't make any assumptions whatsoever.

I asked one two part question and two one part questions.

You shouldn't have even replied if you were going to that way about it.

Both are, in essence from what I've gathered from other threads on this topic, a second chance to save. The same way that the parry legacy and dodge legacy are a second chance to parry/dodge. You can't/won't understand what that means, and explaining it would take a large amount of wasted effort, so just shut up.

ssbsb