Add Elemental Resistance Nodes to Passive Tree

The ONLY reason I say this, is if you get to Cruel difficulty Act 2, the game imposes a 40% ALL Resistances debuff check across the board.
Meaning, IF you have a build and or pieces of armor you spent a TON of time and resources to get, but didnt make sure it has Elemental Resistances in it you are literally hooped and get one shot by everything, REGARDLESS of evasion or shield, because having negative resistances causes you to take like 200% increased damage of that type.

If there were elemental resistances in the tree, so you didnt have to rely so heavily on lucky gear rolls or runes, it would be very nice.
OR just remove the 40% Resistance debuff entirely as I think it is an absolute joke and can RUIN your run completely and leave you stuck there with NO WAY TO PROGRESS.

For example: get all the way to Cruel difficulty act 2, have ZERO resist on armor, no rune slots left, no currency to change your gear around
You literally might as well just delete the character at that point as you will spend more time grinding trying to get resist gear that late game, rather than if you just start a new character. I think its a trash mechanic in the game and should be removed entirely. Would make for a lot smoother gameplay

I would also like to understand why the current resistances system is designed this way.

In general, as a future Hardcore player, I don't like resistances (and defenses in general) missing from the passive skill tree. The dependance on gear is just too big. I would rather go defenses in skill tree and did less damage, than farming one location again and again for a defensive gear when I start a new league on hardcore.

I also think -10% resistances per act is an outdated, unnecessary mechanic. That way, especially on Hardcore, all of my gear have to have resistances, which means most of the drops will go to trash, even if it was a great piece of gear otherwise, which in PoE1 I would compensate for with a few resistance nodes in a passive skill tree. Here in PoE2, there is no way around it, as there are no other sources of resistances than gear (with runes).

Now imagine that you have nicely balanced resistances on your gear, all caped at 75. You have a helmet with +20% fire resistance and you drop or craft a great helmet, but it has +20% cold resist instead. If you replace your helmet, now you have 55% fire res and overcapped 95% cold res. How to deal with it? Ideally with runes, but they are permanent.

So at least please make it possible to replace runes on gear.

On the other hand, runes will have the same problem as gear, you will mostly use resist runes as well, making other types of runes obsolete, which is a shame.

I would probably rethink the whole system. I would remove the -10% resistance penalty per act, I even think it is confusing for a lot of new players. In compensation, you can lower the max amount of a single resistance on a gear. I would add a little more resistance nodes to passive skill tree, to be able to compensate for a bad luck on gear drops, and make runes removable from the gear.

I think players would enjoy using larger variety of gear instead of always hunting for the best resistance gear to survive. Think of us Hardcore players please :) I'd like hardcore to be a skill challenge, not a gear grind and drop luck challenge.

Yes I agree, there are many ways around it and I do no understand, with a game that is SO DEPENDANT on gear drops and that feeling you get finding a new piece, why they would have the resistances limited to gear only.

Making you HAVE to collect resist gear along your playthrough and NOT be able to get around it, come New League day gear with resistances is going to be stupidly expensive, also while your running your first character you will have to keep in mind constantly to stash resist gear and not get excited for anything else, forcing you to get gear that is a certain way. I do not like it at all, and AS YOU SAID, in POE 1 they had ways to COUNTER IT, here there is none

Having heavy negative resistance debuffs that are permanent and with literally no notification they are happening is not great.

Also, in PoE we had a minimum of 30% resistance available via a single aura, craft bench/item crafting to easily add additional resistances, 30% or more resistance from each flask with potential permanent uptime, and a huge amount of resistance on the passive tree.

Just because it is easy to add resistance to gear does NOT make it easy to fit the 135% minimum REQUIREMENT on your gear on top of your ACTUAL build. Taking increased max life/mana nodes mostly off the tree to remove "mandatory and boring" passives but forcing every player to have 2 resistance passives per piece of gear and/or a resistance and a rune in every available slot are completely at odds with each other.

Having to deal with the negative resistance penalty in PoE was reasonable and an appropriate level of pain gearing properly at all levels after the crafting bench came out. With the insignificant amount of resistance options available to player in PoE 2 it is not even in the same universe as reasonable.

The absolute most braindead easy zero second change that could at least fix end-game builds would be to start all characters at 30% base all ele res so they are only down to -30% at the end of the acts.

The lack of elemental resistance nodes in the passive tree is making playing as a tank feel kind of pointless. I build up this massive tanky build just to get one-shotted by some spell? Pretty lame.

It would be nice to have more options, but I think the issues with resistances are a lot more fundamental than that.

I made an entire post talking about how resistances in their current multiple decades outdated form need a change and how it would make the game better for everyone:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3629096