Let’s first talk about the inequality of the penalties among the charms.
Not all resistances are created equal.
- Magic Resistance charm reduces magic resistance by 50% but there is literally no means in the game to counteract this debuff.
- Lightning resistance charm poses the greatest risk to casters playing Hardcore compare to more easily avoidable damage types like Fire or Cold. Glooms and MSLE elites will become a further hindrance without actually gaining much over current lightning meta.
- Cold resistance charm can be partially counteracted by thawing potions and, outside of Frost Novas on death which are easily avoidable, the only other risk from cold damage comes from Act bosses.
- Poison Resistance charm can literally be circumvented with antidote potions whenever a poison attack lands and the potions can also cover 50% of the lost resistance similar to thawing potions.
- Fire resistance charm debuffs are laughable. The BIS fire helm that was released last patch (Flickering Flame) completely negates the resistance debuff…
- Physical debuff is debilitating for melee builds and not much of an issue for zons. As if melee didn’t already have greater gear dependancy than casters and also had issues keeping pace with caster DPS…
Now the real question. Why do the penalties differ? It makes no sense that a class that has mastered poison, for example, also loses resistance to poison. Furthermore, these charms don’t increase damage or player power so why is there a penalty to gain access to content equally amongst all the builds? The charms only allow you to engage with monsters you couldn’t before. The charm slot already takes away a slot for a +skills charm so it’s actually inferior damage to the other 2/3 of content the build was already capable of clearing…
I honestly don’t know what the developers were thinking creating new halo items that act as gatekeepers for content they claim they want everyone to have access to…
This is what is claimed.
Yet this is the implementation.
The solution to not being able to gain full access to the zones is to farm the elite packs within said zones for the hopes of finding a charm that hopefully rolls the resistance you need so you can finally compete on a more even field as the player that rolled Hammerdin.
Rather counterproductive isn’t it? Especially considering that Ladder is a race, your success on the leaderboards should be left to RNG?
There are plenty of alternatives to how immunities could have been dealt with but the developers choose the bandaid route of adding RNG flavored gatekeeper items.
Some alternatives that could have been explored:
- setting a universal cap for resistances
- changing how resistances are broken
- building mechanism into skill trees to lower/break resistances
- etc.