Right now there’s 7 resistances in the game. When you can only place 4 affixes on an item and 7 resistances you need to cap. This really strains your choice on what gear you can use.
A quick glance at one of my endgame character shows that all my items (except my Unique chest Woven Flesh and 2 tiny idols) have resistances. Given my gear isn’t optimized but still of decent enough quality (min t4) I don’t think that ‘bad gear’ is the culprit.
The devs have said in their overhauling defenses blog that “It provides this knowledge gate for players that is often a hard learned lesson.” which is something I’m all-for, but not when there’s 7 of them to cap and the gear is very limiting in the amount of stats it has.
While I agree that 7 might be a bit much, I also don’t think it’s much of an issue, especially since most masteries get resists on passives (to varying degrees, the Void Knight can get an ungodly amount of Void resist, the Spellblade gets a meger 18% ele resist & 20% fire resist). It’s not too hard to cap your resists late game with 4x t5 set resist prefixes (on my spellblade I went with set void/phys & set necrotic/poison then a number of elemental resist suffixes & I was lucky getting a +12% ele res blessing from Lagon).
Honestly, I do not mind… as @Llama8 says, its not that hard to cap resistances when you factor in class specific resistances (e.g. VKs void) and use the Set Affixes (Elemental, Physical & Void, Necro & Poison). I have also found that unlike 7.9, you now have affix space for other things whereas before almost all my gear was dedicated to protections.
My only real concern is that everyone is going to end up with the same gear setups (Set affixes) at end-game… probably nothing to worry really.
But that’s not the point? I didn’t say “Resistances are too hard to cap” just that there’s an abundance of them. The point is that you have to require so much of it. Saying “just get stat X” doesn’t solve the problem at all, just merely points out that it is a problem lol.
If anything they should be a lot harder to cap, if the cap is trivialized it’s just some stuff you ‘need’ on gear to progress but doesn’t really do much in altering gameplay or playstyle.
I’d call that a big thing to worry about. I’d even say this is something that isn’t worried about enough.
The counter argument is also true… If its easy to cap, why worry that there are so many of them. I havent played in a while but if I recall Grim Dawn had 10 and I found them much more difficult to gear for in comparison to LE especially at end-game.
I have a feeling that the caps & resistances are likely to be tweeked a few more times in the patches to come but as I said, it really doesnt bother me right now.
I don’t agree with you. I have no problem with the number of resistances in the game and I have personally found that the recent changes have improved the variety of affixes that you can have on the builds that I have played. On a full build, capping all resistances, I have around 8 affix slots, sometimes a few less (across various gear items) left that I can be creative with or try to improve other things.
You are entitled to your opinion and I am simply countering it with mine, based on my experience so far in the game.
There are 7 resistances, 3 of them are tied to Elemental resistances and the other two are tied to void/Phys and poison/necro leaving you with 3 “resistances” I don’t think they should reduce the number of resistances when set resistances are tied together. If they were all separate then sure but that is not the case
Laughs in Grim Dawn… where you have 10 resistances, Physical Resistance, and Defensive Ability all to keep track of for endgame defenses. Not to mention all the other typical defenses like avoidance, block, armor ect.
Its not hard to balance out defenses endgame in LE especially now. And content you just need to learn the monster types and their damage to know what to target for what area as you go and its smooth sailing.
And really this game only actually has 5 resistances to keep up with in reality because 3 of them are tied together and can mostly be scaled as such. (Elemental) Hell 3 resistances when you think about it because Void/Phys and Poison/Necro also normally tie together. And resistances are WAY better now than they used to be. Defense building in general has improved tremendously compared to a year ago. (I only just started back a couple days ago) Where you either got 100% Glancing or dont even bother endgame. Its was almost a barrier to entry for endgame on top of everything else defense wise.
Not to mention you have what… 11 Slots with 4 Affixes each and the majority of them are for ment for scaling defenses anyway. You only have so many damage affixes on a couple slots. All the rest is open to build your defenses. Choices are good and coming from a game like POE actually caring about defenses instead of building nearly all damage and try to one shot it before it one shots you is actually refreshing…
To be fair while Grim dawn has 9 resistances (Have over 2k hours almost 3k) The top 5 you want to keep updated the most as they go down 25% in elite then 25% more in ultimate the bottom ones don’t get knocked down but 25% on ultimate. Though I will say I do like the way Last Epoch does the percent resists so far atleast more than grim dawn.
Whiel not being a damage resistance in the typical sence, reduced stun duration is also a important thing in GD.
It is secondary or neglectable for some builds, but stun’s are very prominent in GD.
So i agree with @vapourfire GD has 10 “resistances”
LE has by far the easiest time of capping all resistances of all similar game. IMO
On top of that being NOT capped in LE is far less punishing than it is in PoE or GD for example. Hell you dont even NEED to be capped in LE, even for the high endgame.
You do not need to cap them.
You just assumed it is best to cap them because it is this way in other games.
Without doing the math there is no reason to assume it is the same here. LE is unique with it’s 0% effective resistance model (75-75 shred)
I haven’t done a detailed analysis so far, but a quick glance on the rolls of resistance and health suggests that in some (or even in most) cases it is more efficient to reduce your resistance and change rolls to % Health and flat Health.
So I’m saying your assumption - that you always want to have resistance - is probably wrong.
Well this is not a question about how people play the game at the moment (probably with the same (mathematically unjustified) bias towards “I have to cap resis” from other games)
This is solely a mathematical question:
Will you have more effective HP if you remove all (or some) of your resistance rolls on your gear and go for %Health and flat Health instead?
I did play old and new chars with often not having poison, necrotic or void even close ot cap.
And it did not feel like a big thing. Of course i then tryed to give telegraphed abilities of those damage types some extra attention to be 100% sure not gettign hit, but even some of those, while hurting, were not lethal.
In the current difficulty of MoF i feel like there is no real incentive to cap.
But that will most likely change if they introduce even harder/higher content.
While not being neccessary, capping in LE is still a little bit more easy then in GD or PoE i would argue. That together with it’s not being mandatory makes LE kinda feel very “casual” atm.
I hope they introduce content soon that really puts characters to the test.
