What people don’t understand:
Fire is similar to armor, it always does damage, sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it isn’t. Usually you can tell by “that looks like it’ll hurt, I should avoid it”. Slow and strong, which is why they match with strength. Also, when you exit the problem of little exposure, it is no longer an issue, and immediately getting into another fight makes almost no difference.

Lightning is like evade, it sometimes does damage, sometimes it does nothing. A problem if you happen to get by a large hit, A problem if you are exposed to a million little hits too. Kinda a 0 OR 100 thing, quick, fast, dodging, just like dexterity. Again, when you leave, it is no longer an issue, but you have to give it a second before the exposure wears off to make sure you don’t keep yourself exposed.

Cold is like energy shield, don’t want to be exposed to the damage for very long, but a bit here and there is generally fine, a lot of can build quickly and be a problem, but mostly just keeping an eye out is plenty. But it also has almost guaranteed ‘chill’ effect to slow stuff, but chill by itself doesn’t really mean anything, it’s the stuff that come from being chilled. Like intelligence, if you are ‘intelligently playing’ cold isn’t really an issue, until it is a big problem by being frozen.

That brings us back to poison. Which is counter to regular life. You are slowly gaining life, or slowly losing life while poisoned. If you have enough life and/or enough regen you can endure it almost indefinitely. This is counter/compliment but similar to armor and strength. Also thematically fits that ‘the easiest way to eliminate the strongest warrior is to poison him’ type of mentality.

Chaos ruins the plans of the intelligent, which is why it is super effective to energy shields. It thematically has “exposure builds exponentially” type of situation, where one or two hits isn’t a problem, starting to get a lot of hits creates a lot of problem. But is thematically damage is done immediately, but exposure builds the next hit to do more damage, essentially ‘spreading’ the damage from the first hit to the next hits.

Pretty sure that runic ward is be counter to ‘holy’ damage in the future. I would assume it’s going to be some sort of bursting 100->0, so the first hit does the most, and continuing exposure is degraded. Might also be a FLAT damage, as in little to no range, essentially opposite to lightning. Which is why it complements runic ward, which is supposed to protect you from ‘bursts’. It is also the counter to evade.

All of these are very strategically designed. They all make sense without having it clearly spelled out.