How Exactly Does Elemental Defense Work?

until now i thought it was just an amount you'd subtract from your its appropriate elemental damage, for example if smth had 100 air def and i did 300 air damage i would then just do 200 damage.
however, i wanted to test my archer against qira, so i ran on over to hive but turns out i couldnt do any damage to her. normally my bombs do 6-9k air damage, but i couldnt get any through at all
this is especially confusing because a few months back i used an eidolon build which did much less damage per hit but i was still able to get aroudn 1k dmg per hit.
so what am i missing here?

 

For player vs mob it's subtracted from a weapons base damage, which makes super slow pierce better

 

so like it subtracts the damage from my weapon, and then calculates the rest of the multipliers and stuff?

 

Yes

 

To add that, Elem def is subtracted from your "modified Base damage" which has been multiplied by your ID boosts such as Skill Points, Elem dmg %.. etc

You're talking about how elemental def applies, when players attack mobs, right?
Qira has 1350 elem def in every element (if that hasn't been changed), so you can calculate the damage you do to Qira specifically, with my damage calculator, like this


totally not a self-advertisement

 

do you know if it is calculated before or after the attack speed multiplier?
cause my spells dont deal any damage, when i feel like they should

 

It's before

 

what is Qira's neutral defense? 0?

 

Mobs don't get neutral def