Is there an easy way to know what kind of damage an enemy is doing exactly? Outside of guessing based on the visual and context clues. For instance the Festering Cultists in the Ruined Era. I always take a ton of damage from them despite my Void resistance being around 50, so I assume they must be doing physical damage? But the only time I have found to see what damage type an enemy is doing in on the death screen which doesn’t really help me on hardcore. Am I missing it somewhere?
There’s the colour of the skill effects. If it’s purple it’ll be void, cyan is necrotic, dark red is physical, etc.
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I noticed the colors on spells and other ranged attacks from monsters, but the melee attacks are harder to spot. I’ll try to pay more attention and see if I can spot something. Thanks!
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Okay, so I did go and look and I did notice a purple/black effect on the cultist’s tail attacks. But some attacks have no color effect on them at all. See Damage Color 2. But there is a Thrall who’s attacks also do not have a color associated with them. What damage is being done when no color is present?
Also sorry about the music lol, I forgot my recording would capture the audio.
First video would likely be 100% Physical damage as the enemy is physically hitting you without any other colour shown. Second video would likely be 100% Physical damage for the hand slash attacks as the enemy is physically hitting you and 50% Physical/50% Void damage for the stinger attack as the enemy is physically hitting you and there’s a purple colour to it.
Generally, any physical attack that strikes you is Physical damage and if there’s a colour associated with it then there’s a second damage type that gets splits evenly 50/50 in its overall damage amount. An example of this would be the Rime Giants avalanche attack that does 50% Physical and 50% Cold damage – physical because it’s a physical boulder hitting you and cold because the boulder is ice and has light blue colouring.
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I miss the days when the tech existed to color damge numbers to correlate with the damage type that caused it.
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Could also have a combat log that tells you what damage each enemy did. That’s how we analyzed enemy damage for the longest time.
To speak to the OP - Tragically, late game there is so much of every damage type in these types of games, you basically need to cap out all your resistances so it doesn’t make a ton of difference. Early game, there are a handful of damage resistances that can help you get by more easily but because of how gear works, you have fewer choices or options to get them. This has always been kind of backwards.
But the alternative is giving the player lots of options to get resistances and you needing to stack them one or two at a time, which can also be unfun and inconvenient. So in the end, what resistances mostly exist to do is to force you to balance your gear and build choices so as to balance defense stats and damage stats. This becomes somewhat of a nonissue in LE but not until much later on, so I think it works well for that at least.
All that to say, maybe you don’t need to worry as much about what damage enemies do. As long as you have Necrotic, Void and Cold resistance by the time those become dominant damage types in the campaign, you can more or less ignore the others unless you happen to have gear that gives them. ( Physical is somewhat important but lots of other defense stats can make up for it, so you only really have to collect some of it as a matter of convenience. )
Is it really that literal? That if an attack is melee range and colorless than it’s physical damage? If so, that is good to know and I’ll keep an eye out for the colors from now on. Thanks!
I knew by late game I would need all resistances capped or above. But since I play hardcore I would like to be able to adapt if I notice specific enemies do a lot of damage to me, it’s a sign that something in my stats needs to be shored up.
Diablo 1 actually had a really nice solution to this. As you kill the enemy type more, it reveals more information about them under their name when you cursor over them and it would reveal what kind of resistances they have, what kinds of damage they do and what abilities they had. I think that is the most elegant rather than trying to color code things or attempting to scroll through a combat log which in this case could have dozens and dozens of hits per second.
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Yeah, but I understand the devs not wanting a log to turn into a DPS min/max simulator. Not that I completely agree with it, but I can see where they are coming from. But, just highlighting/coloring damage types doesn’t seem to fall into that same fear, so I don’t see why not. I’ll give you that by the end game, it doesn’t matter since most, if not all, your resistances will be capped… but, that’s not always the case.
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I thought that was the appeal of these games lol, that’s why I play
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Yes, the appeal is min/maxing your character. I completely agree. However, the devs have stated they won’t provide a combat log to assist you with exacts in this endeavor. 
You could still write down all the numbers from the dummy, and use a stop watch, but that’s reserved for only the hardestcoresterestest of the min/max community.
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