[crossfire] Chaos attack type (v1.12 17760rc): good or bad?

[Siegfried Eureca]

I've been playing around with a Xerina I blessed with devourers (i.e.
attack types include physical, chaos, death, depletion, drain, life
stealing). I'm noticing that, despite the weapon having great speed and WC
bonuses, it performs poorly on angels (Valriel's Church) and demons
(Gorokh's Pit), it performs poorly compared to other one-handed weapons
like Dark Blade of Devourers and Harakiri Sword of Devourers.

It's to my understanding that, if a weapon has multiple attack types, the
server will calculate the potential damage per attack of each attack type,
and use the "best"/maximal value when deciding how much damage a creature
receives (nice!). However, I'm noticing that when using a weapon that has
the chaos attack type, this doesn't appear to be the case. I see attack
types that don't benefit me being used (i.e. electricity on hill giants,
fire on demons, etc.).

I've done some source diving, but can't quite make out how chaos is
supposed to work. Does it just pick a random attack type from the "pool" of
attack types that chaos provides, or some random value of the other attack
types on the weapon AND those supplied by the chaos "pool", or some other
calculation? It seems that chaos isn't a particularly useful attack type in
general, since it appears to be random in nature (rather than the default
"pick the best" behavior most other weapons have), and seems to turn off
the life-stealing ability of Devourers-blessed weapons.

Also, does armor with chaos resistance block damage from chaos
weapons/spells, or does it just protect against a random element when I'm
attacked?

Thank you.
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