Tried to make a build for Blind Assassin set the other day, and was satisfied with its on paper stat, but got difficulties in actual gameplay against bosses. Then I looked up the stats for bosses and above, and found out that they all have >30% resist to pierce… many have 40-60% pierce resist.
Is this a deliberate design decision to make all the bosses and above highly resistant to pierce? This practically makes Veil of Shadow imperative for all pierce build. Or is it the other way around: only Veil of Shadow has explicit pierce resist reduction that all bosses and above were balanced against it?
Late game is defined by resistance reduction, which scales better than any flat amount of pierce dmg you have in your build. Certain bosses like Shar’Zul in Bastion of Chaos have 118% fire res, additional 10% all res if enraged, but I kill him easily under a minute with my Commando dealing 80-90% fire dmg.
Not really when Assassin’s Mark / Acid Spray is available to everyone. Both of these combined will break most Bosses Pierce resists (lower to or below 0%). The exceptions are superbosses like Lokarr, Ravager, Mogdrogen who push upwards of 80% and some specific Bosses like Iron Maiden (who also heavily resists Physical) or the Clones of Bourbon. Really, Pierce is similar to Physical but slightly higher across the board I presume to balance out the fact that Pierce does not have to contend with armour whereas Physical does.
Beyond that, you can make the remainder up through gear pieces like Bladetwister Signet or % reduced target’s resistances like Essence of Ch’thon.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Nightblade or Inquisitor are the big Pierce supporters (due to Night’s Chill/Death Sentence and numerous sources of flat Pierce damage/Pierce skills) but they aren’t the only way to make Pierce characters, it is just recommended to use one of the two or both.
There are many ways to reduce those resistances, but boss resistance distribution is something we’ve actually looked at for v1.0.6.0 to even the playing field a little between Physical/Pierce builds and other damage types.
Some boss encounters that previously had physical/pierce resistance have lost those resistances, and in some cases they gained resistances to other damage types.
Using forum builds as a metric is rarely a good idea as a large amount of builds are never posted or shared with others
There’s nothing stopping others from making Pierce characters that do not use Nightblade/Inquisitor i.e. by making interesting use of conversion (100% Elemental to Pierce Savagery or Fire Strike for instance).
I can understand for pierce, but physical? Phyisical is least resisted damage type in the game and it’s quite easy to get -100% physical resist reduction. Making enemies lose the resist to something that they barely resist in the first place, to other damage types that are resisted much more seems counter-intuitive.
Armor doesn’t do much to mitigate damage when you can slap enemies for 200k damage easily with a physical attack. Unless the armor formula works differently for enemies.
At best enemies can have 25% physical resist like The Iron Maiden. While other damage types can have enemies with 100% resist to that type. Only super bosses have 85% and up physical resist and those also have high resistance to everything else.
