Whether a power targets ward, armor or focus depends on what attack type its damage is coded as:
- physical damage hits armor
- magical damage hits ward
- mental and sexual damage hits focus.
On top of that you have element types for damage:
- penetrating
- crushing
- fire
- frost
- storm
- blight
- holy
- acid
- raw
- mind
- tease
- drug
- pheromone
- fatigue
These only matter for elemental resistances: for example demons have 75% blight resistance, and will therefore reduce physical blight damage, magical blight damage, and mental blight damage by 75% all the same.
That an element sounds physical (penetrating, crushing) doesn't mean it will hit against armor! Hitting against armor is only determined by the damage "attack type" being coded as physical or not.
As far as i can remember there is no explicit way to know the attack type of a power's damage by looking at the power's description. When in doubt i pull out the javascript console and directly check a power's code.
For the two examples you've asked for, here goes:
- Psyshock's damage attack type is magical, and its damage element is crushing, so it hits against ward and is further mitigated by crushing resistance;
- Soul Arrow's damage attack type is magical, and its damage element is mind, so it hits against ward and is further mitigated by mind resistance.
As for the [Spell] power tag, it means that the power will use your spell penetration against the damage reduction stat it targets. For instance both Psyshock and Soul Arrow have the [Spell] tag and their damage attack type is magical, so they will target ward (magical attack type) and use your spell penetration ([Spell] tag) to ignore some of your target's ward.
Fun fact: it is perfectly possible for a power to use a penetration stat that doesn't match its instictive resistance stat; in other terms a power that hits against ward can use something other than spell penetration. That's the case of Arcane Shot: it has the [Weapon] tag so it uses armor penetration, but its damage attack type is magical so it hits against ward; which means that using Arcane Shot with Bussy Mauler will almost always result in true damage, as your enemies' ward (which is on average substantially lower than armor) will rarely exceed the tremendous armor penetration of the crossbow.
And i didn't even touch on the accuracy and avoidance stats!
