Is there a heuristic that builders use when deciding to make the trade off?
It depends on how much resist reduction you currently have and what your damage type is. If you’re running with low amounts and are desperate for more, it might be worth it.
Sheet DPS is actually much higher on most, if not all builds, because you are forgetting procs from items and devotions. So trading 10% sheet dps for 10% more RR is most of the time an actual boost in overall power.
Thanks for the info.
Your question is a bit tricky, because its answer depends on the enemies’ resistances. If your current RR drops enemies’ resistances below 10%, then the raw damage is worth more. As a general rule of thumb, the more resistances enemies have, the more valuable RR is compared to raw DPS.
Even though no one asked for it, I am very enthusiastic about the math. Questions like this can be answered using simple algebra. Hopefully mine contains no errors.
Suppose you decrease raw damage by a > 0 percent and increase RR by a (additively). Let d represent your raw DPS and r represent the target’s resistance after current RR. Then, we want to compare d(1 - r) with (1 - a)d(1 - r + a). Setting these equal and solving for r (or just staring at it until you see the solution) yields r = a. Both sides are linear in r, so comparing the slopes gives my answer above.
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I think I blacked out somewhere after the word “Suppose”.
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Good math. It is correct what you wrote. I was wondering about that also though never took the step to actually solve it.
Math checks out. Also I’m pretty sure I saw dollar signs around one of the r’s in an earlier edit of your post, so mathematician checks out too. 
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Resistances reduction is more damage when you need it… ie against resistant enemies.
A formula for the amount of additional resistance reduction needed for 10% increase in damage (or to equal a 10% sheet dps increase) is 10 - 0.1E + 0.1R -------- E is enemy natural resistance and R is whatever current resistance reduction you have.
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Good point! This is the reason why I wish % reduced resistance worked differently. At the moment, it amplifies your damage against nonresistant enemies a lot, while doing little against resistant enemies.
Thats opposite how it works. 10 resistance reduction when you have 0 initially, versus enemy with 80 resistances - that is a 50% increase in damage. If the enemy had 0 resistance, then it would only be a 10% increase in damage.
I think he means the % reduced target’s resistance wording (like the one on Viper constellation) which is applied multiplicatively after all the -% resistance ones (which you are likely to have a lot) - which means that if a target had 80% resistance and you had -70% resistance applied before applying 20% reduced resistances from viper - that 20% will only reduce the remaining 80-70 = 10, making it 10*0.8= 8 (effectively only adding -2%)
And a target with 0 resistance will get -70% first, then multiplied by 1.2, making it -84, so the effect of viper will be -14% in that case.
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Okay okay that makes more sense. I was ignoring that for convenience in my first post so it didn’t register to me that he might be talking about that one type (but now i notice he used the indicative language). To that point, I might agree with @Equivariant. It really is in a bizarre situation - that being it is only effective when your resistance reduction is much greater OR less than the enemies resistance. Its good when you need it and good when you don’t … in the middle its worthless.
It would maybe be better if it was applied first… then it would be good when you need it and and not good when you don’t need it… same trend that applies with every other resistance reduction source.
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