Should those two questions about uncanny dodge be merged?

Question

At first the questioner asked Can you use Uncanny Dodge against extra damage effects?, the first answer does not answer the question to the questioners full satisfaction, so he asked for a specific case (which he should have included in the question, but is passively included by asking for "extra damage effects").

Another user and the answerer mentioned, that he should ask this question with the additional details in a different question, which he did by asking this question: Does Uncanny Dodge halve poison damage?

But that question got closed as a duplicate because it is really the same question.

Luckily there was a user which could post a useful answer including the specific case mentioned by the questioner.

I suggest merging the two questions, because they are about the same issue, but some users might not agree on the definition of extra damage effects.

Answer 1

In its strictest sense, "duplicate" means "exactly like something else", however, that would mean that a question needs to be a verbatim copy to qualify. The way it is used on all se sites is "this question is trying to solve the same problem as that question and if the OP reads that question and its answers they will have their answer."

As such, I would be very reluctant to merge duplicate questions for several reasons:

1. The structure of the site specifically (and reasonably elegantly) handles duplicate questions.
2. The OP is looking for an answer to their question and will return to that question to find it - they can then follow the link but not if the OP is no longer there.
3. The way different OPs pose duplicate questions may stimulate different, possible better, answers.
4. Future searches for a similar problem are more likely to find one of the posts if there are more than one out there. This is particularly relevant to the two questions you link because a Google search for "uncanny dodge poison" finds the latter but not the former.
5. Merging questions moves all answers to the primary question - if they are near duplicates then this is fine, if not then some of the merged answers may become nonsense. Also particularly relevant here: the duplicate question deals with poison damage and so do the answers - if they were moved to the original question which is about secondary damage these answers make a lot less sense.