For the most part, I’ve enjoyed GD. Gone through ultimate, tried about 5 classes.
The one thing that strikes me is a ridiculous overemphasis on resists, due to the underlying math of damage and resists. I feel like 100% of my gearing choices are about resists and nothing else. It feels like when I fight a boss, either I brought the right resists and I win easily (fast or slow, still win), or I dont and no amount of skill can make up for it.
It’s kind obvious why. If you were to take 20,000 damage for a hit with no resists, you take 4,000 at max resists. At 60% resists, a single piece of gear with 20% resistance lowers your damage intake by a whopping 50 percent! It could go even higher. Iv’e seen 72% resist, so if you were at 8%, a single piece of gear would lower your damage intake by 72/90 or 80 percent.
Imagine if one piece of gear could increase your total hp by 80%, or increase your total damage by 50%! That would be insane, unbalanced. You would HAVE to wear that, the game developers would HAVE to balance the game around that. That’s how resists work.
I enjoy the world, I enjoy the classes, the skills. The resists are making this game vastly less enjoyable for me. Anyone else?
I’m not trying to rant to just to share my experience with those who build the game and see if the community agrees. If farming resists and playing solely around resists is your thing, more power to you, I guess this game is for you.
The game has too many resistances, it’s one of the very few things wrong with Grim Dawn. Pair that with the fact that what would be considered a tanky build in any other game is the baseline for what’s expected of you on Ultimate and it’s really no wonder that this problem comes up.
It’s also made worse by the fact that legendary armor is designed to be a primary source of resistances, so if there isn’t a legendary set that specifically supports your character design* well, good luck patching those up.
I actually like it, make you think more about build and gear balance, instead of just powering through in all-damage gear.
Amount of resists is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because you can have that many type of damages and have to think about which resist is more important to you character right now and why. It’s bad because some resists are poorly supported by gear, and patching up the insane amount of cc-resists is impossible.
It could use a bit of improvement, but it used to be way worse. Slowly over time, resistances have been added to items and affixes which previously didn’t have them. Once the expansion hits and we get higher level gear with greater resistance values on them, the problem will pretty much be resolved. Keep in mind that current max level is 85 but we only have level 75 gear available to us, so the expansion will reduce the maximum level discrepancy between a character’s level and an item’s level.
But yes, resistances are usually top priority when itemizing, and it can be frustrating at times to max out that one low resistance instead of having that cool, fun item proc.
It absolutely does. I showed the math in my example. Granted, it gives you that resistance against one type of boss not the whole game, but you still need it for each boss. I was thinking of some legs that have +72 to poison and acid. Against poison and acid based bosses, they can give you up to a 80 percent total reduction in damage.
Think of it this way, if the boss did 100 acid damage, and you had 8 resist, you take 92 damage. If you put on the legs, you have 80 resists, and the boss does 20 damage. I guess thats only a 78% reduction in damage, but I was close.
Is that not crazy, there is no other stat but resists where ONE SINGLE piece can make you take almost 5 times less damage. Thats why Im saying mathematically, resists are way over emphasized in this game. Is there a piece that lets you do overall 5 times more damage, or have 5 times more health?
Of course not. Hence, resists are ridiculously overpowered/overimportant/over-emphasized in this game.
If they didn’t tack on resist penalties in each difficulty, I think the existing state would be okay. Having that penalty assigned just feels bad, I don’t like it when any game does it. I expect monsters to get tankier and hit harder as the difficulty goes up… I don’t expect to be subjected to an unremovable debuff as well, and that’s basically what the resist penalty is.
no it doesn’t, you already had several pieces to reach 60%, the last one just got it to 80%. Granted, that halves the damage taken from that damage type, but it does not accomplish that by itself. It does so because you already had reduced it by 60%.
Yes, resistances are important, not arguing against that. Nothing wrong with that, welcome to pretty much most ARPGs…
This is true. Yet forcing an over-emphasis on one specific style of defense can be annoying. Don’t forget, most builds have Resists, AND all physique or nearly so, AND at least one circuit breaker if it can be managed, AND some damage absorption…
We have a LOT of defense we use already. Maybe resists don’t need to be the hardest defense to get to a satisfactory level, is all. I certainly don’t want nothing but offense to be the norm, I’d just like to be punished less on my defense.
No, just 80 all round… Except Stun, OFC, which is insanely hard to get. I usually end up having to abandon at least one resistance, usually pierce, because getting them all capped is ridiculously hard to do.
Exactly my view of it…and the penalties are my main pet hate with GD (and any game that does this) I really hate the fact that the game turns round and goes “well done you’ve made it through difficulty xyz…so I’m now going to remove stats that your char has built up and weaken your build”
It’s about the same as the game saying “oh lets remove x amount of your assigned skill points because we want to make it harder for you”
Basically removing/reducing the players abilities feels like a kick in the teeth and is one of the reasons I’ve no interest in playing in elite or ultimate.
Make the mobs stronger, give them extra skills etc, but don’t remove the players abilities that they have worked to build up.
I’ve ranted about this in the testers section and got slapped back by Medierra for saying that (from a players point of view) its seems lazy to reduce a single players stats rather than improve all the mobs, and I’ll probably get slapped again for saying this again, but that’s how it looks.
I agree. Whole heartedly. GGG was never fond of anyone pointing that out either. It’s expected for what you face to get harder… Getting weakened just feels bad. It feels like getting punished for doing well, and nobody likes that.
There is big difference. Existing 72000 damage types in the game are the problem. I agree with OP. Every item should give at least 3 damage type res to compensate with other games.
I agree with OP. Too much emphasis on resistance also limits the slot avaibility for builds. It is like a hinder everytime i wanna try a build. It is sth like i should overthink everytime i wanna play.
Completely disagree, having to make choices is what makes putting together builds interesting. What I’m concerned about is mythical gear getting too much additional resists in the xpac when we can already cap everything as it is now.
The problem is the %-based resists system which they ported over from TQ, which is similar D2’s resists system.
From a player defenses view, monsters damage is balanced around having max or near-max resists. It has to be, because if monster damage was balanced around players having 60% or less resists, those with 80% resist would be able to facetank easily.
70% resist takes 1.5x damage of 80% resist, and 60% resist takes 2x damage. The discrepancy just gets wider.
This also means that increased max resistance is extremely strong, 85% resist takes 0.75x damage, while 90% resist only takes 0.5x damage.
On the topic of equipment, many of the Epic and Legendary armour and accessories cannot even be considered in a build because they have too little resists.
From a monster defenses view, it makes most players look to maximise resist reduction to ramp up their damage as it is way more effective than stacking %damage type past a certain point.
Look at the number of builds that take Manticore for Acid Spray even if they are not using Poison, it’s way too strong to pass up if you don’t have another appropriate flat resist reducer.
Thus it becomes extremely difficult to balance. Give a monster high resists and certain builds will struggle whilst those with a lot of resist reduction stacking will do fine. Low resists and the monter will be pushed to 0 or negative resists and fall too easily.
Well, it is too late to change now and hopefully GD2 or Crate’s other future ARPG will come up with a new resistance mechanic.