It appears that every single Act 4 mob has a high amount of chaos resist, yet %reduced chaos resist options are nowhere to be found. Even the Occultist curse has reduced physical, pierce, bleed, elemental, poison BUT NOT CHAOS damage. Occultist is the only class that fully supports chaos damage.
Several other classes have Transmuters to convert damage into chaos or small amount of flat added chaos, but that is almost always a bad idea since Chaos damage is so poorly supported by resist reduction. Even if you pair them with Occultist looking for some kind of synergy you get boned.
It’s not so bad. Other elements do have more options with greater effects, but do check out this thread about the Blood Orb of Ch’thon for some relevant chaos resistance reduction suggestions: http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37043
Yes, there are a few ways to reduce chaos resist. You’ll also notice that most of these items also reduce elemental resist in a matter which stacks with resist reducing skills. Skills also don’t lock you into a slot and don’t need 1000 hours of farm in order to drop. In the end you can get over 100 reduction for elemental resist… even physical resist is better supported LOL.
Solael’s Witchblade is an available option. That doesn’t mean I disagree with you OP, chaos resist reduction is a bit under represented, but it’s not ‘nowhere to be found’.
Chaos might be able to get along more on its own if resist reduction were toned down a bit so that you could choose between stacking raw damage or resist reduction as a build option, or a smattering of both.
The biggest problem with chaos is that every single late-game mob (Cthonians in particular) is at least moderately or heavily resistant to it.
Aether damage is also a rare form of damage without any resist reduction skills for it, but is only resisted by Aetherials (and not by all of them) and also has the Widow constellation to cut down resist by 33%
Chaos has very high damage % increases in constellations, but this is just a noobtrap since all your damage will be cut down by resistances.
I don’t think the problem is that chaos damage needs help, I think it’s moreso that enemy resistances need to be overhauled. Resistance reduction is currently in the same place that OA was a few patches ago–the undisputed king of every build due to its ability to increase damage multiplicatively instead of additively. Builds which lack tools to reduce resistances (like chaos builds) fall behind accordingly. Enemy resistances need to be reduced to make resistance reduction mechanics attractive but not mandatory, (enemy hp can be increased to compensate) and additive damage needs to be buffed.
Eldritch Fire: couldn’t find the value at max rank ):
All of them stack, although you won’t have Darkflame and Mark of Ch’thon at the same time because one comes from a gun and the other from a sword.
Sacred Strike and Mark of Dreeg will stack if you dual wield.
For a dual wielding witch-hunter (*no demo skill, no off-hand, no gun) you already have -30-15-20-20-33 = -118% which is pretty nice. Note that these resistance debuffs are all provided by gear, no specific mastery to choose to achieve this.
Summary: Chaos does need to be included in the - resist for occulist as the opportunity to try a build that deals chaos damage is unbalanced. This will only encourage build diversity and not overbuff a single stat. I am really enjoying my witchblade and i am so serious about this idea that I made an account just to support this to make the witchblade more viable.
Argument:
Thank you in advance readers and devs for taking the time for reading my text-tsunami when i’m only a humble grim dawn newb.
While KoalaeiO does mention some great ways to alternatively reduce chaos resist on enemies, the problem of ‘opportunity cost’ remains and investing in chaos still remains inferior -
e.g why invest to bring chaos resist in enemies down to match the 36-50% resist of other stats, when i could invest in those other stats instead and bring the enemy down to 76-96% negative resist of those?
In most cases when the devs deal with these concerns, they can reasonably reply that they want to balance trade-offs - but this is not a trade off when the alternative is always superior.
Yes, it means solael’s witchfirecan stack with this then, but that does not overbuff it as alternatively i could of used those witch skill points in soldiers skills and buffed an alternative type of damage to reach the same result.
If this argument is not convincing enough, i am sure an additional skillpoint ability along the solael’s witchfire line that has a maximum of 3 levels, each doing a -12% chaos res (for a maximum of -36) on weapon attack would suffice, so even then it least only a minor opportunity cost remains.
High level chaos resist mobs/bosses make chaos use challenging enough along with a very low level chaos dmg on SW. Having a 700% bonus to chaos damage through possession/whatever does not feel like much when the base is only around (what is it…) 60-130 when it is not uncommon for players to be dealing 10k+ average at high levels.
The only result would be more playstyle expansion and diversity into the weapon/chaos sets.
Personally people are to caught up in worrying about resist reduction. You don’t actually need much of it at all. I only use the 20% resits reduction from Eldritch Fire and have no issues killing anything on Ultimate on my Chaos Builds. Personally I think they should just get rid of -resist reduction all together as it doesn’t actually add anything to the game. Just another useless stat that becomes over powered when abused.
I used to try and use more but just got tired of the whole idea of it.
including it would mean you did not need to spec into Eldritch fire, or if you did it would give the extra benefit
i think whether or not - resis is OP/UP is another discussion, the point is that there is equal incentive to go down a chaos dmg line as there are others, rather than IF i’s’ possible to do or not
the last point is a bit confusing, how can it be a useless stat and have the ability to be abused to an OP level?
Useless as in it isn’t needed in the game at all, as it doesn’t really add anything. But it becomes OP when you actually try and stack it and makes the games difficulty non existent.
If they absolutely most have it in game then you should only actually be able to use 1 form of it. It should never stack with any other -resist reduction.
Resist reduction should serve the purpose of enabling build diversity by giving all builds some viability against all content, it shouldn’t be the mainstay of every build and streamline damage types into a colour choice.
If there’s a problem, it’s not that chaos damage is obviously suboptimal for clearing BoC and other Chthonic areas, it’s that maybe there’s too much focus on these areas currently.
Builds with a particular focus need a particular niche in which they can shine to be interesting and appealing, if it goes through all content largely the same as every other “good” build with small adjustments here and there, it ends up interchangeable and boring, and while it may be stronger than before, whatever particular appeal it might have had due to its focus is now gone, destroyed by what was meant to support it.
Sure, they’ll also need some tools to cope with other areas for which they’re poorly suited, to avoid a repeat of the whole Early Access Undead bleed marginalization, but even then, the bigger problem wasn’t that you couldn’t get those Undead to bleed at all, but that for the longest time, there was no real alternative to the Steps of Torment for then-max-level content.