One-week "Resistance Penalty Testing" Hardcore Ladder Race

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Moosifer wrote:

Also, one of the guys told me that as you get higher in level the chances of maps dropping on lower lvl areas (like fellshrine and pyramid, the places I'm running for hours) get lower. This makes no sense, I think it should be the opposite. If a lvl 75+ is running fellshrine he shouldn't have a lower chance to get a map than a lvl 54.

Just have to point out that whoever told you that has not read the mechanics thread. First of all, the only penalty that is ever applied to drops is for currency items like orbs/scrolls. Secondly, even if maps were considered currency items, you are never considered to be any higher than lvl 63 for the purposes of the penalty. This means that the penalty would apply for fellshrine once you reached level 57 when it comes to currency, but would never get worse as you leveled above lvl 63. But I'm pretty sure that maps are not considered currency anyway, so there should never be any drop penalty applied to them.

From the mechanics thread:

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Drop rates
There is a penalty to the chance of currency items (scrolls, orbs, etc.) dropping in areas with a monster level more than two levels lower than your character level. For each additional level that you have compared to the area's monster level+2, the chance of a currency item drop is reduced by 2.5%.
So if you are level 30 in a level 20 area, you will see 20% less currency item drops on average:
2.5*(30-(20+2))=20
A level 30 character in a level 28 area will see no penalty.
Currency item Drops are not increased or decreased in this way when fighting in areas above your level.
For the purposes of this penalty, your level is never considered to be higher than 63. Therefore a level 70 character receives no penalty in a level 61 area.

Death by afk...

feedback on resist

Never have I got so far without dying, but I took less risks, and found I had to carry a few things to swap in and out of inventory.
This is a wee bit problematic as some items take up 8 spaces (how about reducing the size of weapons in inventory)

Had a couple of lucky drops 1 early in the week and one yesterday , but hard to find suitable weapons and armour with the right number/colour nodes ( and yes I could recolour reforge but couldn't get drops for that either)


Had quite a few desync issues, today was the worst before the latest patch and since, had to use alt f4 a couple of times as I couldn't move or see beasts hitting, before I would skip across screen after 1-2 secs.

Thought things were a little harder, even running through farming several times at a much higher level than monster level I was seriously knocked back a few times. Not sure why.

Still need to work on my mechanics of how to do builds, but feel the use of passives when having to allocate the early ones to fire and cold resist is slowing the early game play, unless I takes more risks :)

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Axebane wrote:

Just have to point out that whoever told you that has not read the mechanics thread. First of all, the only penalty that is ever applied to drops is for currency items like orbs/scrolls. Secondly, even if maps were considered currency items, you are never considered to be any higher than lvl 63 for the purposes of the penalty. This means that the penalty would apply for fellshrine once you reached level 57 when it comes to currency, but would never get worse as you leveled above lvl 63. But I'm pretty sure that maps are not considered currency anyway, so there should never be any drop penalty applied to them.

that's reassuring. He prefaced it with "I think," and it seems he's getting it confused with currency which I'm happy it doesn't work that way.

Aaaaaand they nerfed it. Now GS, Sweep and Cleave are all equally subpar.

"The leading players in race are all safe GS Marauders." .. aaaaand it's gone.

Fine, now we can start whining about the summoner witch.. right cGramma?

50% GS users in the Top 10 you also forget that many GS users died.

Died yesterday at lvl 56.
I killed a fly that was irritating me for hours and (why oh why) stared at it for like 5 seconds -> afk death by a single fellshrine zombie.
I wish i had a photo of my face when i turned to the screen only to see the resurrect button :P

see you next race

Alrighty, just got as far as I could with a melee Cleave + Jump duelist using 2H swords.

Resistance penalty feedback:
Poor decision. To make it work you'd have to nerf all the elemental damage of every enemy in the game (which I prefer not to happen as it will ruin the differentiation factor between the enemies (ps I like that some mobs now have implicit resistances like spiders resist lightning). Explanation as follows:

1. You need to have resistance on every item, at least two of them, and/or have dedicated sets of all your items for the differing elements. Then constantly switch between them during an instance. note: having to switch out a ring or two is OK, having to switch out sets of items is not.

2. You are now forced to pick resistance passive nodes. Note: Duelist does not have any lightning resist nodes near them (2x fire/cold resists only).

3. I like having to prepare for an instance, and maybe need to switch out a ring or two in the middle if there is a rare mob doing a different elemental damage.

4. If GGG is determined to use a flat % reduction system for elemental resistances, then the penalty is a poor solution to having too much resist early on. I'd suggest bring in tiers of resist mods on equipment (like increased life does), then normalise how much resistance you can get for the 3(4) difficulty levels, over the item levels that will be dropping during the difficulty. eg: during normal (ilevel 1-29), the best mod to give + ele resist should give no more than 10% (INCLUDING CHANGING THE IMPLICIT MOD ON RINGS!!!), which means that your average resistance to an element will only be about 20-30% (assuming you haven't geared specifically for an instance, which SHOULD give you a benefit). Then Cruel (ilevel 30-45??) 15% max ele resist mod, and Merci (or whatever is chosen as the last difficulty, note I have ignored that there are 4 for now, as this will drop to 3 when act 3 is released), ilevel 46-60 can drop 20% max ele resist mods. Then the end game stuuff like maps (and whatever else is in store) for ilevel 61+, can drop up to 30% ele resist mod. That system would allow you to have ave resist against all (without toooo much trouble, ie ONLY picking equip with 2+ ele resist mods), or specifically gear up for an instance. It would also allow the GGG to scale ele damage better from Normal to Merci (as the ilevel dictates the max average resistance toons can have) because they will know at Merci difficulty ave resistance to all should be around 50-60, cruel around 30-40, and normal <20 (numbers are for illustrative purposes only).

5. The alternative system is use formulae like the armour rating system as people have been suggesting. But really this would work in a similar way to 4 (above), in that you need to normalise how much you can get when.

end explanation.

ON another note, it seems as if currency items have been "leveled" more. So you don't see alchs etc until much later in the game. Could be just RnG. But worth a mention.

PS: I'll see if the devs posted somewhere what the desired outcome for the resistance penalty consequences is. And I'll try and answer that with what my experience was.

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Balron wrote:

"The leading players in race are all safe GS Marauders." .. aaaaand it's gone.

Fine, now we can start whining about the summoner witch.. right cGramma?

Actually read the fucking posts instead of constantly trying to change the topic/putting words in my mouth you goddamn moron.

I'd much prefer not to have a resistance penalty in higher difficulties and instead balance elemental damage by:

1. Increasing monster elemental damage, which would be a smoother increase, because it would scale by monster level (no sudden 25% and 50% increase).
2. Either use a formula similar to armor damage reduction or better yet just nerf the elemental resistances that items/skills give. I mean, where is the 7 passive nodes group that reduces all physical damage by 45%? Another option would be to make resistances stack multiplicative instead of additive, like critical hit chance. That way it would be harder to achieve very high resistances and you could remove the cap.
3. Think about introducing a 'curse/debuff resistance' stat, which would in my opinion also make pvp balancing easier.

I don't see why you should handle elemental damage/resistance in the Diablo 2 way, it's like making an exception to a otherwise streamlined combat system. Also it feels a bit strange to have a 'sudden weakness' in your defense just because you switched difficulty and, last but not least, it is unrealistic (I know, I know, a lot of things in this game are unrealistic, but still ;)).