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

As a new player to POE with early access POE2 this is the worst feeling system in the game to me. Going through the campaign I thought I did something wrong because I would seemingly randomly get negative resistances. By the time I hit Cruel I understood how it worked but it feels like you are going backwards too much.

the -60% resist in POE1 is not punishing, its sadistic. And its unnecessary. Eventualy you will find the gear to get you up to 75% but if the game was balanced correctly you wouldnt need to find the gear with +50 resistances on every piece of gear. They should just make the lower/higher tier gear have less resistances. Getting one shot by white mobs after you just beat Kitava is ridiculous.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

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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.

That's completely fair. On that note I do think it's the best time to address it I think it could lead to a better system for sure. I just also wanted to note how it's exacerbated worse from other new systems while also being better at the same time to it's predecessor being the same system.

I think I'll personally be fine with resistances if they don't necessarily change, but do hope this gets more light if nothing else but to evaluate those things around the resistances. I do trust GGG to make the game more fun, but hope they're not scared of a change on this scale of reevaluating resistance formula. They did change some of the systems in PoE 1 before so maybe they will here.

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Cons#1623 wrote:

As a new player to POE with early access POE2 this is the worst feeling system in the game to me. Going through the campaign I thought I did something wrong because I would seemingly randomly get negative resistances. By the time I hit Cruel I understood how it worked but it feels like you are going backwards too much.

Oh yeah the negative resistance system feels way more random in PoE2 than in PoE1. In PoE1 you would fight this evil boss twice and he would permanently curse you both times and the game felt more direct about it. In PoE2 it just seems to go down in increments as you do higher level areas.

This is something that Last Epoch solves very nicely. In that game mobs have 1% resistance penetration per level that applies after your 75% resistance cap. So against level 75 mobs you have effectively 0% resistance if you have capped your resistance.

If you only have 50% resistance you have effectively -25% resistance.

The point of this is to lower the effect of not having capped resistances:

In LE you take 25% more damage at 50% res vs 75% res.
In PoE you take 100% more damage at 50% res vs 75% res.


The quick and easy solution for PoE would be to apply the resistance penalty behind the scenes and rebalance monster damage and resistance values accordingly.

The whole thing feels less of a problem in poe1 because of the flasks + crafting options. In the campaign I never felt that I cannot craft or farm a ring that gives me resist for a specific area and around maps, I knew which one I could farm to grab a white gear that I could craft into a res ring. I had options to play around defenses and could min-max whatever I felt necessary.

I had the power to get around these limitations that I miss in poe2.

I agree that in many ways, it feels a struggle and definitely not a good design decision in its current form. But I never felt hopeless of not capping resistances in poe1, I might just needed an hour or two of farming.

Now its such a mandatory and struggling experience that I have the urge to start trading immediately. No flask options and the non-existent crafting increases the impact of trading.
I always had at least one tab for rings but in poe2 it feels pointless. If an item is not worth keeping as-is after ID-ing, its just a waste of currency. White trash items are more useful as I could at least alch them.
The whole system is built around gambling. SOME people enjoy gambling, it is addictive and there is a reason why it is being punished by law in this industry as well.
I would not design a whole progression system behind gambling. It is disgusting.

Anyways, just my 10c. I would not mind capping resistances if I have options to do that outside of pure gambling (without trading).

great feedback and analysis by OP. totally agreed

resistence discussion never really mattered in PoE 1 ever since we had the crafting bench, and especially past harvest you could just swap one res stat with another - I do think the current PoE 1 resist work fine since you have the bench/flasks to make up for shortcomings - resistances can be tackled in a lot of ways.

PoE 2 has none of this, well runes - but as long as you cannot overwrite runes gear swapping is a nightmare

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Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index#1288 wrote:

resistence discussion never really mattered in PoE 1 ever since we had the crafting bench, and especially past harvest you could just swap one res stat with another - I do think the current PoE 1 resist work fine since you have the bench/flasks to make up for shortcomings - resistances can be tackled in a lot of ways.

PoE 2 has none of this, well runes - but as long as you cannot overwrite runes gear swapping is a nightmare

Oh yeah resistance in PoE1, while still clunky, functioned by being manageable with crafting slots and harvest element swaps. It was still somewhat messy and anti new player though, but never a priority issue.

I really don't see a reason why we can't overwrite runes on our gear, similar to overwriting catalysts on jewelry. I honestly wouldn't mind the loss of the crafting bench if we could actually replace our runes without limit.

It doesn't matter how it was in PoE1 (or diablo, or any other game for that matter).

Current issue with resistances is that it takes VERY specific VERY coordinated effort to cap them, and capping them is NEARLY (not in 100% of builds, but in a very large variety) mandatory.

So vast majority of your equipment handling goes strictly about seeking specific resistances and +life (for those not running CI). And compared to the size of affix pools, this is very limiting.

A lot of interesting affixes are disregarded simply because +res is more valuable. A lot of rares are disregarded because they don't have necessary +res. Even worse, +res itself is disregarded too, because it might be a wrong res - going over cap does pretty much nothing.

This all can be alleviated by a res system that doesn't focus so much on having capped resistances.

Whether by a diminishing returns formula or by some other approach.