Resistance Penalties (and a league to test them!)

When developing Path of Exile, we fully intended to have penalties like these, but never got around to adding them. Now we're faced with two problems:

• Players are creating characters that only have 75% of each resistance, which can be done very easily using only a few high level items. According to our metrics, many players are just naturally getting a high level of resistances from arbitrary secondary mods on their items.
• If we add these penalties now, then everyone in Merciless difficulty will take substantially more damage until they change their gear to have the level of resistances that they want. It would be unfair to patch this in without any advance notice. (This post is the advance notice!)

I see the broken resistances situation as being a really big problem that we need to solve before Open Beta. I'd love to properly balance the higher difficulty levels around elemental damage from monsters being impactful, and in turn creating more interesting player choices. Ideally, when it comes to resistances, players would choose between:

• Building a set of gear that offers high resistances. This isn't that hard - the higher mods are common and generous. Rings can have both implicit and explicit resist mods.
• Using unique items that have generous resistances to shore up deficiencies at the opportunity cost of that item slot.
• Speccing more into resists in the passive tree.
• Using specific resist gear as needed for certain encounters.
• Having a set of resistance gear on the alternate weapon swap.
• Choosing to side with Kraityn in some of the bandit quests.
• Using the resist flasks (or aura) during combat.
• Choosing to not have maxed resistances, just as some characters choose to not max their armour or evasion, and instead focus on hitting harder.

As you can see, the above choices are far more meaningful (and in line with our core design beliefs) than just having everyone automatically get close to maximum resists in Merciless because they happen to be wearing arbitrary rare items.

We're going to introduce additive elemental resistance penalties of:

• Normal: 0%
• Cruel: -25%
• Ruthless: -50%
• Merciless: -75%

For example, if you currently have 110 Fire Resist (capped at 75) in Ruthless, you'll now have 60%. If you have 10% Cold Resist in Merciless, you'll now have -65%. Chaos resist is not getting a penalty.

On Monday (Sept 24, NZ time), we will create a one-week hardcore race league to test these changes. Once this league ends, we will review the results and probably enable the change for all leagues. The league is hardcore because it gives us far better behaviour and death stats than a Default league.

As with everything else, we definitely need feedback on this change, once it has been made. We're very interested in tweaking the game until it feels right, so of course we're going to review the elemental damage from monsters and make sure that low-resistance characters are still able to survive (albiet with some challenges). Please give this league a go and let us know your feedback once you've had a chance to try them in game

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TheuberClips wrote:

Much like Diablo 2. I like. Although, what will happen when Merciless is removed?

Our intention is to use 0%, -25%, -75% once we add Act Three and reduce it to three difficulties. We're balancing the end-game around -75%.

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Progammer wrote:

Purity prices just shoot up.

Jokes aside, getting maxed resist seems too easy. On the other hand, -75% seems too steep. Could you clarify on how this system work on PvP ? If two players are fighting on merciless difficulty they both have -75% resist but if they fight on normal difficulty they will not take penalty ? And how will this mechanics affect elemental weakness curse ?

If people are fighting in the world, then the resists of the area come into play. If they're fighting in an arena, then we pick (based on the level range of the arena) what penalty to apply. For example, if level 15 characters are dueling, it's likely it's at a 0% penalty. If it's a max level of 70 in a certain arena type, then it's probably at -75%.

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faerwin2 wrote:

While I don't mind the system itself, I think that -75% is a bit too much (especially when you consider that some maps have elemental weakness as a mod).

You may not remember it but d2 originally only removed 50% resistance in hell (was changed to 100% at the xpac).

The reason I am saying this is because it is rather difficult to get 175% resistances to all elements and even more to certain builds (mine for example).

You only need 150%, not 175%.

We'll definitely be taking feedback into account (the results from that league are very important). So far our internal testing is looking okay with -75% though.