elemental weakness -vs- resist penetration

What is the difference between - 30 to elemental resist, or damage penetrates 30 elemental resist?

Check this thread mate
In short,resistance penetration deducts from capped current resist value,while resistance lowering is deducted from total amount of a resist.

They are also generally applied in a different way. Lowering resistances typically comes from a curse, which you either must apply manually (costs time), use blasphemy (reserves mana or life) or use curse on hit (costs two gem sockets). Penetration can come from tree (smallish amounts, costs passive nodes), support gem (costs one gem socket) or certain sceptres (takes up the implicit on that weapon). So one factor is what resource do you want to spend on it.

Thanks it was really helpful. Basically curses has no effect if the map boss has overcapped ele resist, which happens pretty usually on t14-t16s so yea penetration is the way t o go i guess :-->

Also worth noting that penetration can't affect damage over time, you need -res debuffs if you wanna deal with resists as a DoT character.

And there are a few options now for lowering resists without curses (or EE), namely frost bomb and scorching ray. Can also use Malachai's Artifice with an elemental golem if you want a decent amount of resist reduction without having a global EE. (or use HoT in it... or anything with a proper element, really, but golems and HoT apply it pretty passivly)

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tr1gg3r3d wrote:

Thanks it was really helpful. Basically curses has no effect if the map boss has overcapped ele resist, which happens pretty usually on t14-t16s so yea penetration is the way t o go i guess :-->

Bosses almost never have overcapped resists; most bosses have 30% ele resist, aside from the shaper and guardians (which have 40%). Even with the ele resist map mod they won't reach the cap, and without it they're nowhere close. The main time when enemies can actually reach overcapped resist is when you get stacking things like rares with ele resist auras + magics/rares with ele resist affixes + monster bases that already have resists + the ele resist map mod... but that's only really relevant on magics/rares, not bosses.


Really the tough thing about relying on -res curses vs bosses is their 'less curse effect', which drives the -res values down to some ~16% (without quality or increased curse effect). Ofc, non-curse sources of -res like EE don't have to deal with that, which makes them pretty useful for bosskilling.