I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the mechanic of resist reduction and why it is practically a necessity, and I wanted to get some feedback from the community and offer a few suggestions for the problem as well.
Since resist reduction is one of the few ways to increase damage multiplicatively, it’s obvious that players will gravitate toward it. I feel as though resist reduction is in the same place that OA was (and still somewhat is) a few patches ago–it serves as a bottleneck which players must overcome rather than a build option. Some builds are hurt by the mechanic much more than others (all undead and many Ch’thonic enemies resist bleed). Although it makes logical sense for undead enemies and obsidian enemies to not bleed, giving enemies 100% resistance to any damage type creates huge bottlenecks that lead players to select the Manticore devotion or use the Mark of Dreeg component when they otherwise make no sense for the build. In cases of 100% resistance, players cannot choose to boost their damage via flat damage increases, % bonus to a damage type, cast speed, attack speed, or OA–they can ONLY increase their damage for that damage type using resistance reduction. There are a few solutions to this problem that I’d thought of, but I’d like feedback and other solutions offered as well:
One possible solution is to make it impossible for enemies to have 100% resistance to any damage type. Cap enemy resistances at 50-70 percent and increase their hp to compensate. This way, the player is not forced to build around resistance reduction but instead has the option to simply stack damage of that type. Accordingly, enemy resistances can either be overcome via resistance reduction or via large damage increases. This is by far the most workable solution and my preferred solution.
another solution is to make resistance reduction more common through gearing/devotions/skills. Currently, it’s necessary but rare for most builds. Active skills from components and auras from components (greater fireblast, chill aura, etc) should reduce enemy resistances to that damage type.
Consecutive strikes against an enemy lower resistances to that specific damage type. For example, the more an enemy burns, the more susceptible it becomes to fire/burning damage. This solution seems weird, but I’m brainstorming, so whatever.
IMO pt.1 is the best solution. With resistance reduction becoming a very rare source, property mostly of DoT oriented builds and mobs’ resistances adjusted accordingly all around.
Definitely the reduction has become the cheezy way to max damage, a modern substitute of the old OA/crit mult “exploit”. Stacking -res to outperform the %damage increase is already a norm.
In addition, majority of the DoT builds are completely reliant on it and they suffer the most when developers try to fix and balance the issue just tweaking the numbers of the -res reduction.
I guess tweaks won’t cut it, a kind of actual rework is needed.
I haven’t noticed this. Yes, enemy damage output was tweaked a bit, armor made more effective. But if anything certain resists have become higher on enemies. Life steal being particularly bad now.
That’s true the players should probably have more options around the resistances reduction, but some resistances should not be able to be reduced: for instance, I don’t want to have skeletons dying out of bleeding, trauma, vitality, poison damages or any others that are supposed to only affects living creatures. That just wouldn’t make sense.
Or the other solution is to focus on damage types that nothing in the game can fully resist: physical and trauma. But pure physical end-game builds are challenging because the game then tries hard in ultimate to convert your over-optimized physical damages into sub-optimized damages for some reasons through aaallllll the gear that you will then find.
Enemies with 100% resistance on a particular damage type, could have -X% resistance on another damage type.
For instance: undead have 100% resistance to bleeding, but have -10% resistance to fire.
I think that undead and any “rock” type enemy should be immune to bleeding/poison on initial difficulties as well so that the player knows about this early.
I know this is a (dark)“fantasy” game but making skeletons/ghosts bleed and die from poison is a bit too unrealistic maybe?
As I see it, bleeding and poison are VERY strong against certain types of enemies but useless againt others as a trade-off.
Didn’t get to ultimate yet but if -% resist is the best way to do damage to most monsters then it’s a real shame… Higher difficulties should test player builds, reflexes, positioning and tactical thinking, not just a binary check of 1 attribute.
This would make poison/Bleed useless for atleast a third of the game. No one would ever pick them cause they wouldn’t be able to do a third of the games content.
Also pretty sure having skeletons and ghosts in a game is already unrealistic. So who gives a shit if they can be hurt by bleed and poison damage.
It was that way initially, they had 500% resist. And at the same time there are multiple items and sets focused on bleeding damage, big part of shaman and parts of soldier and nightblade are also dedicated to bleed. But no one used that, ever, bleed was considered the most useless damage type in the game. Leaving it at that meant letting all that work go down the drain, so resistances were lowered down to 100%. And voila, build diversity improved, people do use said items and skills now.
Why has my year-old topic been bumped? That topic was made about a pre-release build and resistance reduction has been tweaked multiple times since then…
Undead enemies aren’t so common and many skills have more than just bleeding in them. There should be more items to help you deal with undead if your main dmg type is blood/poison however, but I like the idea of needing to store some alternative items to deal with things that counter my build.
The way I see it, it makes the game a bit deeper: Poison and Bleeding are strong and you can hit and run, but you need to plan how to deal with immunes.
What i’m trying to say is that there isn’t much practical difference between damage types. You either wreck things with fire or cold or lighting or aether or chaos. With poison and bleeding you need to think a bit outside the box and I like that :D.
I just think that the game should give you tools to work around your weaknesses instead of nerfing those that are strong against you
Sure, but this is different. Imagine that you’re playing a game and then you hit a skeleton or a ghost and blood spurs out :undecided:. Many people would find it really silly(including you, I believe) while at the same time they don’t find skeletons and ghosts silly.
I always see people making that argument and I find it really weak and with little thought put into it, no offense meant.
Some consistency is required in order to enjoy a virtual world.
Would you be that much carefree if the monsters then started to fly, go through the walls, wear sportwear and use girly rainbow powers and call WWII bombers, Sith Lords and Power Rangers for reinforcements?
If there is no sense in the game, there is no sense in playing it, and there sure would be very little sense into finishing it.
The game would be deeper if that rule was a real rule, ie applying for all the monsters and the damage types.
But since you can kill everything with physical damage, including ghosts and rock elementals, the depth is more into imagination than reality.
So far, my understanding of the immunities goes like this:
Cold: Cold ones, unique chillmanes
Fire: That fire boss at the end of the final rift (in the Necropolis)
Bleeding: Undeads
Chaos: Bloodfiends
All the other damage types do some damage to some extend to at least 99% of the creatures in the game. I can’t remember anything that is totally immune to vitality, physical, trauma, acid etc.
