Dear GGG: You brought over a MASSIVE mistake from PoE1 to PoE2 and it hurts everyone! Resistance?!

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

They're not going to get rid of Reistance reductions because those have been a thing since Diablo 2. They should give a more clear warning on the screen though, a lot of players are surprised by the fact their resistances go down hours after they change Acts.

Just because something is old doesn't mean it deserves to stay. That's obvious to GGG since poe 2 has changed so many things sacred to poe 1 fans. Proof being how upset they've been since EA launched. Nothing is off the table, now.

I like Low bar Soft Cap Resists.
They work pretty well. Some old MMOs used this like EverQuest.

Essentially a top geared character would have between 40-60 resists. This would amount to ~30% resistance at 60. If you wanted to focus more on resists it didn't improve much. 150 for instance is about ~40% however when a character with 150 resists gets debuffed by -30 they don't really feel it while the baseline gear character will see a 20% increase in damage taken.

Unlike an ARPG this was something you more worked on towards the end of gearing because your baseline DPS and Survival would start to cap out. Unfortunately as most know PoE has no breaks when it comes to DPS output. A consistently unfortunate design choice.

EDIT: Far as the basic % based Resist system. I've used it in development but it is not required and only conditionally useful. For instance Physical and Elemental damage are generally even however debuffs and statuses allow Resists to be reduced. This will conditionally punish a player with no investment but still simply level off for those who do invest.

In other words some fights Having 50% Fire Resist comes in clutch. Other times it gets reduced and does much less. The amount a player can get is slightly higher than the reduction value. This is what I mean by conditionally useful. Sometimes you get to ride that 50% Fire Resist. Sometimes it gets reduced to 10% but the base damage output is still the same baseline so it's not as penalizing.

I'm going to have to disagree on this one - it would make points in max resistance lose so much worth, but they feel like such a good endgame thing to aim for.

I do think that they need to do something to improve the resistance capping for players though.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

They're not going to get rid of Reistance reductions because those have been a thing since Diablo 2. They should give a more clear warning on the screen though, a lot of players are surprised by the fact their resistances go down hours after they change Acts.

I agree on better telegraphing, I didn't notice till act 2 cruel that resistances had gone down.

I disagree on "Because since diablo 2" as a reason. If you have actual reasons for wanting to keep it, fine, but "an older game made the same mistake" is not a good argument.

I think as this thread shows, there are a lot of better ways to handle resistances that don't feel like the game arbitrarily kneecapping you for progressing.

I suspect we're too late in the coding of the game for resistance calculations to be reworked, but sure hope not, and I am not a coder myself. Definitely agree that they are a false progression "choice" that adds little, if any, value.

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RedSpades9#5940 wrote:

I disagree on "Because since diablo 2" as a reason. If you have actual reasons for wanting to keep it, fine, but "an older game made the same mistake" is not a good argument.

But a lot of intricacies of PoE are there because they were that way in Diablo 2 and its clearly intentional. GGG is a company made out of hardcore Diablo 2 fanboys after all. Don't expect those things to change even if they might feel weird or frustrating.

+1

Capping resistances being mandatory (and increasingly difficult to do) in a game where you are supposed to have build and loot variety is awful

You have the opportunity with PoE 2 to make it better than PoE, and yet you stick to all the shitty features from poe 1, like resistances and death penalty that make the game unfun

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pattw555#0071 wrote:

This would overall make attaining high resistances less important, essentially buffing lower resistance gear-sets relative to high resistance gear sets, correct?

So it's basically a proposed nerf on the difficulty of the game?

I'm not necessarily against it, but you seem to have put a lot of thought into this and understand the system well. Is that what you are proposing, in general making the game less difficult across the board?

Or am I missing something?

Replacing the resistance scaling with a new diminishing returns formula would ultimately depend on how GGG chooses to balance the numbers.

Players currently have -80% res by the time they reach endgame mapping and need +155% res to reach a 0.25 mitigation multiplier, or +170% res and +15% max res to reach a 0.1 mitigation multiplier.

Let's use my placeholder formula for some comparative examples:
(50+0.05*resistance)/(50+resistance)=mitigation multiplier

Having +155 res would net you a 0.282 mitigation multiplier. You would take 12.7% more total damage compared to the current 75% res cap system. So at this threshold of +155 res on your build your character would actually be nerfed a bit.

Now what if you swapped a piece of your gear and loses a single res suffix of +35 though? With the current system going from +155% to +120% makes you take a massive 140% more total damage! However, with the placeholder formula you would have a mitigation multiplier of 0.329 which would make you take only about 16.8% more damage than the 0.282 multiplier from having +155 res.

Now let's say that a character instead swaps gear and gains a suffix of +35 for a total of +180%. With the current system you would take the same amount of damage and the mod is dead. You could have +max res in your build, but that's currently a different stat anyways and would only benefit from up to an additional +15 normal res. On the other hand, with the formula you would go from a 0.282 multiplier to a 0.256 multiplier making you take about 9.2% less total damage instead of being a dead mod.

As you can see having a formula would make gearing a character feel far more smooth and be more forgiving without necessarily making you stronger. The game is balanced around players having about a 0.25 mitigation multiplier anyways and that would not change unless GGG did a separate re-balance of enemy damage.

The different variables in the formula can easily be adjusted by anyone with a moderate understanding of algebra and could be easily buffed, nerfed, or generally adjusted after implementation if the devs decide certain thresholds of resistance are not at the power levels that they want.

It would overall not be a direct player buff. The result would simply be a more intuitive and consistent level of difficulty scaling that would enable more comprehensible build management and wiggle room while also enabling far more options than the strangulating 75% res system we have now.

I think there's a lot of good points to this post and I'm not arguing against some of the formula gripes, but at the same time as far as gearing progression being ruined by it I disagree that it's a primary issue. I think it's important to note this game is early access. PoE 1 has tons of ways to craft gear and have more nuance in how you build and tweak gear.

There's already some very nice qualities of life that impact managing resistances. Some of these are notable:
- They give some flat res in the campaign and it's a softer reduction than the flat hits of act 5 and 10 in poe.
-NO SOCKETS!!! Not having to manage that makes it so so so much easier for SSF to just slap crafted gear on and not feel completely gated by the sockets.
-Runes are like a soft crafting bench for now and can help micromanage the resistances you need after crafting some nice gear and it doesn't feel like "Well it doesn't have res so I can't use it" more than it used to be as it's not tied to suffix and prefixes.

All in all the resistances, while mathematically perhaps could be improved, are less an issue in inhibiting gear progression than it used to be. I get the game is harder in some ways, but I don't know if it's new players or just getting taken for granted, but it seems more like players not gearing well in a very much gearing and loot based game.

I am not opposed to changing the mathematical formula, but micromanaging resistances is easier than ever and I don't see how it detracts from the game that is largely about balancing the lines you want to get on gear and improving gear for defense and offense.
I tend to go more glass cannon and enjoy damage scaling lots. This is getting punished a lot for one portal and THAT is making it seem more mandatory vs "As long as I don't die 6 times who cares about cap res for now." I do like the incentive for trying not to die as much, but it does feel a bit like softcore is a bit more like hardcore which has problems in itself, but not because resistances are the issue exclusively. There's other small things adding to the pressure.

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I do like the incentive for trying not to die as much, but it does feel a bit like softcore is a bit more like hardcore which has problems in itself, but not because resistances are the issue exclusively. There's other small things adding to the pressure.

Resistances are definitely not the only issue with the early access balance state, but every piece of the whole getting polished would go a long ways. I think most of the other defensive stats like evasion chance, block chance, life scaling, energy shield scaling, strength life, and plenty of other small things will definitely be looked at and adjusted by GGG over the course of the early access.

I just want to shine more light on resistance since while it might only be a single piece of the puzzle, it's in a rather messy state and has had the least attention compared to other defensive stats.

Also having sources of % more res with a res formula in the strength section of the tree could help balance out characters that don't use evasion or energy shield similarly, but perhaps in a more balanced way than the max res that was there in PoE1.