curious about exposure + pen + curses that lower res.

my goal as an ice caster is to freeze and cause damage in the doing of it.
better frozen solid than dieing fast. you cant retaliate.

I am considering using awakened cold pen, and have used it before.
cold pen causes the lump sum of damage to go up per hit generally.

if I have cold exposure causing -16% cold res. and have awake cold pen
causing like.... 49% res reduction how does frostbite effect them?

its not direct in that: monster has 90 cold res. loses 16, loses 49,
then another 49 and is now -14 cold res.

I recall someone saying penetration goes from the cap of 75, but that
curse can reduce the overcap. I'm not sure.

I guess. is stacking exposure, penetration and a curse as effective as
we think it is? or is the curse weak compared to the other two?
how do they stack?

the root cause of freeze duration is damage caused that is cold,
would deep penetration etc causing max damage cause the longest
freeze duration. it should right? like awake added cold might cause
a higher tooltip damage, but if in reality awake pen causes a greater
damage? it causes the longer freeze?

While penetrations act a little different in wording, their effect basically sum up with Exposures and "-x% to Resistance" effects

So, if you have a -16% Cold Exposure and cast a Lv20 Frostbite (with 0% increased effect of curse, thus for a -36% to Cold Resistance) on a generic monster with a natural 0% Cold Resistance, that monster will now have -52% to Cold Resistance. So far, so good.

Now, when you hit that monster with an attack or spell with an Awakened ColdPen for 49%, that monster's tooltip won't change (as one can check in a PvP match), but the attack will treat that monster resistance as 49% lower that they are - thus that monster will have an effective -101% to Cold Resistance against those penetrating hits

As a counter-proof, Gale Crown's "Your Hits treat Cold Resistance as 10% higher than actual value" modifier is the wording of a "negative" resistance penetration. Using a Gale Crown with that Awakened Cold Penetration would turn the penetration into a 39% rather than a 49%

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Some extra considerations:

* Penetration only applies to hits, never to DoTs. You can support Vortex with Cold Penetration, and that will increase the effective damage taken from the hit part, but won't increase the "strenght" of the DoT part - only exposure and negative resistances can

* Since Freeze is, actually, "100% less action speed", a monster with "Cannot be Fully Slowed" is partially affected by Freeze : it will look frozen and will count as Frozen, but will only be slowed a little and can still move and attack. Same goes for maps with "Monster's Action speed cannot be modified below based value"

Scaling ailments as well is good, its pretty easy to get 100% increase freeze duration on the tree at the moment, compared with getting 100% more dmg.