The glass cannon. You can simply skip resists and focus solely on damage and hope to kill everything before they can sneeze in your direction.
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You could do that with health/armor/etc. Resists and crit avoidance don’t really provide any unique gameplay or fantasy that isn’t covered by the other more interesting defenses that you could actually choose to stack or forgo.
There is none since it’s not something which the game plays around with.
It’s a mechanical hurdle to be overcome for the player, not a ‘fantasy’ to be fulfilled there. A method to have a downside into the building of a character which needs to be overcome. If a baseline 75% in all of them is to be expected then this means the game is balanced around the other stats then allowing to provide the build specific defensive you’ll need.
Thinking about the premise of it being a ‘fantasy’ is hence not one you can do, it would be a false one. It’s not intended that way and instead works for other reasons. This is not the classical RPG where you want to get that lovely dragon shield which gives you heavy fire resistance before having the chance of beating a dragon.
Also there is no ‘resist build’ as there’s no baseline option for that to exist. Either you have resistance or you’re dead on the ground, that’s it. Hurdle.
With your line of argumentation we can collapse the whole system down to health and mana. Hence a resource to attack and a resource to defend.
To make it more interesting you use special mechanics like blocking… but not dodging since that would be mechanically the same, why have 2 different things of the same category, right? We only need one.
Ward is hence also not needed, it’s just the same as HP pool anyway… so why have it in the first place?
Your argumentation isn’t a good one.
First off:
Make sure to understand what’s intended with a mechanic
Following that:
See if the intention is realized
If so:
Great! Works.
If not:
Then complain
So, the intention of resistances is clear, a variety of stats which are expected to be maxed out or close to it to provide baseline survivability. It locks affixes on gear, it locks blessings from monoliths and the variety causes you to need time to get it all right.
Does it work? Yes, fantastically so in what it’s supposed to!
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I think the stats need to justify why they exist by some meaningful mechanical and/or flavor difference. I can reason through why certain stats are different and interesting to build up what seems worthwhile and what is just clutter:
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Health is the starting point for all defense. There’s not a lot to say about it, but it needs to exist for anything else to make sense.
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Ward is different than health because you need to generate it and maintain it somehow and you can’t use healing effects to do that.
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Mana is your resource to be able to do stuff. It provides both offense and defense in varied ways based on the skills you choose to spend it on. The % of damage taken dealt to mana before health modifier that mages get to use is interesting because it asks you to consume even more of your resource you need for other things, often in unpredictable ways since you might take a lot of damage, but in exchange you get more effective HP and another way to get back effective HP through mana gen effects.
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Any kind of damage reduction stat distinguishes itself from the above pool stats by the fact that it increases the effectiveness of healing. Someone who just has a big health pool but not much damage reduction would have to put a lot more work in to fill up their health pool than someone with lower HP but higher DR. But there are different kinds of DR, some distinguish themselves, some are redundant.
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Completely passive reduction such as armor, resistance, crit avoid (when capped), and less damage from crits all essentially achieve the same thing: If you have this stat, no matter what you’re doing, you will take less damage without any input or variance. There could easily just be one of these stats, maybe 2, and no real mechanical depth would be lost.
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Then there is Endurance. Technically it’s also generic EHP, but the fact that it’s specifically active at low health makes it better for some builds that want to take advantage of that, such as a Lich using Dealth Seal that wants to stay in that health range.
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Then there are the two chance based damage reduction/avoidance stats: Dodge and Block. (I guess there’s also glancing blows, but that’s not really a stat you put on gear.) It’s fairly easy to distinguish the difference between them. Dodge is higher risk higher reward, block is more consistent.
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You can get your block up much higher than dodge, (I think you can even cap it?) and therefore more regularly receive it’s benefits, but it’s only a partial damage reduction. You’ll still be taking variable amounts of damage, but the peaks and valleys will be a lot closer.
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Dodge on the other hand is something that’s hard to get a lot of and you absolutely can’t cap, but you get the benefit of taking no damage when you do dodge. Your damage taken as a result will be really spikey, sometimes taking no damage, sometimes taking a truckload and maybe even dying. That’s also why dodge is often kind of questionable in ARPG design. It’s hard to build a character that solely relies on dodging to survive and therefore needs to take other defensive stats that aren’t as in flavor for the character. That said, you can design around this with various other kinds of effects, so it can probably be justified.
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Also, in general, the chance based defenses provide for another mechanical hook for builds: Thing happens when I dodge/block. That’s always fun and leans into the primary purpose of the stat while giving you a bonus: If you have something that triggers when you dodge, you want to be dodging more often, which means… you’re dodging more often. The stat is doing more of what you wanted it to. As opposed to uncapped resistance where after 75% the stat means nothing to you aside from that other mechanical hook.
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Then there are various forms of sustain: HP Regen, Life Leech, and Healing Effectiveness. Each of these is fairly different in obvious ways.
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HP regen is entirely passive, you get it regardless of what you’re doing. So you can either keep wailing on the monster or run around in circles if you need to avoid stuff. To compensate for this generality, it is consequently going to be harder to get a lot of it.
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Life Leech turns your damage into sustain. It promises that you only need a small amount of it, freeing you to stack damage to improve it. It lets you keep wailing on enemies even when they hurt you, but it has the downside that it stops as soon as you stop dealing damage. If you need to run around to avoid a boss attack or perhaps you run out of mana, you get nothing.
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Healing Effectiveness is interesting because it improves your character’s abilities, and therefore will have different value, and a different impact on your sustain profile, depending on the skill build.
So you see, if you’re not trying to be reductive, you can come up with justifications for most of the stats in the game that show why they are interesting and valuable additions. But if you really break it down, it’s hard to justify having 9 different stats that all essentially do the same thing: Generically take less damage.
If I was going to rework these, I think I’d do something along the lines of:
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Either collapse resistances into armor for a general damage reduction stat or perhaps just have 2 stats like “Armor is for hits, resistance is for damage over time.” or “Armor is for physical damage, resistance is for magical damage.”
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For crit avoid and less damage taken on crit:
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One option is to just get rid of crit avoidance. It’s kind of just a worse version of less damage taken on crit. If both are at 100% (which is doable for both and not even that hard when you consider some item bases) they function identically for anything other than stuff like Fiery Dragon Boots that care about you getting crit. If you’re not at 100%, crit avoid acts like dodge in that you can’t rely on it, you either get the benefit or you get randomly pancaked, whereas less damage taken on crit is always helpful.
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Another option is to roll these into other stats. Crit avoid can become a part of dodge and have it work by shifting the hit table. Crits have a chance to become hits → hits then have a chance to become glancing blows → glancing blows have a chance to become dodges.
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Less damage taken on crit could be rolled into armor.
Intent is one thing to consider, but if it’s not fun it’s not fun. I can complain about that. These stats as constraints on gearing just make me feel bad. It makes me less excited to find loot because I have to deal with the annoyance of re-balancing my resistances and crit avoidance.
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From what I understand things like Life, Ward & Armor / Dodge rating and much more important. Also other defensive buffs that might appear on your skills / passives.
A huge one is avoiding damage by constantly moving. a formation of archers will never hit you if you strafe around them.
When it comes to late game monoliths you can consider capping and over capping. The max negative resist that can be inflicted on you is -20 from what I understand so. 95% is fine.
Even then some might suggest just getting more raw defenses. I’m not sure how it all works exactly. But I had 1k life doing monoliths and dying a lot, I have 1700 at some point without capped resists dying way less.
Also remember you do not need to cap them all. Just carry extra idols or gear you can swap in as needed.
2 Likes
I’ll start with this since it’s the most important part.
Subjective feeling.
I enjoy it… so is now my perception or your perception the important one?
Which is not true though, you’re just failing to see the mechanical depth there.
Armor has a deduction towards non-phys damage and does not affect DoTs
Resistances affect DoTs fully, it’s the main method to reduce the damage there.
Crit avoid only works on hits, once again no DoT effect.
Less damage on crit is the failsave measure to reduce crit in case avoidance can’t be capped.
So while similar they all have a different function, they affect the outcome of any situation in a different way.
Pure EHP mechanic, you have this no matter what, it’s a multiplicative measure which works well off of high health investment and nothing else since we don’t really have mechanics which tackle ‘low life’ yet.
Block you can get to 100%
Glancing blows which you pass over as well with the rogue.
Dodge in itself is solely high risk, it’s mathematically a detrimental stat to invest into as a main focus since it’ll get you killed sooner or later, just the question ‘when’ and not ‘if’.
And block works as a percentile reduction based on effectiveness, it doesn’t reduce the amplitude, it reduces the magnitude.
And you can cap dodge, it’s senseless though, and it doesn’t cap at 100% simply, still has a cap.
Oh, I can easily justify it:
Each of them gives you a damage reduction in different specific situations and against different types of enemies.
Hence you can personally choose which ones to cap (since they’re dangerous or you get it by something specific more then commonly) or… not (and avoiding damage in the first place from those enemies, made up by freeing affixes).
Also they’re inherently acting as a limiter on the usable affixes on gear, otherwise allowing you to get other mechanics easier capped or quite powerful.
Then we also have the difference between the elemental res, phys res and ‘other’, interacting in different ways.
elemental res has a overarching mod which you seek to cap them, phys has a special interaction for armor and the other 3 are very timeline based in terms of existence and content.
You mean superior version.
100% crit avoidance causes all crits cease to exist.
Obviously better then getting a lot more damage then ‘100%’ after all.
Overall the change suggestions pull a whole slew of thought out issues which play around the respective mechanics and their balance with it.
A very hard ‘no’ from my side. It would be rather nonsensical to have a common resistance system be dismantled willy-nilly for no reason outside of ‘I don’t like it’ and ‘I don’t see the reason for the existence’.
2 Likes
Fun is subjective. My fun might be your bore.
I like playing with damage types and resistances, balancing them around my other choices. It’s part of a puzzle I like solving. In PoE for example, I loved to puzzle around getting my resistances as close to 90% as possible, running 3 purity auras and freeing suffixes on my items. My builds might not have been the most optimized, but they were my builds.
I think adding a second group besides “elemental” would be good, one that contains poison, necrotic, and void.
While resistance is certainly a classic of the genre, it isn’t obsolete as a mechanic.
3 Likes
sounds like maybe you need to learn to play RPG
2 Likes
You just need to learn what items have resistances in the implicits that can cover you for a lot. I also thought balancing resistances was difficult until I really learned what pieces of gear are great for resistances I don’t know about other classes, but I play rogue for instance, you can pretty much cover half your resistances through the bone, amulet void gloves, elemental resistance on two rings, and then just fill in other little things here and there as you need them on your relic And you can seal something that might be lacking on another piece of gear just to cover everything else it’s a balancing act and seems difficult but it’s actually not that hard once you have a plan and know what you need.
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If resists were gone, there would just be other mitigation stats. That said, I’ve had to resort to a pencil and paper to track all of them. Seven is too many to keep in my head.
Part of the issue is that there is not enough info in the character sheet about which resists are from passives, which are from skills, and which are from gear. It’s also inconsistent whether resists from skills and passives are even shown. For example Holy Aura Shelter from the Storm is hidden in town. I’ve screwed up gear overcapping because of that. If the aura is on my bar it should be reflected on my character sheet.
I’d welcome a shadow/necrotic/void stat as well as elemental to simplify my gear a bit.
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It is extremely easy to craft a set of gear with adequate resistances. Levelled like 6 characters already and it has not been an issue once.
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You can literally hit C and see all of the resists. Very easy to track.
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I finally figured out that they are bugged on paladins. I just made a bug report.
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I’m playing a paladin with no issues so far. What causes the bug? All of my resists are capped except for one.
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Holy Aura & any skill points in it isn’t shown in town. My elemental resists jump around by 40 points depending on where I access stash and forge.
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I don’t get this kind of complaint, even hardcore PoE players have been saying that resistances are not even that much of a big deal in this game except void, phys and necro.
At most you get 75% more damage from enemies by having 0 resists, you have to invest on many different resists to cap them all. Getting Armor, Health/Ward and crit avoidance is always more important.
Resists are good to have, but people act as if not capping them is a crime.
This is not PoE where 5% resist can mean 20% more damage taken.
Get one shield with All-Res and a couple of idols and you’re golden. Stop building glass cannons.
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Not a bug, since skills aren’t active in town.
It’s mildly annoying, though. One has to remember to consider them when watching their stats, and I have messed that up at some point, too.
Do you have a dev post saying it’s working as intended? In my company if we had something that obviously confusing to end users we’d consider it to be a bug.
Then hopefully noone is ever confused by you 
.
On a more serious note. Skills are disabled in town therefor you don’t get benefits from skills. Easy as that.