Chaos resist on mobs overbuffed

Here's the change I'm talking about, patch 0.9.12m

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Raised the resistances of monsters on higher difficulties. These are still capped at 75%, but many monsters on Merciless are far enough above the cap that the Elemental Weakness curse is less effective than before.

In here the purpose of the resist buff is to reduce the effectiveness of elemental weakness. And I totally agree, however, there are no mention of chaos resist being excluded.

From my own experience playing a poison arrow/viper strike build, chaos resist has been buffed significantly, and it's a very common mods on mobs. Coupled with the poison arrow nerf, I can barely damage any monster with chaos resistant, and they are invulnerable as long as they have a regen mods.

This is a bad idea because:

- Chaos damage is supposed to be a true damage form, which is hard to increase (no % stacking like physical or elemental), generally fixed number (viper strike, poison arrow, added chaos gem...).

- Chaos damage is supposed to be very hard to gain or lose resists (only 1 unique helm with chaos resist, and no other way to lower chaos resist)

I remembered a dev post a long time ago stated the avarage chaos resist at end game is 29%. This is acceptable, some mobs take a little bit longer to kill. After the changes, chaos resists seems close to 50-60% (personal experience). This basically half the damage of any chaos focused build without any alternative to raise it. (No curse reduce chaos resists, other dmg increasing curse have neglible effect on chaos). Furthermore ,chaos resist is very common in endgame maps.

What do you think ? if chaos resist should stay as high as elemental resists, what's the average value of it now ? and should there be alternative method to counter it ?

Edit: A little bit of reason for the existence of chaos damage: lower than any other damage type, non-scalable (for the most part), irresistable (for the most part), predictable (true dmg). One must decided to go for a chaos dmg if he prefer to have low dmg but predictable. Allowing chaos resist to go high without a way to bring it back down just turn chaos into a weaker type elemental dmg

I would like to second this concern. Chaos is supposed to be that no-bonus, no-nerf gamble, compared to the elemental or physical buffing/nerfing nature of the game.

Now with this strong of a chaos resistance, chaos is nothing more than just a 4th element.

I'd go as far as to say, don't have any chaos resistance, except maybe a few select enemies or bosses that have around 20 to 30% resistance. This emulates the player base as well. Besides, you will never see a player who can achieve, say 1000 chaos DPS. It wont happen.

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ac429 wrote:

Besides, you will never see a player who can achieve, say 1000 chaos DPS. It wont happen.

Darkscorn, Maraketh Bow.

touché. That's a very particular case, though. I'm saying, don't punish and trivialize all the rest of the cases, or it will encroach on the fun of a lot of casual players.

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Xendran wrote:

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ac429 wrote:

Besides, you will never see a player who can achieve, say 1000 chaos DPS. It wont happen.

Darkscorn, Maraketh Bow.

Doesnt even come close. Even if you decided to use poison arrow, that's about 45+25 = 70% of physical damage as chaos. Let's say you use added chaos support gem as well, which add around roughly flat 70 chaos dmg per attack.

Let's do the math:

- Take resolute technique: 0 crit. Assuming you can get up to 1.6 attack per second (base darkscorn attack is 1.38 mind you). Added Chaos gem contributed 112 dps. You now need 888 chaos dmg that's 70% of physical, which is 1268 physical dmg dps from bow. Translated back to 792 physical dmg per hit. Darkscorn base physical is 110 per hit, you either need a very high ammount of flat physical dmg on gear or 700% increased physical dmg from bow. Not even close with perfect gear.

- Going crit: This is more plausible, but again you can't be an expert at everything, so let's assume you can get 200% increased physical dmg, 50 flat physical dmg from gear, enough accuracy to hit 85% of the time, 25% crit chance and 300% crit multiplier, attack speed 1.6 (Sounds impossible to grab all that for me).

Added chaos gem dps: 112
Bow physical dps (110+50)*3*1.6 = 768
Chaos dps from physical = 768*.7 = 537.6
Total chaos dps = 649.6
Chaos dps affter accuracy = 552.2
Chaos dps after crit = 552.2*.75 + 552.2*.25*3 = 828.3

Almost there :) Poison arrow can provide 300 dps with the cloud, and viper strike is 500 dps with 4 stacks, so 800 chaos dps is not so bad.

Edit: forget to factor in quality bonus on the bow, but the point still stands, chaos dmg is not designed to be boosted to the roof

You're assuming that the person isn't using the faster attacks gem, has no str, does not have iron reflexes, and has nothing in their passive tree to buff physical bow damage or speed.

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Xendran wrote:

You're assuming that the person isn't using the faster attacks gem, has no str, does not have iron reflexes, and has nothing in their passive tree to buff physical bow damage or speed.

I have assumed most of that, physical damage bow does not get up to 200% alone. Most points are 4% in fact. I did take into account of str bonus, which 100% requires 500 str, not a small ammount.

Iron reflex does not help this case.

I agree that I've missed attack speed gem, it certainly could boost attack speed up to 1.7 or 1.8, and you could reach 1000 in the 2nd scenario but you have to remember that you can't have everything in this game. It is exponentally expensive (impossible) to get both: high str, high passive, high attack speed, high accuracy, high crit chance and multiplier. And the mana cost of poison arrow is outrageous if you start stacking gems up to achieve 1000 dps. In this case, there's another thing you need to get, high mana pool or regen or reduced mana cost.

I meant iron grip. And just actually with my current build that has no bow damage passives and no attack speed passives, i'm able to get 761.4 + 371.7 chaos damage per second with poison arrow, let alone the other 3500 dps from the other damage types.

EDIT: This is with the blood magic gem, meaning cost is also completely negated. Mana leech gem would work as well.

NOTE: I do agree that enemies have too much chaos res, but it isnt as hard to break this 1k chaos dps as you think

Unless you had a way to reduce chaos resistance, you shouldn't be seeing a difference.

Getting into the semantics of the possibility of reaching 1000 DPS only serves to stray from the topic the OP was trying to address.

As an ice witch, I've never paid too much attention to chaos resistant mobs, but since the patch I've actually been noticing quite a lot of them. I'm with the OP here, however, given that my perception of chaos damage has always been that it's intended as "true" or unresistable damage. Otherwise, what's the point? I mean, other than the few very specific and rare cases being discussed above, it's a change that has widespread implications and seems to me far too broad a stroke that's attempting to balance...what, exactly?

I think it's something that deserves attention and I'm mostly curious about the subject as someone who uses chaos dmg supports, and had intended to build a ranger using Poison Arrow which this seems to double nerf with its recent mana cost change.