The big uproar about them is resistance reduction making sundered monsters too easy to kill, Cold Sorc being the main focus… The suggestion by @DarkMaster for reducing the effectiveness of Cold Mastery, Lower Resist, Conviction and -enemy resistance items down to 20% effectiveness would be fine IMO…
Here’s an alternative thought for fire/lightning/cold/poison Sunder charms:
With the elemental Sunder charms, the monsters immunity is broken, their resistance is set to 75% to that element, and they become immune to resistance modifying effects? (for the one with the Sunder charm)
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The cold sorc is just the tip of the iceberg. What everybody talk about because they dont dig enough. It goes much deeper.
Yes that is not an unreasonable change to set it at a fixed 75%.
I’d prefer that sundered monsters have their res set at 90% and that ALL sources of neg. res. are at 1/5th penalty (including cold mastery). This way things like flickering flame, eschutas, and facets are STILL valuable and still add killing power - just not very much.
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Yeah, something like this is the right approach.
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I think the overall goal of Sunder charms is to allow solo damage type builds to have a way to progress through areas where most monsters are immune to their damage type. But we shouldn’t be capable of blasting through these monsters like they are paper bags either…
Think about a Blizzard sorceress trying to get through the Claw Viper Temple in Hell difficulty, in Hardcore. Right now, her only option (playing solo) is to skip the cold immune vipers, and some tight hallways can be packed with them. A risky task, even with teleport. One wrong move, and your deeds of valor will be remembered.
Now, if she had some charm that removed the immunity, but they were still hard to kill, she’d have another option to get through.
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Some people have been testing Sunder charms more indepth, and it turns out that Conviction/Lower Resist from your merc is still 1/5 even when you have a Sunder charm, it’s only if you have Conviction/LR on yourself that it’s fully effective.
That reduces the egregious-ness of the problem somewhat but cold sorcs are still a big issue and it’s still a big power buff for paladins that use Conviction or characters that self-wield Infinity/Plague, or necros that use Lower Resistance.
But yeah, reducing most resistance pierce to 1/5 against Sundered monsters seems like the easiest and most straightforward solution (in my opinion) to the current issues of Sunder charms. I still think Cold Mastery needs a stronger penalty like 1/10 so she doesn’t have a big step up of the others.
I think -Enemy Resists% from facets/Griffons/etc. shouldn’t be penalized because it’s fairly hard to get those stats and a lot of them require sacrificing other gear slots (facets replace topazes, Ist runes and other jewels, Crescent Moon uses up your weapon slot, etc.).
I think Sunder charms should function similarly to how breaking immunities currently works, in that it does break the immunity but they’ve got a ton of resistance left over that needs reduced by the fairly rare/hard to get -Enemy Resists% stat.
Another issue is the magic and physical Sunder charms, they’re pretty underwhelming for different reasons.
Magic Sunder charms
Magic is underwhelming because there’s no way to reduce magic resistance, I think what could work is allowing Lower Resistance to reduce magic resistance like it did in older versions of D2. HOWEVER, they would need to make it so hammers ignore the reduced resists (i.e. so they only take the monsters base magic resistance into account), otherwise this would be a buff for hammerdins too which isn’t needed of course. 
This change would allow bone necros to get some more damage in PvM (and Berserk barbs too if they want to use a LR wand) while allowing PvPers a workaround (since they can ban Lower Resist in their rules).
Physical Sunder charms
Physical on the other hand is also pretty bad, because the physical Sundering just isn’t worth a constant -25% physical resistance. It’s like having 1/4 Amp Damage (that stacks with actual Amp) at all times, and physical resistance is a hard stat to stack up.
The only physical damage build that would really consider using Sunder charms is thorns builds because it increases the damage reflected.
Most have better options for dealing with physical immunes like Vengeance, Magic Arrow, Berserk, Sanctuary, etc.
I’m not sure what would be a good change for the penalty on physical Sunder charms but it needs changed somehow.
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