Resistance power creep... 75% bare minimum?

Question: Why has the game been balanced in such a way that basically requires all players to have a minimum of 75% elemental resists to be even halfway viable?

Some would even go so far to say that 75% resists is much too low, and that 80-85% is a bare minimum to stay alive in the later difficulties. For example, if I told you I was going to run Atziri with "only" 75% all resistances, many of you would probably have a fit of laughter. When you join public parties, you regularly see people who are running up to 3-4 purity auras, and on the forums, builds often center around collecting all of the +maximum resist nodes in the passive tree. I find that this approach in building/planning characters to be very tedious and mindless -- as in "Okay I'm building a new toon. Time to see what resistances I get from gear, and make up the rest from the passive tree / auras to hit 75%....."

With certain monsters in PoE, such as the Blackguard Arcmages, and bosses like Megaera who can cast offscreen burst-skills with high elemental damage, players are essentially forced to compensate by having high elemental resists at all times, regardless if their characters are ranged or melee.

I've tried many things to work around not having to cap my resistances: maxed spellblock, phase acrobatics, high life leech with vaal pact, high life regen, Mind over Matter, manual kiting, high DPS to kill monsters before they can kill me, etc. But the lack of capped resistances always comes back to haunt me. In fact, it's so drastic that I've noticed a character who only does 15k DPS, but with 80% all resists, will do exponentially better than a character who does 30k DPS and 65% all resists. Yes, if you cut your DPS in half and gain 15% more resistances, you will have a heck of a better time in the end-game. I find this rather sad, as I believe it limits build diversity in a lot of ways. Even when choosing amongst defensive auras, I am often left wondering, "Hm, should I run Grace/Determination aura or Purity of Lightning/Ice/Fire aura?" And 9 times out of 10, I will go with the resistance aura because the benefit is too great to ignore.

So I ask: is this good game design? Does requiring builds to plan around resistances discourage people from successfully making more fun & wacky builds? I know that GGG believes in the philosophy that not all builds should be viable, and I agree with that. But in the current state, there seems to be too much emphasis being placed on resistances.
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Last edited by rrtson#7791 on Jun 5, 2014, 7:30:19 PM
I don't think it's really a problem.

Thare is power creep with resist u are corect , however thare more power creep with just tanky survivability as a whole.

to get to high end content u NEED to have some way of very large damage midigation. Resist is the cheapest way to do this so u see need for resist first.

personaly i think it's a good thing when talking about builds, yes it limits some build options ( glass cannon type specs , or pure chance tankinng( pure evation / block ) It keeps the your build honest and makes for findning interesting ways of tanking to get the result u need.
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It's not power creep though, 75% has always been a baseline for Merc.
The reason for this is pretty simple. If you balance around players having 50% Resists, anyone with 75% (which is easy to achieve) takes half damage compared to what you balance the game around. That's huge.

The highest level content might be better done at above 75% Resists. The game also offers a host of options to obtain a bit of extra Resists, as well as many other forms of defense that can fulfill the same role.

The Resist penalty reduces item freedom (somewhat kinda) - balancing around 75% Res does not.
Last edited by Vipermagi#0984 on Jun 5, 2014, 7:35:03 PM
I don't see much of a problem


granted I'm a former D2 player and in D2 capped res was mandatory so I'm used to it
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The resist stats have escalating returns as you stack more of each one, so of course people need to stack them super-high. Going from 0% to 50% halves incoming damage, doubling your effective HP against that element. Going from 50% to 75% raises your EHP from 200% of baseline to 400%. So 50 to 75 has twice the effect of 0 to 25, for half the itemization cost.

On the flip side, if resists worked in a different manner, with everyone starting at 100%, adding resists from items on top of that, and then you *divide* damage taken by your resist (so 230% resist means you divide incoming damage by 2.3) you would not have escalating returns on resists.
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sirgog wrote:
The resist stats have escalating returns as you stack more of each one, so of course people need to stack them super-high. Going from 0% to 50% halves incoming damage, doubling your effective HP against that element. Going from 50% to 75% raises your EHP from 200% of baseline to 400%. So 50 to 75 has twice the effect of 0 to 25, for half the itemization cost.

On the flip side, if resists worked in a different manner, with everyone starting at 100%, adding resists from items on top of that, and then you *divide* damage taken by your resist (so 230% resist means you divide incoming damage by 2.3) you would not have escalating returns on resists.


I'm well aware of why people stack resistances.

But my question is: why has the game been balanced in a way that necessitates people to stack resistances in the first place? It's literally an arm's race between the players and the devs.

Instead of balancing monster elemental damage around ol' Joe Shmoe with 50%, 65%, or 75% resistances, the GGG devs are likely balancing monster elemental damage around players with 85% resistances. The most recent example being Atziri and her absurd lightning/fire damage.
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Last edited by rrtson#7791 on Jun 5, 2014, 7:47:10 PM
Because devs can't create a hard game that's why one shot mechanics pretend that the game is hard.
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Vipermagi wrote:
It's not power creep though, 75% has always been a baseline for Merc.


It's more like 85% now.

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Vipermagi wrote:
The reason for this is pretty simple. If you balance around players having 50% Resists, anyone with 75% (which is easy to achieve) takes half damage compared to what you balance the game around. That's huge.


Does this suggest that maybe resistances should be reworked so that there are diminishing returns past a certain point? For example, past 50% resistances, there is a 10% decreased effectiveness for each 1% resist. This way it would take someone a lot of investment in gear/points to reach a high resist %, and the monster damage can then be balanced so that people with 50% resists don't get 1-shot (like they do now).
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If the game was balanced around 50% resists, everybody would still get their max resists up as high as possible. Then the vast majority would be running around with invincible characters complaining that the game is boring because there is no risk of death. All just so some people who want to play with sub optimal resists can survive. Doesn't sound like such a good idea to me. While being invincible and face tanking everything can be fun, it would get boring pretty fast. It'd be like playing Civilization in Chieftain mode and never wanting some more challenge.
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mark1030 wrote:
If the game was balanced around 50% resists, everybody would still get their max resists up as high as possible. .


This is why I'm suggesting that resists be changed so that there are diminishing returns to resists past a certain point (I chose 50% arbitrarily), so it would take someone a lot of point/gear investment to reach say, for example, 75%.

I think the problem right now is that it's too easy to reach 75-85% resists, and GGG has to balance the game around the guys who can reach it that easily. If it were harder to reach 75-85%, then the game could be balanced around a lower resist %.
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Last edited by rrtson#7791 on Jun 5, 2014, 8:34:19 PM

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