Been playing this game with my son as time permits. We’ve been theorycrafting and testing my son’s mages and things don’t seem to be adding up when it comes to elemental penetration or sources thereof.
For example, shock stacks don’t seem to do anything or very little effect. Scaling out elemental penetration by itself doesn’t seem to be too effective, either.
It feels like you can’t go negative, or going negative has very little effect.
We feel it might just make more sense to switch from the elementsl penetration points to a flat percentage system. In reading the wiki/gameopedia, it looks like protection and mitigation rates vary inversely with increases in total life and ward - if this applies to monsters as well it makes elemental penetration kind of… useless especially bosses whwre youd need it most.
This is one mechanic that xould be awrsome but we found deeply disappointing.
The problem is that we don’t know the base stats of the mobs, so we can’t say if 100 penetration or 500 armour shred is useful or not. That said, unless you can easily stack a lot of armour/protection shred, it’s probably not too useful at the moment.
We don’t need to know the base stats to decide how useful penetration is. Assuming that it works the same way on monsters as it does on players (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t), the protection stats are defined to be worth exactly as much as having that much HP against their corresponding damage type.
So having 100 penetration is worth exactly as much as fighting a monster with 100 less HP, assuming they have at least 100 in the protection stat. This is why these stats don’t scale great into the endgame, because on the biggest tankiest monsters the flat reduction in effective HP does less.
Kinda, for one-shots, yes, but for damage that you can then regen from it’s all about the ratio of hp to protection that determins how much hp you loose from a hit.
This is why I motion for a flat percent instead, because the nodes are significantly less valuable when you really need them.
I need my elemental penetration to provide consistency and to help smashing bosses.
Penetration typically serves as a potentiator and enabler against resistant enemies. It should allow for consistency in build diversity. It should also serve as an accelerant for burn or other dots… today the effect against bosses is negligible. The penetration doesn’t really do muh penetration… thems bosses is thicc
