Actually, all you need to stay alive in low level corruption is decent sustain.
Four pillars of defense:
Ward is “HP total”, so “cloth” builds should absolutely be looking for Damage Reduction sources.
You didn’t even mention Sustain in your post, so I’ll take a wild guess and say you forgot about sustain, and that’s why you die. Just like many players before you 
I think this is the biggest gripe new players have. It’s not intuitive at all that capping your resistances at 75 and being in a lv 75 area = 0 resistances. No other game works like this that I know of and was always a bug head scratcher for me.
Edit: I think there’s a tooltip that mentions it? But if I didn’t know from the forums or seeing it somewhere I would absolutely assume that my 75% fire res was reducing fire damage by 75% lol
The thing is, with how this work it is a positive, not a negative, because it makes the system much much more lenient and waaaaay less punishing.
Having close to capped resistances, but not quite capped them it totally acceptable and sometimes even better if you get other defenses instead of capping it.
These “mandatory gear budget stats” are sometimes annoying, but basically every game simialr to Diablo, LE, Grim Dawn or PoE has them, because it just gives your affix choices a bit more friction and choices that you have to make.
Yes, this is very confusing for me also.
I never really fully understood what it means, but when you hover any resistances in-game, it says:
“Enemies penetrate 1% resistance per area level, up to 75%. This penetration applies after the resistance cap, so extra resistance above 75% has no effect unless enemies shred your resistance.”
So I just know 75% is maximum I can get. Still no clue about the monsters pen thing part, or rather what it actually means.
I think it means that if you have 150% resistance, being in an area level 75 zone means you have 0 resistance to that enemies attacks. But if they Shred resistances, you have that extra 75% buffer before you start getting into the effectively negatives.
So situation 1) you have 150% resistance, lv 75 area will Penetrate 75% of your capped resistance (effective 0% resistance).
Situation 2) you have 150% resistance, the enemy shreds 76% resistance, you have 74% remaining. The area level is 75, so the enemy Penetrates 75%, giving you effectively -1% resistance.
I think …
What it means is that going from 0% to 1% resistance means 1% damage reduction. And going from 10% to 11% means a 1% damage reduction. And going from 74% to 75% means a 1% damage reduction. Likewise, increasing your maximum resistances from say 75% to 80% means a 5% damage reduction. And if you managed to reach 98% maximum resistance and increased it to 99%, it’s still 1% damage reduction.
So in LE, each % in resistance equals the same % in damage reduction for that type.
This is completely different from other games because resistance has a much heavier weight to defenses.
For example, in PoE going from 74% to 75% resistances is actually a 4% damage reduction. Likewise, going from 75% to 86% is a 78% increase in reduction.
And ultimately, if you had 98% resistance and increased it to 99% resistance, it would be a 50% damage reduction.
Scipo already explained what shredding does, but I just want to add that if you have exactly 75%, this means that you have an effective 0%. If an enemy shreds 20% you’re left with -20% and this means it’s just a 20% damage increase, which would have been a lot more in PoE.
Basically, what LE has done is to make resistances actually easy to figure out and, more importantly, not really mandatory to cap. You can easily have 70% resistances and you’ll only be taking 5% more damage.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, made it way easier to comprehend.
I kinda already knew how it functionally works after all these years, the problem is that it’s really not at all intuitive and easy to get to that conclusion just by reading that text alone.
I might be pendatic here, but you should word this the other way around and say going from 75% to 74% in LE means taking 1% more damage
And in PoE going from 75% to 74% means taking 4% more damage
If you say it the other way around like you did it would actually not be exactly 1%/4% respectively but instead would be 0,99% DR/3,846% DR respectively
A while ago I made this table which shows very elegantly the difference in incoming damage based on different resistances values between LE and other games like PoE/Grim Dawn
No, you’re technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. 
One good way to think about shred and areas is simply that areas shred your resistances. Each area level shreds 1% of your resistance, up to 75%.
The effect is pretty much the same. If you have 0% resists in a level 75+ area, your effective resistance is -75%. If a mob shreds 20%, you’re left with -95% (dunno if there’s a negative cap). If you have 50% resists, area will shred you down to -25%, etc.
For me personally it ain’t as much a stat problem as much as it is a gear is not that impactful problem.
Having only four affix options is very limiting at low to mid game, and having 2 affix uniques is not impactful enough where enemies scale up to high numbers and you can’t meaningfully reduce it anymore.
The last epoch devs in general need to rework the gear system entirely. As the roll on affixes system was fine for beta as a placeholder system. But not as a final product.
Faster they do it the better
More affixes will not help at all, quite the opposite, without any major adjustments it would only homoginize builds, because they are not enough affixes to keep meaningful choices.
Giving more affixes would require massive overhauls of many game systems, all of which would have rippling efffects.
Crafting, Forging Potential, Legendary Crafting, Glyphs, Runes, everything would need major adjustments or reworks.
All of that to fix issues that are not there.
Why is having “only” 4 affixes (technically even 5 for endgame options with sealed affixes) limiting? It is way more than enough to make buidls distinct.
Fun Fact: We had 6 Affixes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back, even though it was a very different game back then.
Your right that it won’t fully fix it as the build variety is very linear unless it’s a +4 to a skill in which case it can change a lot but that is restricted to very few gear parts. In some cases there are no enough nodes to change the skill either, so I end up cranking a node a bit to make it do more damage.
Would be neat if I could have a +20 to profane veil. That would be very funny indeed. That or a +20 to lich form
It is though, compared to having 0 fire res. That mobs get resist pen up to 75% isn’t actually as important as some people think it is. The important thing (for new players) is that you cap it as well as getting other defences. Surely PoE has been out for long enough to teach people that you don’t just cap resists & then go direct to red maps without anything else?
You’re assuming that if they put it back to 6 affixes that they’d keep the values the same. They could easily reduce the values so that your total stat budget was the same but you’d “just” (& it’s not a small thing) have more granularity.
Plus it’d have a negative impact on legendaries.
Not really, everybody would take every node & there would be no variance at all.
I have a much simpler way to think about resistance penetration.
Resistance penetration from area level is automatically always there, you cannot get rid of it - unlike in other games, where you just stack more resistances. So basically, our “resistance penetration from area level” is just a fancy name for “area level increases monster damage” - the same effect corruption has.
And if you didn’t have resistances, your base resistances would be -75.
It’s actually very common - for example Diablo 2, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, all lower your base resistance below zero.
On 1.0 Launch, some people were just hyper-focused on the existence of res penetration from area level, to the point where several rumors were created. For example, some people considered resistances useless - an obviously wrong assumption But it’s actually not important at all. Having resistances still equals less damage taken compared not having resistances. Just like in all ARPGs.
All a new player needs to know is that:
We don’t really have to tell new players that once in a blue moon there will exist a mob that has shred or death mark, where overcapping res is actually useful. 99% of the time they won’t fight it. 
There is a big difference between both, though. Resistance penetration from area level has a cap of 75, monster damage doesn’t.
Yes, but in D2 or PoE you look at your character sheet and it says -20. LE says 50 but you actually have -25. That’s why he said it’s not intuitive.
No, there’s no difference 
It’s literally the same thing:
“Resistance penetration from area level” caps at area level 75
“Increased monster damage from area level” caps at area level 75.
Would you prefer to see a 0% rather than 75% in your character sheet?
I’m pretty sure you’d get topics with people saying the zero is not intuitive, because they are wearing this ring with resistances, and despite that their character sheet says zero or negative
Ah, that was you rephrasing, I thought you were just comparing with regular monster damage increase from corruption. Got it.
Either is unintuitive. That was the point. LE’s system is great but is unintuitive simply because it goes counter to player expectations from over 2 decades of games doing it differently.
Though it’s unintuitive only as a new player. You then learn how it actually works and you adapt and, usually, you like this method better because it’s more forgiving.
I think this is the main issue.
I’m pretty sure Steam Store doesn’t say anything like “resistance system that’s similar to other games in the genre”, so the expectation of getting a resistance system that’s very close or identical to other games in the genre is wrong from the start.
To avoid confusion, I think you could simply rename and modify the description of this mechanic. “Resistance penetration from area level” shouldn’t have been named resistance penetration. We reserve that name for Shred and Penetration affixes.
Instead, let’s call this mechanic “Miasma” for example. Idk if it’s a good name - others please post your names
What do you think?
edit: “incoming” made it sound like it’s applied before resistances, so I modified the description again to remove that word.
edit2: but now I realize that calling it a multiplier doesn’t produce the same results as substracting from resistances. Damn coming up with a proper description on the spot isn’t that easy.
See? That’s why I also said it’s not intuitive. Even devs had trouble trying to come up with a proper informative description that would suffice most people’s doubts about the whole system just by reading it.
Also, not wrong to expect some of the major aspects of a ARPG will be present in every new ARPG released, which is the case for resistances, that has always been handled in very similar ways, when not identical, in all games in the genre.
And yes, I’d like if there were different words for this, as this would clearly minimize confusion in players… EHG still has this issue where they name things differently when they are essentially the same, while using same name for things that are inherently different.
I’m not sure what’s unintuitive though.
You have two Resistances values shown next to each other, cap and uncapped total. For example:
(163%) = uncapped total
75% = current (capped) amount
Then you have two groups of effects:
(163%) … Resistance reduction is applied to the top number.
75% … … Resistance penetration is applied to the bottom number.
Reduction are ailments like Fire Resistance Shred and Marked for Death.
Penetration are all things that say “X% penetration with Bleed” or “X% Elemental Penetration”. And the penetration from area level too.
So far everything was identical to Path of Exile.
The only difference is that PoE has no permanent -75% resistance penetration, LE does. The current way of showing %current res (%uncapped res total) is both consistent with other ARPGs and also seems intuitive to me, but I’m a veteran of many ARPG games.