A Question on % Health Reduction

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hey all,

Just looking for a quick clarification on how health reduction works in game. For skills like Doom Bolt and Bloody Pox, both skills say they do a specific % reduction to enemy health. Doom Bolt being the most drastic example, saying it can potentially reduce an enemy’s health by anywhere from something like ~12 to ~50%.

My question (after doing some testing and making observations) is how exactly does this % health reduction work? If I’m fighting someone with 20,000 hp and call down the hand of god (my affectionate term for Doom Bolt) on them and Doom Bolt hit’s for a ~50% reduction to their health, does that mean they immediately take 10,000 hp worth of damage? Or does the game look at their remaining health and halve it before applying the rest of Doom Bolt’s damage?

Do enemies have resistances to health reduction?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to clarify, I wasn’t able to find any info on the rest of the forums. If there’s a more appropriate place for me to ask this question or if there’s a thread I didn’t see that can answer my question, just let me know and I’ll redact this thread.

-Quiiliitiila

2

Do enemies have resistances to health reduction?

Yes, bosses and heroes are mostly immune from what I was told.

3

Thanks, I had assumed so but wasn’t sure. Most bosses have very high resistances all around but I didn’t know if % health reduction was folded in there, or even what it would go under.

4

Health reduction works based upon enemy’s currect HP. If he has full HP, he takes a lot of damage, if he’s near death, he will take negligible damage… And that damage is a subject to resistance… Vitality resistance, i think…

5

There is a life reduction resist as well.

6

A lot of bosses have something like 90%+ resistance to HP reduction damage iirc, which (on top of vitality reists) limits the effectiveness of these skills somewhat. Bosses do have a lot of more HP though.
Bottomline is that you’ll want to develop other damage types to complement HP reduction damage. Note that HP reduction damage usually doesn’t appear by itself (Doom Bolt, in particular, also does a massive amount of vit/chaos damage).

But yeah, on something with minimal vitality resist (which you can accomplish with debuffs) and zero HP reduction resistance, that doom bolt on a 20k HP mob can do ~10k HP reduction damage.

7

Thanks everyone, that fully answers my question!

8

So %health reduction damage is applied before all other damage that’s also on the skill?

9

Can someone confirm what the % Life Reduction Resistance is for bosses exactly? I looked at Grim Calc but it doesn’t seem to show that value for mobs.

10

Pure HP reduction can be found on War Cry, for example.

It’s so high that my War Cry (33% HP reduction) deals no damage to them. Even many high-HP mobs tend to resist this effect a lot…