Sentinel X damage taken as physical suggestion

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Right now, Sentinels have 3 possible prefix affixes on body armor and helmets:

  • Poison damage taken as Physical
  • Necrotic damage taken as Physical
  • Void damage taken as Physical

And also 3 possible prefixes on class idols:

  • Fire damage taken as Physical
  • Cold damage taken as Physical
  • Lightning damage taken as Physical

Those affixes are almost never used. It is just not worth it to give up you precious prefix slots on such high contested items as Body armor or Helmet, and even less so on idols.

And what makes those affixes so worthless is the fact that, with the exception of some bosses, most content in the game throws a lot of different damage types on you. So giving up a prefix slot just to reduce damage taken from 1 damage type doesn’t look like a good idea. Also, the reduction is not that great also, T5 affix goes up to 45% X damage taken as physical, so lets do some math here.

Lets say we have 30% DR from armor for physical damage (21% DR for other types)
So we take 100 necrotic damage. Armor reduces it to 79.
With 45% Necrotic taken as Physical we take 45 damage as physical, reducing it to 31,5 and 55 damage as necrotic, reducing it to 43,45 for a total of 74,95.

So we went from 21% to 25.5% reduction for our example. For 1 damage type.

You could say that you can use those affixes on different gear sets for different bosses or dungeons (like Soulfire bastion which is Necrotic/Fire only), but who would ever do that? It is hard enough to get 1 set of great gear for you character, let alone several.

So what we have are class-specific (which makes them rare and supposedly valuable) affixes which are actually practically useless.

And we finally come to the suggestion part:
Reduce the values, but make those affixes be multityped. So Necrotic and Poison and Void damage taken as Physical for Body armor and Helmet prefixes and Elemental damage taken as Physical for idols. This would make them much more useful and would justify giving up some offensive prefixes for a more tanky character.

3 Likes
2

What makes them pointless is that you don’t actually get any additional damage reduction from them. Back before resistances were implemented they had some value since you could convert some of the damage from damage elements where you had lower protections to physical where a Sentinel would have more DR. But in the current resistance world, you always cap your resists so converting damage taken is pointless.

If those affixes also had an additional line for reduced damage of the converted damage (ie, convert 50% of X to phys then reduce the converted damage by Y%) that might be useful.

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3

While I would agree that they are not particularly strong, you do gain additional damage reduction from them.

At least from hits, since armour is more effective against physical damage

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4

True, not much in the grand scheme of things.

5

Not really, sadly.

I just remember the good ol’ days when armour only affected physical damage and also was more effective at low health every time when I see these affixes

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6

These affixes work on damage over time, right? So if you got 100% of poison damage taken as physical, you wouldn’t need any poison resistance? I could see that being useful, especially given that the poison ailment reduces poison resistance (which means there’s normally decent value in overcapping poison resist). You’d need two valuable prefix slots to pull it off, but maybe there’s a case where it saves enough suffix slots to make it worth it.

7

Correct.

8

To get 100% converted you would need to sacrifice 2 Exalted prefixes cause T5 only goes up to 45. Too much of an investment just to skip 1 resistance.

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9

90%'s probably good enough though. Not that it’d be worth “swapping” 2 t5 suffixes for 2 t5 class-specific prefixes IMO.

10

I’m too tired to do the math right now, but I think taking 10% damage at 0 res will negate all the bonus from converting the rest to phys)

1 Like
11

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