I have always thought the 75 resists is a cap and if you have say 80 fire resist the extra 5 is wasted. But this is not true? If I already have max resists at 75 and then put of Kira’s with 70 to all resists and then get hit with fire damage and/or Conviction the extra resists beyond the 75 cap will kick in? I have an Act II merc with 71 fire resist and he always die when I run Trav. I put a Kira’s in him and he’s now invincible even though fire resist is capped at 75. Surely he’s using all of the extra resists?
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75 is the max base resist (before gear, buffs, and charms) you can get. In the original I believe the hard cap was 90 unless it went higher but didn’t show (can’t remember which). For D2R I can’t answer this as there are things that got uncapped.
95 is the max resistance you can have. you can increase your cap by wearing appropriate items (for example waterwalks gives 5% max fire resists or guardian angel gives 15% max all resists) or by using certain runes (Vex rune provides 5% to max fire resist so it would allow you to have 80). without this then yes technically anything over 75% is wasted unless you face something like lower resists & conviction then the extra resists would help.
so your merc is using kiras + what armor? are you making sure you have a good amount of life leech? generally if your merc is doing enough dps and has enough life leach you can just circumvent hydra damage… but best merc setup to survive & take out trav = eth reapers with shael, gface with 15% ias jewel and treachery. some people use guardian angel on merc which i dont really care for but if you pair it with kiras then you can get 90% all resists but i dont think it is worth losing killing speed, fade, crushing blow & deadly strike.
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Keep in mind that the increase in percentage protection against elements is logarithmic. A 4 percent increase in protection from 71 percent represents a 16 percent reduction in damage going from 71 to 75 percent.
Reapers + Treachery but there’s no time for fade to trigger. He normally never dies in combat except by archers.
correct, you need extra resists to offset the negative effects of conviction aura and lower resists curse
works as intended
It’s okay, resistance doesn’t understand any of us either
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trav is generally considered one of the hardest hitting mobs for sure especially for mercs. i normally dont have an issue dealing with player 1 trav using reapers + gface + treachery also using nm act 2 with holy freeze. holy freeze + decrep makes any monster pretty much useless and reapers provides enough life leech to stay alive. fade procing isnt all that necessary. guess at this point i would suggest trying guardian angel on your merc and see how you like that. 90% fire resist should make hydra pretty weak.
Just cap your fire resist and use fire absorb gear like hellmouth and you will laugh at hydras in Trav.
Yes.
Hell mode is -100 all resists
75 is max effective resist (unless you have items to increase max like hot spurs, guardian angel, etc.)
So you need +175 of an element to be maxed at 75.
If you have items that are +250 it won’t help you, UNLESS there is a unique monster with lower resist (ob knights in CS/WSK) or conviction aura (aura enchanted affix).
Lower resist will reduce your resists by another ~50 in hell, while conviction will reduce them by ~80 (not 100% certain of numbers everywhere in game, but it’s close to this in CS).
So (assuming these numbers) to maintain your resist at 75 with lower resist you need +225 of that element. To maintain it with conviction you need +255. To maintain it with both you need +305.
This can be especially important in CS if you’re doing Infector of Souls seal boss, because the fire breath can kill you when you’re double debuffed even if you have “maxed” resists at 175, you really need like 300+ to be fully safe.
This is why hammerdins often wear hotspurs when doing CS, or barbs wear them for trav, even with endgame gear, to get the huge FR bonus to reach +300 or so to negate LR/conviction.
For example, I had an endgame hammerdin with +225 resists (50 over the ‘75 max’) who was fine with either debuff individually, but got double debuffed by LR/conviction and died instantly to infector with 3000HP. Don’t mess around with conviction or LR and dangerous mobs (the big venom lord demons, black souls in WSK, etc.) unless you have very high resists over-max.
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Yep put GA and kira on your merc for trav, or he will die a lot.
Didn’t know that. I thought it was linear. Very educational thanks! I will experiment and see what happens.
My Pally just has the base 75 max resist and with a dwarf star the hydras in trav hell is just a tickle. The councils hit hard themselves too, not just the hydras.
And yes as someone mentioned, your actual total resist is hidden even though the cap is showed and used. The spillover is only used when there’s things like conviction or lower resist in effect, then the spillover is used to offset that. So very useful when there’s conviction spawned uniques in say Trav.
Hydra damage on players has been reduced to 17% (?) but merc takes full damage. Hence the tickle on your player character.
There are also items that extend the “cap” on resists which are a factor to consider here.
So if your “cap” begins at 75% but the cap is extended past that, to say 85%, you’ve gained an effective 10% over the original one. Now those points are no longer “wasted”.
The point on having a “cap” on resists is that if you’re completely immune to damage, then there’s no vulnerability to it. Hence, no one can ever be 100% immune to all damage types.
If you can run around the game with impunity, never taking damage but yet dishing it out, it’s “God Mode” and what would be the point other than watching pixels explode?
Now, you can mitigate and reduce that damage taken by maxing them out, but you’ll always take a certain percentage of damage, somehow and somewhere.
Also note that absorb is applied after resists, not before.
So let’s say you take 1000 fire damage.
With 50% resist that would go to 500
With 75% resist that would go to 250
With 90% resist that would go to 100
With 50% resist + 15% absorb (dwarf star) that goes to 500, then 15% absorb calculated, removing 75 and healing you for 75, final damage 350
With 75% resist + 15% absorb, 250 post-resist, then 37.5 reduced, 37.5 healed, final damage 175
With 90% resist + 15% absorb, 100 post resist, 15 reduced, 15 healed, 70 final damage.
There’s also flat absorbs like tgods (20 lightning absorb). So for that if you had 75 resist and took 1k, then it’d be 250 post-resist, and you’d absorb 20, for a total of 230. Flat absorb like Tgods is better for “shot-gun” damage skills though (e.g. meph charged bolts) in which you’ll absorb 20 from every bolt and it does A LOT more.
Increasing you base/max resist is basically always better than absorb, but once you’re capped it can give you an extra cushion.
On the other hand, most classes with proper end-game gear/vit/block are not going to die to anything at 75% resist, except maybe a huge room of black souls or ubers. It’s mainly when you get debuffed with conviction or LR that you’re in danger of getting insta killed before you can react and leave game/rejuv/life steal. So increasing max resist isn’t necessarily that big of a deal in most settings so much as increasing over +resist to negate these debuffs and maintain a 75 resist even when under conviction or LR. Not all classes need to, it’s more important for melee than casters, but if you can reach e.g. 255 resist for an element it makes you very safe.
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resistance is futile. its very simple to understand.
You can still raise it to 90 because I have Hotspur Boots that give +15% to fire resistance plus the 45% added to fire resist.