One-week "Resistance Penalty Testing" Hardcore Ladder Race

Some good ideas posted about how to improve the resistance system. No matter which system is used there will always be advantages/disadvantages.

Flat % system with 75% cap

Pros
* Very transparent
* Simple (both to players and to implement)

Cons
* Implicit mods (upto 30) on resist rings make it easy to reach the caps even in norm difficulty (low level resist rings are still useful even in merciless!)

Modifications under % system:

Resist penalties in later difficulties

Pros
* Simple, transparent

Cons
* Stepwise functions over large spans of content produce huge impact at thresholds only. It becomes a cycle of under-geared early and over-geared late in the difficulty. Rinse; repeat.

Balancing the scaling of resist modifiers/items/monster damage

* I like the idea of having tiered implicit mods. It would be better to make them into separate items for transparency (like 4 grades of fire resist rings with different implicit mod ranges)

Pros
* Transparent
* Much smoother scaling than penalties
* Current level items have higher impact and lower level items become obsolete faster

Cons
* More dev time
* Harder to scale with new/higher level content as % mods can only become so powerful with linear scaling (limit of the % system)
* Scaling monster elemental damage arbitrarily high suffers the same limitation as players can only increase resists to the % cap and no higher so damage can't get too high without instant unavoidable death


Resist Rating System

Resists have a score like armour and mitigation is determined by a diminishing returns formula.

Pros
* Smooth scaling
* Scales up to arbitrarily high vales making balancing higher level content easier

Cons
* Values are unintuitive (lacks transparency)
* Significantly increases complexity (more dev time, harder to understand)

Some of the complexity seen by the player can be reduced with helpful tool tips (again more dev time):
* Showing the effective % migitation at the current monster level
* Showing how much a standard amount of increased resistance rating will increase % mitigation at the current value (i.e. +10 more fire will provide a 2.3% increase)

Just a quick note (or example if you wish) for the topic changed to resistance mechanics now.

A player who decides to max his resists will have to have 150% resistance bonus in merciless. With this bonus he will recieve only 25% of the default monster elemental damage because his actual resistance will be 75%.

Another player who focuses on other defences more will gather 'only' 125% resistance bonus. With this bonus he will recieve twice as much damage compared to the first player.

This is 25% difference, it is one average item, a tiny fraction of all the resists you need. But the actual impact on recieved damage is enormous. (And we compare 150 vs 125 here.)

You can look at it from the other side as well. When you have effective 50% resistance, you can take one more good item to halve the damage recieved. Is it really a matter of choice?

We could always do this, but we could also easily cap the resists to default cap to avoid this 'unfair' mechanic. For people who wished to specialize in resists there were ways to raise cap to 80% (or 82%). The impact of another 5% was still significant, but it was a meaningful choice to be made. It could only cut off one fifth (or a bit more) of the damage you were going to recieve.

Edit: as always.

Edit 2: About the groundslam nerf, what can I say. I didn't think the damage was the problem, yet the damage was nerfed.

I like the race and the resitance simple style of -25% each diff level. In fact when i first started to play PoE some months ago and reached cruel I was surpriced that its not yet like that.

I used only 2 max 3 slots of the stack in this race, I got help by higher levl friends for a shield or a wapon or a q sometimes, gear find, linking and crafting is tempting when y reach ruth and merci difficult. Nevertheless its possible to do so - on free to play base.

I didnt yet try seriously to play a twohanded clss or built i didnt like GSMara or Templar or even Ranger now. But one other reason why so many choose that built style is for my believe a different reason. Consider the hassle to find 4l items in time...with a 2handed class built you have 5 choices with any other built you only have 4! This is a hugh difference also with resist items to find and implement in your built. Especially because twohanded wapons feels like easy to find and craft with 4linked sockets and even comparing the power of a char with the 2x5l items against the simple armor is impressive,isnt't it?
My suggestion to balance this "divergance" a little would be to have the 3slot shields changed to 4socket shields. dual wapon users already profit form more stats and faster kill rate by pure damage. To give them more easy access for resists(also other forum users mentioned that) would be to have higher chance of resitance mods on wapons.

Oh and one more thing, I find it anoying when i get q reward items playing in the lvl 50+ and the ring or belt roles out to be like lvl 17 (I dont mind if its in the 20-30 area) usfully only for getting a chaos :-( or useing one on it...
Its ok to still have many fusions to use for link something you really like, makes it fel special anyways. But it would feel also nice if you see slightly more 4l items proceeding in game and level. Playing for months now and only saw one time a 5l item drop is kind of WOW...too much grind.

I had fun with this resist race. It posed a great many challenges especially when it came to builds. I actually felt like my skill was being tested as I did maps that I would normally steam roll and now I was having to proceed with caution. While I like that you guys attempted to add some resist to the tree for all classes. I feel like the nodes added were made simply to try and calm the masses and were more of a tease then helpful.

I would like to see some changes made to the tree that would actually bring some decent resist to all classes (not just marauder).

I played shadow this race as it usually doesn't seem to do so well in these week long races (at least the ones I've partook in). And boy let me tell you the frustration sure does set in when you are pretty much a wet paper bag. Even when I got my build in full effect it still seems to struggle and I often times found myself playing UBERLY defensive vs mobs that shouldn't pose any threat to my def stats.

All in all with similar stats, if not worst, stats my marauder tanked / dealt far better damage with less damage taken.

While I did have to put up with a lot of annoying things playing shadow my luck still managed to throw me a bone here and there and during a fellshrine run I stumbled across this beauty off of a normal zombie.

So in recapping my thoughts

- Yes to Resist Decay
- Work on a balanced Resist Passive tree
- Keep dropping me GODLY items
- Keep on making a GREAT game

As always thanks for the great game and keep up the good work.

-Fayded

As a duelist i felt that there really need to be a bit more elemental defense passives, there really aren't enough there. I seem to have noticed that i usually have 2 elements very high and 1 low, making me play more carefully when i'm in areas where monsters use the element i'm weak of. So i think it really doesn't change that much, just makes me play more carefully in some places.

I committed suicide in protest of the map drop rate

RIP L55 Ranger

Died in Fellshrine Merciless to unique archer and minions. My error, got surrounded and couldn't kill/escape fast enough.

Feedback - As others have stated the transition for each difficulty is abrupt. Early on doing a lot of swapping and being uber careful, later in the level you are fine as resists are maxing out. Choose Kraityn at each level - but I do that anyways as I find him impossible to kill in HC as a Ranger. I did notice a distinct lack of DPS this build as I went out of my way for life and resists at the expense of ias and physical damage on the passive tree. Usually doing 1000+ by merciless, today was just above 600 :( - that actually may have been my downfall, with extra damage I might have escaped.

All in all still fun to play and if the idea was to provide more decision making regarding gear I think it works OK, just needs some tweaking in terms of scaling, the passive tree and gear availability.

Time to do some practice runs for the 3hr race...

Had to say "Thank You" for an awesome week of fun!

Was my first HC race and made it to lvl 49 on a caster shadow build I've been toying with.

Most addicting fun I've had in a very long time and look forward to more races like this.

(Died @49 Weaver Chamber ruthless..ran into a room of 5 flicker spiders and got stunlocked when I shoulda just AoE'd the place.)

-RIP Copen

P.S. I like the added challenge of the Resist penalty. It did not feel like a gamebreaker and it certainly made it more challenging with gear/passive selections as a Shadow.

Normally I play Ranged builds (Ranger, Shadow, Duelist BOW)

This week I went with a tank type build and with the nerf to resist I think it feels a lot better.

I love the resist negs per act. I think it helps a lot in gear choice instead of looking for 3 mods you are now looking for 5.

Wiggins you were talking about how its not a choice. Well its a choice every time. Many times in can use a dual resist ring or if I have enough resists, I can pick up a single resist ring and have other mods like damage on it.

Choices like IAS on gloves vs HP/Resist gloves are a major choice now, where as before I would wear IAS even if they were level 5 gloves.

Ground slam balancing, good job much needed. I dont really even see that bad of a dmg loss as its still very high, and doing more than witch/rangers/shadows/templars in my parties.

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MrDDT wrote:

Wiggins you were talking about how its not a choice. Well its a choice every time. Many times in can use a dual resist ring or if I have enough resists, I can pick up a single resist ring and have other mods like damage on it.

Not sure what choice you mean. The choice you are describing is more of a luck with loot than anything. You say it yourself: 'If I have enough resitsts'. You put it as a condition. But this condition has to be met first and I am talking about meeting this condition.

I think I described the trouble with current system and why are penalties not fixing it (they actually amplify it) quite in detail already, I think it is fair to answer a comment but I don't think I need to repeat myself here.