negative resistance is lazy game design

Of all the things to copy from Diablo why negative resist all?

I was always one to put resistance and survivability on top of my priorities. I always felt that the negative resistance in Diablo was just due to how old the game was and due to its simplistic design it was the only way to ramp up the difficulty as you progressed.

I dont see why a system like this is needed in a game this complex. ESPECIALLY with chaos resistance not counting as resist all. So you already have a stand alone damage type which needs you to dedicate item slots (or skill points) to dealing with. I just feel like having the negative resistances restricts what you can do with items if youre trying to max everything out. You need to over come some road block that didn't need to exist in the first place.

Like if you could give a legitimate reason as to why our characters all the sudden become weakened to the elements like for example the power of ascension comes at a cost, the more we ascend the weaker we are to the elements but nope... Its just the devs thought it was a cool mechanic blizzard used to make diablo harder at later difficulty when in reality its just a silly concept.

I dont know much about D&D but I feel a lot of RPGs foundation is based off D&D so is there something in D&D that gave characters negative resistances?

Items become a big problem in this game for me. Between needing the perfect links on your items to needing to stack such high resistances it really restricts freedom for some players. Honestly with the announced gem system changes for PoE2 I have barely even wanted to play PoE currently because support gems socketing directly into a spell gem is going to be so game changing. Giving the freedom to not care as much about the slots and links on an item...

Basically just finished watching all Day9s vods and seeing his flawed mentality due to the current spell system highlights everything wrong with the game currently. "stats dont matter, links and colors do" getting to the mid 30s wearing whites and not thinking much about the items stats just because hey they got the links i want thats all that matters. Kind of sad he never got far enough to hit the walls that start to make the game turn from fun to "ok im just wasting my time now"

I mean I know lore-wise why it happens, but as far as game design I'm no expert. More than likely it's really helpful in their scaling, and fans of diablo2 were familiar with it. So lazy? maybe, but it serves its purpose well.

I figured that from a developer's perspective it makes more sense to balance a game around every player needing 135 resistances at the end of the game, rather than balancing every and any item around 75%.

I mean, taking goldrim as an example, which gives you up to 40% all elemental resistances, would have to have around 13-15% all resistances, so your characters wouldn't run with 150% overcapped res galore once they hit maps. But then these items become significantly less impactful in the early stage, which is where goldrim absolutly shines (Even though with the introduction of thrillsteel I've been discarding goldrim as soon as I hit lvl 18.)

About chaos resistance, D2 had "Poison" as its 4th stat, which chaos isn't "too" different from really. Although chaos also involves enemies dealing direct hits with chaos damage, rather it being ONLY affecting poison ailments.

If you're looking for a legitimate reason as to why the affliction is happening, outside of lore reasons of course, it's simplly so you are forced into balancing your character, instead of going full damage everything. Hitting 95% all elemental resistances (To be capped when elemental weakness hits you) and at least 15-20% chaos resistance also isn't very hard nowadays, leaving you enough room to fit mods to boost your power level.

Hope this helps somehow for your understanding :3

^d2 also had magic damage which didn't count as elemental resists.

As for the negative resists, I have a few points:
1) There IS an in-game reason for lowering our resists. Kitava curses us...we are forever suffering from kitava's curse which weakens us. This is perfectly plausible.

2) Negative resists serve a very important purpose, but it's not something we like to think about as players. It has become natural that our "base" is 75% resist all. But in reality the "base" is 0% resist all. Any resists we get on gear is reducing the elemental damage we take, but there HAS to be a converse side to that: something that causes us to suffer MORE damage from attacks than the base. And that is negative resists. I wouldn't consider this lazy design: to me, it makes perfect sense when you actually think about what resistances are doing and what 0% resist MEANS.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

but there HAS to be a converse side to that: something that causes us to suffer MORE damage from attacks than the base. And that is negative resists. I wouldn't consider this lazy design: to me, it makes perfect sense when you actually think about what resistances are doing and what 0% resist MEANS.

I was going to mention something similar however there are flaws.

1. You want to soft cap damage and defenses not make them exponential.
2. There's more resist offense layers than defense layers. ie +% Damage as X Element x2-3. Cursed with XYZ, Penetration built into attacks, Reduce Max Res and some more specific ones.

The above is exactly why Degens are so brutal.
Defense against them rely directly on reduction / less taken and that's it. If Resists and the counter reductions were aligned this wouldn't be the case. Least not unintentionally like I think has happened. Instead we rely heavily on Block + Spell Suppression/Near 90% Res or we die.

I have to say. The Bow or Shield meta is getting quite old.