Resistance Penalties (and a league to test them!)

are minions going to be affected by this?

they already get raped by el damage if you dont take nec aegis with a high resist shield.
and please dont give me" but we want them to die" because if they are being 1 or 2 shoted they are not going boom.

and i would like to say that Poe has no where near as much resist gear as D2.

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Chris wrote:

And yes, I don't think players die enough ;)

So why can we still instantly portal, save out or altf4 whenever we fuck up?

You want to see more deaths- especially in hardcore- add those cutthroat delays to the other leagues and watch the bodies hit the floor.

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Holding out on further resistance penalty comment until ive had the opportunity to test.

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Moordakhan wrote:

and i would like to say that Poe has no where near as much resist gear as D2.

This.

Uniques in PoE don't usually grant resists, or at least not in high amounts, so builds based off of uniques will suffer.

In D2, you had runes, gems, and jewels that could be put into equipment to up Resists. I know I wasn't the only one who searched for many-socketed shields to load up with Perfect Diamonds.

Rings and belts in PoE are the primary source of resists at the moment. The best Ring I have is one that effectively grants about +35% to all resists. (+30 implicit, +28 and +35 to the other two, and +5 all besides that). That is a pretty damn good resist ring for this game. Two rings like that, plus a belt of +20-40 of two resists (as is considered "good") would be less than 120% of 2 resists and less than 80% of the last one... so less than 45%/45%/5% in Merciless. Ouch.

This means that another few pieces of gear will be required to get to max resists, if a player even wants to bother with max resists now. A CI character might say "screw it" and just stack *more* ES... and stack all potions with the "of Heat" suffix, except for one potion "of Dousing". A tank will just take more life nodes. This game already has a bit of a disparity in the preferential choice of stacking boring defense nodes vs. exciting and fun offense nodes, and this just assists that.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm glad that this change is coming. I like adding more difficulty to my game, and I felt like the resists were not properly implemented thus far. However, I think that this is a bit heavy-handed for this game in its current state. This could change later.

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Mr_Bill wrote:

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Morsexier wrote:

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Mr_Bill wrote:

I am normally in the wait and see camp however in this case they are going to make a quick decision based on the 1 week Alt F4 crowds experiences which is a bad way to go.

If you want to force everybody to wait for content until they are 3+ levels above it just code it that way rather then this contrived messing with resistances which forces a rebalance of the tree, gear and playstyles.

You just described exactly how I play (+2 levels) in the last two 1 weeks. I did pretty well. It is called hardcore for a reason.

I alt F4 0 times.

It is simply counter intuitive that you can be in ruthless and merciless and be (3-5) levels under the content and still be fine. That is insane, and quite frankly silly.

So you throw a random comment about 3-5 levels under content in here. My point is that it isn't going to be tested at the current content level as they are using HC as a test bed.

I really wish people would get over their fond experiences of high school debating where putting words in other peoples mouths and then debating them won them some points.

I'm not sure how to respond because I was in no way attacking you or anything of that nature. I also don't understand your comment because it just doesnt make any sense to me. How is testing things in a new hardcore league going to provide less data than in the "current content level" to use your words, when an open beta is coming so you'd lose everything AKA be in a new league.

I guess that is what you mean but I'm really not sure. You seem to be relatively new around here, but generally this is a far more temperate place than other forums. I know I lurked for almost 7 months while in the beta before posting anything.

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Chris wrote:

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

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

Why are you including 4 difficulties here?

Aren't you going to be using a 3 difficulty system in the finished game?

What are the proposed resistance losses per difficulty when there will be only 3 difficulties? 0%/-35%/-70%? derp


Additionally more complaining:
I had a hard enough time already getting resistances and dealing with monsters when around level 50-58; making the resistances lower would be absolutely crazy.

I think that ASIDE from the non-linearity issue that resistance currently has, the big problem that's causing an issue (to which GGG are trying to address) is that players past level 60 are getting over-leveled for their area, farming items like crazy and/or gaining more exp while fighting lower leveled monsters.

So much time spent leveling up and gaining items results in getting great gear such as ones which will provide lots of resistance.


In a nutshell, the biggest problem is that the best stats possible for resists are just too good, and/or players can't easily push the limit on the end-game due to the rarity of higher level maps (you can be level 70 character rather easily, but can't play maps above level 65 frequently at all).
________________

I should re-iterate what I said in my previous post, and it probably won't be the last time either:
This abrupt change of resistance per difficulty is unnecessary (only in the sense that it's not the only available option, and certainly not the best option), annoying, and doesn't fix problems properly.
It would make much more sense to fix the current issues by:

1. fixing the non-linearity of resistances by switching to a resistance rating system
2. Reducing the effectiveness of resistance vs higher level monsters (via the resistance rating system from #1)
3. Fix the end-game where players have too much time on their hands to farm lower level monsters for eventually-good items, as well as experience. The fact that these players cannot push it to the limit due to lack of higher level maps is a big issue and contributor to the problem. I would think that when act three is introduced the problem may partially mend itself, but may need a bit of help as well.

* In addition if ever an area is too easy or hard due to the resistance system, just increase the power of the enemies' elemental damage. This could even be done now on map levels, or even also the end of act 2 merciless.

Doing these 2|3 changes is far more of an effective solution to solving the current problem than the proposed solution in this thread; It's just a really old "barbaric"/crude way of trying to fix something to me and really doesn't seem that effective. Early to late merciless (ignoring end-game merciless) is already the hardest part of the game; making it even harder is kinda stupid; it should be only the end-game that's penalized.

@Xapti

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Chris wrote:

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%.

And when i read your post I realized how weird is the upcoming change. And how unfair it is, too.

This change will not work without adjusting gear mods, passive tree and monster damage properly. The very same result without side effects could be achieved by - and now I will try to be really clear - adjusting gear mods, passive tree and monster damage.

What exactly is the penalty offering? Why don't you simply make the monsters hit harder and change the resist gear mods progression? It seems like penalty for the sake of penalty to me. You are balancing the game around -75%. But if you simply halved the gear mods, you would have the same balance.

Edit: don't get me wrong, I don't really mind the change, I believe it will be balanced one day. I just wonder why would one do this when cleaner solutions are possible.

The way the passive skill tree stands, this will create imbalance between Melee classes. For example, the Marauder that has easy access to Diamond skin and Elemental Adaptation, and the Duelist (particularly) and Shadow who has easy access to... Nothing.

This will force a Duelist to side with Kraitlyn (at least a couple of times anyway), essentially removing choice. Similarly, it will force said Duelists to always have an elemental resist amulet equipped in the necklace slot.

Also, it may be my inexperience, but equipment drops (armor and weaponry) and crafting seems a bit too random to depend on for elemental resistance.

As a level 52 Duelist in Merciless who's never sided with Kraitlyn and doesn't normally wear an elemental resist amulet, I find the current elemental damage challenging. With these changes my character will be useless.

The above paragraph isn't just meant as wining about my unfortunate Duelist build. Rather, it's meant to emphasize that unless other counter balances are taken (ie, more elemental resist nodes in the PST (for Duelists and Shadow in particular), and possibly other balances in gear mods, etc, many current lighter melee builds in Merciless are going to get seriously nerfed.

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wiggin wrote:

@Xapti

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Chris wrote:

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%.

And when i read your post I realized how weird is the upcoming change. And how unfair it is, too.

This change will not work without adjusting gear mods, passive tree and monster damage properly. The very same result without side effects could be achieved by - and now I will try to be really clear - adjusting gear mods, passive tree and monster damage.

What exactly is the penalty offering? Why don't you simply make the monsters hit harder and change the resist gear mods progression? It seems like penalty for the sake of penalty to me. You are balancing the game around -75%. But if you simply halved the gear mods, you would have the same balance.

I agree here. There's no need to add more systems when the current ones can be changed to accommodate harder Merciless difficulty.

By balancing the mods, high resistances can be something that can be worked towards, adding a sense of progression - instead of suddenly taking an arbitrary penalty during the game for no other reason than "it should be harder here".

I would hope that you all give as much feedback AFTER this has been implemented as you are before we've even seen it in play.