Are there too many resistance stats?

General
10

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…

11

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.

12

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.

13

Yeah, if you enjoy taking more damage, and who doesn’t enjoy that?

14

I did played half a dozen builds with some resistances being just 30-50% and had no issues AT ALL.

And all of those builds weren’t ultra-tanky-facetankyeverything.

My statement still holds IMO.

In LE you are far less “forced” to cap resistances

15

Bottom line is that building defenses is boring. It’s a necessary evil in games like this though.

16

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.

17

I don’t think there’s +60 characters succesfully completing timelines with sub-50 in most of their resistances.

1 Like
18

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?

Quite often the answer is yes, but not always.

19

Could you put your mathematical skills where your mouth is & provide us an example?

20

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.

21

Are empowered timelines (& masochist mode) insufficient?

Edit: I’ve never tried either of them.

22

Well while machoist is a chosen difficulty, that is no “endgame” difficulty for me, since it’s like a whole other gamemode from the get-go. I jsut want more “scaling content”

The currently available empowered timelines are very cool, but they are not nearly as hard as the base 100 timeline, whiel also being lvl 100.
Also the quest echoes pop at the same echo count as the normal verisons, which makes finishing the lvl 100 empowered timelines pretty quick and easy, which seems wrong to me.

But well that is going a bit off-topic here

23

sure, lets make some simple laymans model. I try to mention the simplifications.
It is just to get a rough idea of the numbers, not a guide.

assuming the numbers on lastepochtools are somewhat correct
then we have for T5 rolls:

75 flat HP
12% increased HP
32% single resistance ( accounts for 1 of 7 )
20% ele resistance (accounts for 3 of 7, so 60% total)
to keep things simple we ignore set resistance stuff and assume we have a mixed bag of ele and single resistance so we have to average.
we could average “50/50” but we can only cover 3/7 with the stronger ele resist rolls and 4/7 with the single resist roles. So we average with weightings 3/7 and 4/7:
(60% * 3/7 + 32% * 4/7) = 44%
(edit I did an error here before: I wrote 40% due to wrong calculation of the average, subsequent stuff is now correctd for “44% average resistance contribution per T5 roll”)

Its reasonable to assume that those T5 rolls relative to each other are not arbitrary and imbalanced but at least somewhat reflect the typical balance values in the game.

So with the above values we can make a simple model to transfer resistance to Health and check what happens to our effective HP.

So we have a budget of 7x75% resistance and to keep things simple we assume we can shift half of it to flat Health and the other half (hence /2 in the equations) of our budget to %Health:

So for our budget we get
7x75%/44% /2 * 75 = 447 flat HP
and we get
7x75%/44% /2 * 12 = 72 % Health
Bold numbers are from the T5 health rolls (see above)

with the health at 7x75% capped resistance being
Health@75res = b(1+i)
with b the base health (vitality, levels,…) and i all increased modifiers.

The Health with zero resistance but instead the above calculated additional amount of flat health and increased health:
Health@0res = (b + 447) (1 + i + 0.72 )

With 0 resist we get like 75% more damage assuming high enough monster level and ignoring additional shreds debuffs.

So to get the breakpoints we have to ask when the following equation holds:
Health@75res = Health@0res / 1.75
b (1 + i) = (b + 447) (1 + i + 0.72) / 1.75
introducing shorthand C and solve for b gives:
C = (1 + i + 0.72) / 1.75
b = 447 C / (1 + i - C)

We only accept solutions with b>0 and i>0, obviously.

(edit: There is always a solution now (compared to when I used 40% for the resistance T5 roll) even for i=0.)
With i=0.3 we get b=3541 (thats a total health@75res of b(1+ i) = 4603 … lol :slight_smile: )
with i=0.9 we get b=1661 (thats a total health@75res of b (1+i) = 3156 )

(edit: i guess 90% increased Health while also at 7x75% resis is “a little bit” unrealistic tho)

So with this laymans model you would need a little bit more than …
‘types in calculator…’
… a shitload of health before health becomes less worth than the resistance…

3 Likes
24

Not gonna pretend to understand the math, but you took up Llama’s challenge beautifully. Well done sir, well done.

25

No worries the first line of calculations was already wrong …

Where there is now a 44% there was a 40% (no clue what I did there)
I corrected the rest. Numbers are quite different now but still insane.

26

ok, you are now officially Khastro_Da_Professor :crazy_face:

and my brain hurts on a Sunday morning…

27

So the tl;dr is that stacking hp up to 3k is more efficient than capping res? Intriguing. Res are not depletable though, wich makes them functionally better than hp, but still… How would these numbers change with a higher maximum resistance cap or with higher average value of the resistance affixes?

28

Yes and no.

Its a simple model to start with, however there are so much more things to consider.

Like you said: the depletion: If you have not enough overheal, going more HP will hurt your relative health recovery where you relative effectiveHP recovery does not change if you go for resistance instead.
I think HP sustain/recovery is a very crucial point in last epoch at the moment.

The model ignores set resistance which are prefixes.
Because then it gets really complicated and you will trade different kind of stats, sometimes offensive stats for set-resistance.
No easy answer there, too.

The model ignores that you will often get resistance from somewhere anyways. So you will end up with a certain distribution of resistances in the first place.
If you take the “I may get ever type of damage in this map/arena” approach, then your EHP is only as good as your lowest resistance.
Then, if you have - for example - one resistance falling behind, pushing that resistance will be roughly 7 times as good. Without doing the math I’m pretty sure that it’s best to raise that resistance to make your different resistances more equal.

Then again, things change completely if you know that in a certain “map”/monolith you will mainly get one type of damage.
This again multiplies the “value” of this resistance by 7. More realistically it would be 2 resistances (e.g. physical + X) so the factor of improvement would be 3.5 compared to a situation where you think you can receive any type of damage.
If you only expect two types of damage I assume (I havent done the math) that it would be a lot more efficient to go for 2x75% + 5x0% resistance and as much Health or other defense as you can get for lowering the 5 unneeded resistances.

For me its too early to say that resistance rolls are too low generally.
What is certainly true is that there is no automatism to cap them like in other games.
This was inteded I think, so thats not bad.

2 Likes
29

I very much appreciate your maths, however I’d like to see you & raise you with some reality (in a nice way 'cause I just realised that might sound a bit ****y). :wink:

But is it possible to get that much % inc health? You can get 5% on gloves/boots/belt from the hybrid hp affix (for +15%), 12% (t5 max roll) on helm & belt and 18% on chest from the “of the Ox” suffix for 42%. This gives a total of 57% icreased health rather than your 90%…

For flat health (“of life”), you can get +75 on a helm/belt/boots/gloves/2x rings/relic, +88 on an amulet & +112 on the chest armour. You can also get it on the shield, but lastepochtools.com doesn’t want to say how much, som quick crafting in-game says +75 for the max roll… So that’s 8x 75 + 88 + 112 = 800 hp. Now, you get 900 base hp (no points in vit, starting hp is 100 + 8hp per level), so the max hp you could get (from gear) is (900 + 800) * 1.57 = 2,669 (+/- 8 because I can’t be arsed checking whether you get 8hp for lvl 1).

Further, this will only “cost” 13 suffixes of the 20 that we have. Allowing us to take some resists… :wink:

Edit: I also forgot that the hybrid hp affix (of the giant) gives flat hp as well! 3x 68 to be precise = 204. This then gives 900 + 800 + 204 = 1,904 x 1.57 = 2,989 hp from gear.

Edit #2: I do feel a bit guilty with the above, I asked you for some simple maths, whch you did & then I say that that’s not what can happen in-game, I feel a bit mean…

2 Likes