First of all:
10% penetration is not necessarily the same as multiplicative 10% damage. I’ll explain later.
Second:
The blessing doesn’t give Cold Pen, like amulet affix or a passive from Sorc tree. It gives a chance to apply “Shred Cold Resistance” ailment. Which itself applies negative cold res (same like Snap Freeze) and STACKS to 20 (and with ice barrage you should be able to maintain 20 stacks quite easily on bosses)
AFAIK, resistances can be dropped into negatives, so, now, the actual damage increase depends on the initial cold resistance of the target:
If base cold res of the target is 0%, then yes, you can treat Cold Pen (or any pen) as yet another “More Damage” multiplicator. With 40% cold pen you do x1.4 more damage, with 140% pen you do x2.4 more damage (which is 71% more damage than without Cold Res Shred blessing).
But, assuming a target has 75% cold res, without penetration you only do x0.25 damage to it. With cold pen from Cold Snap and Passive you have 40% pen and now you do x0.65 damage to it. So, 40% pen actually results in 0.65/025 = x2.6 = 160% “more” damage! Which is fucking HUGE.
Now, with 20 stacks from Cold Res Shred you have additional -100 resist on the target. Now you have 140% pen! Compared to 40% you now do 1.65/0.65 = x2.53 = 153% “more” damage. Which, again, is fucking HUGE.
Honestly, I’m not sure how much base cold res monsters/bosses have. If it’s 0% for everyone, well… this is boring, I must say. I would easily believe that target dummy has 0 armor/res/whatever. But bosses — seems unlikely.
But what I’m absolutely certain of, is that x20 stacked Cold Res Shred is DEFINTIELY more than 29% damage boost. It’s noticeable even on target dummy, that it’s somewhere around x2 boost.
Usually Bosses and monsters have 0% res and 0 armor as long as you dont give them some. by monolith modifiers. There are some rare exceptions that have res (the fire scorpions e.g.).
Pen, Res Shred and (in case of Lightning) Shock - are all “minus enemy res”.
So you add them up and they are one big multiplier.
20% Pen
Max Shred
→ -60% boss res
All monsters have generic “less damage taken” not only bosses - the poor dummy has 0%.
For lvl 100 mobs the number was like 91% less afair
As Llama pointed out enemies usually have 0% resistance and only some sort of flat damage reduction which cannot be modified.
In addition, shred works together with penetration. The only “big” difference is when a target has above 75% resistance. Shred would be applied to the value before the 75% resistance cap is applied while penetration is applied after. If you reduce resistance with shred by 40% (maximum on a boss) and the enemiy would have 100% resistance it would result in an effective penetration of only 15% (edited) while 40% penetration is always 40% penetration.
Nevertheless, going for cold shred or frostbite is a matter of preference. I prefere frostbite since my damage at close to 700 corruption is still great but survivability can make some troubles. Frostbite chance provides more freezes and faster stacking of frostbite. More freezes not only hinders the enemy to hit you but also recovers ward/life on freeze.
Both blessings are decent option supporting different objectives.
That’s for player resists, not enemy resists, we don’t know the max resist a mob can get (though I wouldn’t be surprised if it were capped at 75% just to make sure immunities aren’t possible) but that’s likely a moot point since the player penetration is not the same as mob area-level penetration.
I’m not quite sure where you get the 5% figure from. If it were possible for enemies to get 100% resist (which I doubt it is), then 100% - 40% = 60% resist so you’d still be penetrating 40% of their resistance. You’d then be doing 40 damage off a 100 hit compared to 0 (which is why I don’t think it’s possible for mobs to get 100% resist).
Two mistakes by me: First I assumed that enemies are capped at 75% as well and in addition I was not able to calculate 100- 40 = 60 which gives an effective penetration of 15%.
With effective penetration I meant that the first 25% resistance reduction of shred would show no difference in damage while the remeaining 15% would increase the damage the same way 15% penetration would. Always assuming enemies resistance as well has a maximum of 75% resistance. Under these assumptions 40% penetration would yield 40% resistance penetration while 40% shred would only grant an quivalent of 15% penetration.
Should be more carfeul when writing such things. Thanks for highlighting my mistakes
You’re still assuming that a) mobs can get that much resist & b) player penetration applies after a putative resist cap rather than it just being added in to shred in the damage calc.
Always a pleasure. @EHG_Mike Is there a cap on enemy resists? Does player penetration (& shred) apply before or after said cap? Is it possible for mobs to get above that cap (if there is one)?
Yes, just wanted to illustrate the difference between shred and penetration. There will only be a difference if there is a maximum resistance for enemies. Otherwise they would always give the same amount of effective penetration.
I’m very interested in the mechanics myself, because beyond the obvious mobs that have “extra fire resist”, for my build which stacks shred\pen\ignites and a bunch of electrifys and poison as secondary, I spent maybe 3-4 hours clearing tons of Monos thinking my build was really starting to suck at higher corruptions until I noticed I seemed to have +28%, or maybe 38% to all res in every Mono… and man it seemed to really hit the damage hard until I reset killing Oro and I havent seen an all res modifier since and I am back to trucking for the most part. I’m trying to get an endgame shield with 2+ LP and I’m new to LE so I am sure I am doing things a bit inefficiently as I learn but speaking as a long term PoE Vet I think some clarity on shred vs pen and what it actually does would be helpful. For instance my grand blessing of fire shred says “35%”, so meaning I can get to 35% once at 20 stacks? or 20 stacks is 20 x -35? I’ve seen it explained both ways and testing in game is a bit tough to pin down exactly whats going on beyond the eye\smell test which as we all know is subject to our horrible monkey brain analysis.
I actually asked in the Discord if the Pen on amulets was the same effectively as shred and I was told no, even though that is clearly wrong even if the mechanic by which we reach the reduction is different, its still a reduction unless we have an order of operations situation from mob resists.
Some of the responses were worthy of Mark_GGG on his best day (hes PoE’s resident definer of obscure terms like what ‘near’ means in case anyone doesn’t know) and I will say its nice to for the most part not need a copy of Strunks Elements of Style to know how a mechanic works in this game.
The blessing gives your hits a chance of 35% per hit to apply a stack of shred. You can have up to 20 stacks which each grant 5% resistance reduction against enemies resp. 2% against bosses.
Each stack lasts 4s. So if you get enough attacks within 4 seconds you will reach up to 40% resistance reduction against bosses. These information can be found in the in game guide (G) and the community guide (Community Game Guide):
Each damage type (Fire, Lightning, Cold, Physical, Poison, Necrotic, and Void) has a respective Resistance Shred ailment. Resistance Shred ailments reduce the target’s resistance for that particular damage type. By default they subtract 5% resistance and last 4 seconds. Each Resistance Shred ailment can stack up to 20 times.
Resistance shred applies before the resistance cap.
Resistance Shred ailments have 60% reduced effect against bosses and players (multiplicative with other modifiers).
As far as we know shred and penetration have the same effect against enemies and only in upcomming pvp content it will have a difference. If enemies have a resistance cap like players, i.e., at 75% resistance you could also have cases with multiple all resistance modifiers which results in less ‘efficiency’ of shred against monsters (see my example above with 100% mosnter resistance and the assumption that enemies have resistance cap of 75% like players.
I updated the guide and its gearing for using the Gaspar’s Insight set helmet. In patch 0.8.4 this is the superior build version. It pushed me to doing 650+ corruption without big gearing changes. I expect the build to push even higher with proper gear.
You can find specific sections in the guide where the helmet changes your gearing and/or stat priority.
Love how you freeze Julra all the time… She cant even apply the last void pool on the last time jump because you have her freeze locked till she bites it… Most satisfying…
Some uncut content showcase including a T4 Dungeon, 671 corruption random echoes, Orobyss and Formosus. Including some deaths at the end due to careless modifer stacking.
Orobyss with approximately 10x damage can hit really hard
It definetly isn’t on of the faster build in the game. You really want some movement speed on LP Snowdrifts to feel smoother. In lower corruption the speed also is a lot faster as your damage obviously kills everything more easily.
If you are looking for a speedy build other classes are probably better. Sorcerer hasn’t that much of speed support. Lightning Blast builds may be as well a little faster.
Finally farmed all the uniques for your build today and can now try it propely . Feels smooth on monos when you get used to it and boss dmg is pretty satisfactory. Need to farm the blessings now and go freeze Julra to death lol
. Feels smooth on monos when you get used to it and boss dmg is pretty satisfactory. Need to farm the blessings now and go freeze Julra to death lol