Great summary. I think anyone who understands how it works (i.e. Everyone in this thread) has no issues with how it’s displayed, except that everyone had to go through the process of figuring it out and having it click (or having someone explain it to them) because it’s not presented in a traditionally intuitive way. Even if the way it works is intuitive once it clicks.
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As I said, I think the easiest and most intuitive way to present it would be to add a 3rd line in resistances for effective resistance which changes when you switch area levels. Maybe with a tooltip explaining or pointing to the guide.
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They are only at 0% if you also capped. (They can go negative if you have less resistance than area level)
The “endresult” of how much resistance you actually have doesn’t matter.
Because resistances in LE still reduce the amount of damage taken, just like in other games
The player does not need to know if they have 0%, -5% or 75% for the calculation of damage versus monsters.
Only the mathematical details of how much DR a few more or less % resistance will bring changes.
For the player it is still: Higher resistance = less damage taken from that damage type.
Hard disagree. I would argue that player that actually understood how and why this mechanics exists do NOT want to see this reflected in the character sheet.
Because it does not change anything.
Your Character still has 75% resistance (if oyu capped your resistance)with or without the penetration.
But armor and dodge use flat values togehter with a formula to calculate how much %DR or %dodge you have.
Resistances are already a % value that does not get modify based on area level.
The penetration that monsters get do not change your characters stats!
They only change the endresult of the calculation. Which you can’t do anything about and is equal for everybody.
NP, I can edit that sentence to
In LE endgame, the Penetration effect from Area Level is permanently active, so players’ Resistances are effectively always less than the value displayed in the character screen.
I agree.
But this topic seems to indicate that players want to know that 
That’s right, mechanically this is only an effect that’s applied to monsters, so it makes sense that it doesn’t show up in character screen.
However, if every monster in every map of every monolith has this effect applied, then this monster-specific effect is effectively a global modifier to player’s resistances.
At that point, would showing the capped resistance even matter? You could just replace the capped resistance portion with “effective resistance” and have the tooltip explaining how it works (or linking to the game guide)
It would matter so you know when you reach your cap. If all you have is your effective resistance you have to calculate how much you effectively have according to the area level to know how much you’re missing.
It’s just easier to show all 3.
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No, they don’t need to know for the calculations. But if I see “75% Fire Resistance” (and don’t know how LE works), I’m going to assume that I take 75% less fire damage.
Then an enemy at area lv 75 does 100 fire damage and I take 100 fire damage instead of 25 and I’m confused. Why wasn’t it reduced? Why am I taking “so much” fire damage.
Again, it’s easy for us to justify it because we understand how it works. I’m speaking specifically from a new player perspective and one I’ve seen echoed time and time again in “why am I getting one shot” or “help my survivability” posts on this and Steam Forums. And when they’re told “you’re resistances are capped so you’re not reducing enemy damage, just preventing them from dealing more” and that now their other defenses are the critical ones, they’re shocked because every other arpg uses resistances differently.
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That’s fair.
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But that is not how it works in a real life application example. People don’t even know what the initial incoming damage was and they don’t exactly look how much it was reduced.
It is also not really easily testable because you usually have other forms of DR.
Everything you are complaining about you basically only know because they devs told us how it works. If we wouldn’t know mabye someone would have figured it out.
But with 0% resistance you take 75% more fire damage
If you want to state it the otehr way around: You take 42,857% less fire damage with 75% resistance compared to 0%
Depending from which side you look at it, how LE handles the system is actually better and makes more sense then PoE/GD (or other games).
New players do not need to know the details of how this works.
Well, this also applies to PoE and other games.
In LE the baseline is just shifted into the negative and you work towards 0%
But in all these games you “prevent the enemy from doing more damage”
But it’s a good thing if they’re aware of how it works so they can understand better why resistances in LE are less punishing than in every other game. Or easier to explain it to them when they are aware of it.
As it is now, when you have to explain to someone why resistances are less important in LE and why 1% resistance is always 1% reduction, you have to explain the whole thing from the start.
If they’re already aware of how it works relatively to area level and penetration, it’s easier to make the point.
And yes, most players don’t care about it. But some do, as has been seen at the very start of this discussion when F0lk said:
It’s always better when players understand why things work the way they do rather than “I have to get this number up because of unknown reasons”.
And especially you would get a smaller number of players sacrificing other defenses just to get that last 1% or 2% when it doesn’t matter just because they don’t understand this system properly.
So, just to preface this, I agree with you on the overall point that you’re getting at.
That being said, if I have 1% resistance at area lv 1 I take full damage (before other mitigation), if I have 75% resistance at area lv 75 I take full damage (before other mitigation). In other games, if I have 0% resistance (equivalent to 1% at area lv 1), I take full damage (before other mitigation) and if I have 75% resistance I take 25% damage (before other mitigation).
So when I’m taking a lot of fire damage at lv 25 at 25% resistance and I boost up my fire resistance to 50%, I expect to see a reduction in incoming fire damage. But then I go up 25 area levels and my resistances are effectively reduced by 25% since the enemy will penetrate 25% more of my resistance than at area lv 25, putting me back a t effectively 0% resistance. This makes me feel like my resistances haven’t really changed as the damage is still the same, or higher since the enemies are stronger now.
Yes I’m taking less damage than I would had my resistances stayed at 25%, but going from 25% resistance to 50% and seeing that I’m just as weak to fire damage as I used to be doesn’t exactly feel great.
Again, if I don’t understand what’s going on underneath the hood.
We are only discussing this with the resistance system. But there is another major component to this: The enemies themselves and the balance around it.
You also don’t jump from area level 25 to area level 50 in an instant. It is a natural progression going through higher level zones.
Enemies get stronger and thus taking increased incomign damage also comes from enemies getting stronger.
The game is designed with the enemy penetration per area level in mind. This is one of the growing axis of enemy difficulty.
We as a player don’t really care about why exactly the monster is dealing more damage.
Either its LE’s system fo them getting more penetration or in other games the monsters get a more %inc damage growth.
If you take more incoming fire damage from a higher level area (when your stats stay the same) you as a player don’t know why that is exatly. Is it the enemy doing more base damage? Is the enemy getting some %inc dmg modifier? Is the enemy getting penetration per area level?
All you need to know that building defenses wil lreduce the damage, in this case increasing your fire resistance will decrease the incoming fire damage.
All your exampels of what “a player expects” are really not applicable to any pratical situation. There are so many factors.
The important point I am trying to make: It doesn’t matter from what scaling factor enemies deal more damage in higher areas. Even though we know the under the hood system, it does not change anything about how you would build defenses at all. Just because we know how it works doesn’t give us any smart ways to “outplay” the system.
Anyway, I think this is not leading anywhere anymore.
Have a nice day.
It does though. There is a very important factor where players that are aware of how it works under the hood have an advantage over those that don’t:
Like I said before, players that don’t know will sacrifice better defenses to get an extra 1-2% of resistances because they think capping resistances is more meaningful and mandatory like in other games.
Whereas players that do know how the system works will ignore that last 1-2% in favour of getting more armor/block/health/whatever.
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On top of that. No one in this thread has mentioned trying to “outplay” the system, only how to make the system more transparent and understandable for a new player lol.
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no that build is far from anything good and i know it.
Because many people are good at making assumptions, but not as good in fact-checking those?
65% less damage, since 65% is what the sheet will say. But since the player never sees the initial damage before mitigation, it is irrelevant what they think it does.
They experience that their defences suck because they got one-shotted. Now we can raise the big question of why we died. The issue is not resistance, it seems. Time to RTFM. Or asking nicely a fellow player.
And I think the loading screen says something about this mechanic every now and then.
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It’s just the way he phrased it. As a not-completely-casual player, you look at all the defensive systems to see if you can do anything to reduce incoming damage a bit more. If you had an easy way to get fire resist to 95%, you take it, except that the cap on damage reduction from fire is 75% (unless you get an item the increases the cap). I think that is what DJ meant by, ‘outplay’.
There is no reason to go above the cap
If we’re just talking defensively, and we’re ignoring shred, sure.
But now (1.0?) there are offensive reasons to go above cap - there are skills whose damage scales with a damage-type resists. Saying, “oh, but we were just talking about defenses”, ignores that you were talking about defenses and complexity/obscurity that a new player would face. So a new player is going to hear, “just get everything to 75%-ish, you’ll be fine”. And then later they’ll here, wellllll, funny thing. And at that point I think we all need to blame Llama.
PoE versus LE
Here’s a question I have in this comparison, but I haven’t played PoE in awhile, which is why I don’t know the answer. PoE has 5 damage types. LE has 7… but also it kind of has 4 because of the Elemental wrapper around Fire/Cold/Lightning. So the question is, is it easier to reach cap in PoE or LE? I kind of feel like it’s easier to max out the resistances in LE (maybe because of idols?), but I’m not sure.
I never said outplay. It was Heavy that used that term.
This is irrelevant though, for the simple fact that uncapped resistances aren’t affected by your area level, whereas capped resistances are. Which is what we were discussing that is opaque to a new player.
Scaling off uncapped isn’t opaque. They see their max value in the character sheet and that value applies fully to whatever is scaling off it.
If you ignore chaos, it’s easier in PoE. If you include chaos, then it’s about the same. Neither is too hard, really.
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Realistically, people somewhat ignore physical resistance in PoE. My golemancer witch once had phys resistance at 75% due to the extreme chaos golem buff and endurance charges, but this was around the time of blight league. And with three purity auras, I had like 87% fire/lightning/cold resist, IIRC.
In PoE, you need 135% to fire/lighnting/cold/chaos resistances to reach the 75% cap after the end of campaign.
That’s 3 or 4 top-tier affixes for each resistance, IIRC - if you don’t get resistance from your passive tree. But you can have 6 affixes on rare items.
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For me its a bit of an interesting question, id say its poe because you have to do it. there is no question of “max resistance” you have it, or your dead and crying at pretty much every point past act 3-4.
As for LE, I will often times have little to no resistances well into empowered! I am the type to get my resistances from blessings and implicits. I very rarely itemize for resistance unless I have a conflicting needs. Sometimes I want not void res from that blessing but its rare etc.
So its also not hard in LE because I frankly dont feel the need to chase resists. Getting my health pool up is way more important to me, getting 50% res across the board is easy and generally is enough going into empowered for me and heck I even farm on some builds under cap, just dont get hit or push to hard and you will be fine. And once you are setting up your blessings you can get 60+ on all the important resistances with blessings and not have to worry about it.
LE also has resistances I feel pretty safe ignoring. I ignore poison resistance rofl. I think the number 1 resistance to get is physical, everything else I can mostly just avoid, void/necro are also dangerous and somewhat common, elemental is pretty important as well, but its easy enough to avoid it.
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