I looked around the forums and didn’t see any previous topics that answered my question, so I’d like to figure out how Resistance and Penetration benefits are calculated.
In the Game Guide, Resistance is described as modifying damage taken. This implies that it modifies the end result of damage calculations, like so:
But your Base Damage + Bonus % doesn’t matter here, you could simply leave this out, because it has nothing to do with resistance or penetration calculation.
Two more things to mention here, which is different in LE compared to similar other games that use % Resistances.
Enemies gain 1% Penetration per Area Level, up to Area Level 75
Penetration does apply after capping
This means on Area Level 75+ it doesn’t matter if you have 75% Resistance or 150% Resistance.
Both values would have 0% Resistance for calculation purposes.
This does two major things:
Overcapping Resistances does only counter Mark for Death or Resistance Shred
It makes having not capped resistances way less punishing
I included it in case the resist/pen effects were rolled into the other damage bonuses.
I thought that Penetration worked on Overcapped Resistance first, so getting up to 150% would effectively be 75% for 75+ Areas. Is what you’re saying is that, outside of Mark or Shred, there’s no reason to have over 75% Resistance since Penetration will still reduce my Resistances to effectively 0 either way?
I apologize for asking for clarification for something that’s probably obvious, I have trouble processing information sometimes.
And even “capping itself” is not that mandatory in LE.
Your endgoal would still be to cap all resistances for a true endgame build, but getting from 70% to 75% resistance isn’t really that important, you can rather take a Health affix before getting an entire new affix just to cap those 5 remaining percent.
The maths is the same but the starting parameters are different. Mobs generally don’t have resists or armour and the player doesn’t get area-level penetration.
I only mention it because sometimes people have gotten themselves confused between the two.
