I just learned about LE’s resistance and penetration system. On the 2 year old page where you explain it, you explain your reasoning as wanting to avoid a “knowledge gate” where players have to learn the hard way how important capping resistances is.
Well, by doing this, you achieve the opposite of your goals. Capping resists has been super important for the explained reasons in every game for the last 20 years. Everyone knows this. Changing your system away from this standard is actually introducing knowledge gaps into your game.
I’m sure im not the first to point this out. But it just baffles me how you can do this with this argumentation, so i’ll point it out again.
Also, some things being super important is not a bad thing. Some things having diminishing returns and other things having reversed diminishing returns is not a bad thing. So basically i disagree with all the reasoning behind this system.
Now you know how it works and that capping resistance is still something that you should aim for in LE irrespective of the fact that it works in a slightly different way… 75% is all you need and its pretty easy to hit this target…
I, on the other hand, fully support this system. Is an evolution, resistances are still important, but not so punishing. If you leave a resistance at 73% or 70% the damage increase is manageable. Try doing that with the usual system.
If the difference was massive and made resistance capping a bad thing to do, I would agree. But the difference at cap is just that you get 75% DR in PoE and 42.8% in LE. we still want to cap them both, but in LE there’s a bit less pressure to get them capped and we have a bit more wiggle room to be a few % off of cap.
And this is how games and genres stagnate.
Just because a lot of similar games within the same genre do things a certain way doesn’t mean things like this should always be the same.
If people dive into a new game and from the get go expect things to work the same as in other games that is a people problem and not a dev problem IMO.
I personally even like if things are different and they make me reconsider things.
Yes, but should be/are aware of the general expectations of a particular genre & when they break with those expectations it is up to the devs to communicate that sufficiently to the player (which I think they do in this instance with the loading screen tips and the game guide).
I can see the arguments from your side.
I personally like the aspect of games that in some cases it is absolutely crucial to get that last point of some stat. It puts extra demands on your character building and you cant just slap some decent stuff together and expect it to work well.
What is happening here seems to me like a simplification that makes character building more bland.
Ill not go to much into the game comparisons, but lets say i think that game starting with a P is immensely awesome because it is complicated and that game with a D and a 3 is rather dull. Exactly because of simplification.
But of course to each his own. And this detail wont make or break the game.
And most of all of course i was struck by that reasoning about knowledge gaps, where they create one with the argument or trying to remove one. Not that it matters, knowedge gaps are good. There must be things to learn in the game.
What does it matter where on the spectrum of infinite difficulty scaling “decent” gear lands somebody else? Nothing about it stands in the way of you min/maxing your own gear. You will still push higher difficulties than “decent” gear can and you will still reach a point where those last points become crucial. So I don’t see why being able to “slap decent gear together and have it work well” is supposed to be a bad thing.
I feel exactly the opposite. Having to lock a significant portion of your gear/spec choices into maxing out resists results in half your gear being the same as everyone else’s - that is what I would call bland. There is no depth involved in throwing away half a dozen or more stat slots on what is effectively just ticking a checkbox. The only “complexity” comes from being forced to play an obnoxious stat tetris metagame when you want to upgrade your gear, which is really just tedium masquerading as complexity.
To be fair, we are used to have horrible game guides inside the game, turns out LE’s in-game guide is actually quite complete and decent. Going to resistances, the penetration system is explained IIRC.
I don’t know how they can expose their guide more to new players, I don’t recall it being mentioned in the initial tutorial tips? I hope they keep that guide up to date, such magnificent resource, I rarely go out asking about mechanics.
Anyways, there are a bunch of things I personally don’t like much, for example, I love the more traditional RPGish elements like having a bunch of stats that grow with your character as you level, here all that is over-simplified, most of your stats come from passives and gear.
Still, I respect the devs vision of their ARPG, I also think they are going in the right direction, and even if not, we need more different games not a bunch of Diablo clones or PoE clones, so I won’t make any fuss about it.
Pretty sure almost all of them apart from Armor/Dodge/Block is a suffix, you have 2 Suffixes per gear and you get what 20 suffixes? not including Idol but including weapon (not really weapon as you wont/cant get defences there)
You also have little coverage of resists in your passives, you either have them or you dont, from memory Rogue gets nothing resistwise
Gear on paper really is a nightmare
Been playing Grim Dawn again after 2 years, the gear there is amazing, it can be hard to cap resists there because you want to wear strong gear
Those are suffixes as well apart from block on shields and the Rogue-specific flat dodge when hit prefix.
That is very mastery specific. As you say, Rogue gets very little (some poison) but the others can get quite a bit.
Purples (legendaries?) in GD give a massive amount of resists as do the two different augments that you can apply to them. So while GD has a lot more resists you want to cap its easy to cap them at end game when you need them, plus GD has more gear slots (ignoring idols), and Devotions though you may be locked into some specific ones to cap your resists. Plus GD’s legendaries has way more affixes.
Exactly, theres more things to get DA/OA/Armor Absorb, 10? resist types however GD gives you gear with 4-8 affixes? Plus components, plus Augments, its actually a fun puzzle to solve
They dont give much Res, Rares give a lot of resistance, Same as Augments/Devotions passives
Made a Paladin from 1 and no gear after PC wipe, Boots giving me 110+% resistance. My Augment powders add 100ish% resistance
What I meant above was you play for example a Fire build and stack Fire type uniques you will have ludicrous Fire resistance - this char has 96% but you struggle to cap say Pierce, this is where augments come in to fix that. I nearly have a 3 piece Justice Set which will fk up my resistances but the power gain is worth it as I will be able to re-cap them again with playing around with augments
GD also solves some ‘issues’ by combining some stats into two - Offensive Ability/Defensive ability, OA is basically accuracy/crit and DA is evasion/crit avoidance
While rogue gets the short end of the stick of defenses from passives, you only get 40% poison res, has its way with gear implicit + blessings, to the point you don’t have to use any suffix in resistances.
Poison: Passive + Antidote Vial Relic
Fire: Solarium Greaves + Ruby Ring
Cold: Heorot Blessing
Lightning: Lagon Blessing
Necro: Bone Amulet + Ivory Ring
Physical: Bone Amulet + Brigandine Armour
Void: Ending Storm Blessing
Many implicits are shared in rings, boots, gloves, amulet, so there’s a lot of room for defense optimization in endgame, some classes get more and have an easier time adding health + endurance suffixes but even rogue has its way.
