Defense Options for Chaos Damage

I might just be repeating something here, but I didn't see another thread. If this has been brought up before I apologize.

After plaything through a couple of different builds through the new patch, I've noticed that the increase in group sizes in act 2 means massive amounts more chaos damage. I noticed a lot more archers means a lot more immediate damage, and in a lot of act 2 that also means poison clouds. Those poison clouds appear to do about 500+ DPS to me. I was forced to take chaos inoculation on a couple of characters just to continue playing.

I don't have a problem with the difficulty, I love the added challenge, but I feel that chaos inoculation is really the only way you can start building most DPS classes now. We don't really have any other defense against poison or DoT attacks. It's a nice passive, but I'd like to build in different directions without that massive loss of survivability.

It seems like adding some minor passives, or maybe some flasks/flask mods, against chaos damage would help add some variety to DPS builds without reducing the challenge of playing them. I wouldn't expect huge resistance bonuses, but even a small amount of resistance somewhere would be nice. Maybe just a flask with 1-2 second immunity or a dispel poison flask mod. Just tossing out ideas.

To keep it short and sweet: I agree. We now have a major damage source that cuts through one of the three major damage mitigations, and no defence against it other than a keystone. And no keystone should be necessary for anything other than rather particular types of builds, I think. They should be game-changers, not game-definers.

I wrote something about that in another thread:

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The only thing I'm missing right now is some sort of protection against chaos damage. In the later difficulties chaos damage hurts a lot and I think it would be nice to have something to prepare for that.

For example selling an iron ring and a blue, green and red gem makes an chaos resistance ring. I know that chaos damage should be something to be feared and the player shouldn't have much against it, but this could be handled with overall lesser chaos resistance percentage (maybe something between 10 - 15%).

Right now the only defense against chaos damage is chaos inoculation. Some rings, or flasks,and so on could help.

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SytRa wrote:

I wrote something about that in another thread:

"

The only thing I'm missing right now is some sort of protection against chaos damage. In the later difficulties chaos damage hurts a lot and I think it would be nice to have something to prepare for that.

For example selling an iron ring and a blue, green and red gem makes an chaos resistance ring. I know that chaos damage should be something to be feared and the player shouldn't have much against it, but this could be handled with overall lesser chaos resistance percentage (maybe something between 10 - 15%).

Right now the only defense against chaos damage is chaos inoculation. Some rings, or flasks,and so on could help.

Indeed. This is actually a fairly serious issue as there is currently no way to spec for it unless you just happen to have enough ES to make CI work out okay for you and you can get close enough in the tree with your build.

Instead of passive resistance, it might be more interesting if Chaos damage can be resisted through the use of active skills available to each attribute type, making enemies and players that use Chaos damage more unique.

Until somewhat recently, there wasn't much chaos damage in the game. Almost none was directed at the player from monsters. Since there weren't many sources of chaos damage, there wasn't a need for a defense against it.

Now that there is chaos damage, and a lot of it, the devs will surely add ways for use to mitigate it.

Yes, I noticed that the amount of chaos enemies have slowly been increasing. I have only been playing since the last ladder, so I wasn't sure if it was just me. Before this last patch though, I was able to navigate through merciless fairly easily with only mild problems in the pyramid and maelstrom. This last patch however, with the massive group sizes, has really been kicking my ass with chaos damage.

I don't know what the best way of implementing it might be, I'd just like to see more options out there. Even if they are weaker options.