Monster Resistances and Damage Type for D4

General Discussion
1

If there were a real time description under the name of the monster that said i.e. “resists fire” when you hovered over it (similar to d2 monster tags) then I think resistances could work well. I would accept this in place of immunities if the devs have ruled out immunities.

Please make the type of damage important, in Diablo 3 it didn’t matter if the damage was physical, poison, cold, whatever. A barbarian may use a wand with 300-500 cold damage if it had more dps than an axe. The type of damage should be relevant too (maybe this changed some to make phys relevant when the crit damage craze started or maybe elemental crits too, not even sure).

Affixes like “-x% monster resistance to x” and “+x% fire damage” to further make damage type relevant and allow for more interesting builds to be made should be in the game as well.

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2

If skill casts replace the normal attack just like in D3, don’t expect for a resist-immunity system in D4.
All rezt-imm system ever did in D2:LoD was providing a power cap for synergies and casters, funneling them back to physical combat (whether ranged or melee) where they require a weapon and encourage multi-class traits. That’s why physical immune was intimidating but easy to break while non-physical is nigh impossible without abuse of some exploits and features, such as; Conviction, Lower Resist or synchronized hits.

3

Completely agreed.
We need monster resistances in D4.
To better balance single vs. multi dmg type builds.
To add more depth to combat encounters.

I think immuneties is a bad idea, as they go against the first goal here, but resistances is a great tool that it would be a folly not to use for Diablo 4.

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4

I’m fine with monsters having resistances, I’m even fine if items didn’t have “-X% resistance” affixes, as long as the monsters resistance isn’t near immunity that is (pretty much shouldn’t be higher than 75%). but if monsters were to have immunities, then there would need to be methods (either via passive or skill) of breaking said immunities.

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5

I don’t think we need immunities but I’d like to see resistances make a return. Once you’ve got them high enough, that’s already going to make damage types matter without making it so people just flat out can’t kill things.

I’d be careful about resistance penetration as a stat though. That’s very powerful, especially if we’re not going to play Diablo 2’s weird immunity game when it came to how that interacted with resistance penetration.

6

Yeah. If you make that too powerful, you simply make it possible to circumvent the resistances. Then it can’t accomplish what it was supposed to.
The mest efficient way to handle resistances should be to have multiple skills with different dmg types.

I think dmg conversion stats can be fine though. Using fire skills, but converting 50% fire to cold for example. That is a different way to be multi-dmg.
(and dmg conversion can of course also be used the other way; to go from multi dmg to single dmg type builds)

Unlike resistance penetration, dmg conversion does not ignore the resistances. You have merely traded a big weakness against 1 resistance to a somewhat smaller weakness against 2 resistances, which is a fair trade.
Resistance penetration might simply remove the weakness altogether (with a cost in affixes of course)

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7

Yes, especially if monster resistances can go into the negatives, in which case monsters who don’t have a resistance to your elemental damage would end up taking far more damage, which would make the resistance penetration stat a staple one for every build that would benefit from it.

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8

For a second, when I read the title, I was thinking about different damage types that could be used in D4 that were not used in D1, D2 , and D3.

Of course I thought about Grim Dawn’s damage types beyond the normal physical, fire, cold, lightning. It has Chaos, Aether, Acid, Trauma, and Vitality damage. Of course it doesn’t have Holy or Arcane damage like D3 does. I don’t know, maybe D4 will have an additional damage type or two to play with. And, um, don’t gimp on poison damage again. That was just messed up.

Topic at hand…

D2 immunities were only really bad in solo play. My fire Sorc was shut down every time I saw a fire immune. Yeah, in multiplayer I couldn’t damage it either, but other players could. Even monsters that had two immunities were more of an issue in solo vs. public.

If D4 is going to be even more anti-solo than D3, then immunities really don’t matter unless the whole group uses the same damage type that the monster is immune to.

If D4 will allow solo play, then resistances more than 75% might as well just be 100% or close enough to still be basically immune.

9

More than 75% resistance would still very much be killable.
Should probably never go above 90-95% however.

10

Yet whether lame or not, D2’s immunities were a conviction or lower res gear check, if you didnt want to split your build.

There was a way through immunities, if you knew the items (required google youtube to lookup, which isn’t cool) and where to find them (required learning, usually google or youtube, which isn’t cool), you then hunt for those items.

IF the game is fun to grind items, like D2 obviously was and D3 obviously is not, bc metacomp required, and no rare items that are new are in the game to hunt for, well, thats part of your endgame.

Like, D2 said “Go find out the way through immunities and hunt for those items, solo or in group”.

Usually this meant rerolling a char to some meta hammerdin or so that broke most immunities to hunt for your higher end items, or going cows w lightning to get hr tradeable items, lame or not, this was the most common path to getting through 'immune to this or that" for your build.

Obviously the good part about conviction is it’s on your merc which opens up your build, completely. If you had to equip conviction, omg, build variety endgame would be like so, so, so tiny. It’s like a super big deal that merc holds your key, not you.

So, immunities aren’t that bad they are a hardcore, lame or not, powerspike for AI. You want things like this bc diablo is supposed to be about SOLO play first, by far, then group. D1/2 were solo play, D3 is alllll group mandated, which means meta.

So, immunities have good and bad. Obvoiusly resistances are crucial for element type to matter, no brainer they should be in the game, and be tied to the element that AI monster is dealing. Example, a fire damage dealing AI should be fire res natively. Many, many, many people have brought this up over the years.

That’s one way how D2 did realism, and D3 didnt think of it / went anti-D2, but most likely they weren’t in tune w D2 enough to notice that since they were all about making ‘their own diablo’ that well we all know how that fell short.

So resistances automatically, or at least in higher difficulties after normal, assuming D4 actually has difficulties, which it probably wont, and/or the difficulties wont be hard enough, are automatic absolutely do it.

Immunities, are split. I think immunities should be in the game for a straight up “dont just continue the build you have w/o thinking”. “Start thinking about how to overcome this major powerspike the AI has going on on the last difficulty” is a good thing, but ONLY if it’s not what YOU have to wear (ie it’s on merc) so that build diversity is there. Yea, to max it you wear lower res gear and your merc has conviction, but at least you have an option to forgo self wearing -res gear to be not meta.

1000 percent have ai restances for element type they are, in later difficulties.
Maybe go w immunities too on last difficulty, if it’s done where your build doesnt have to be warped with what you wear to overcome it Also, they’d have to have a plan (like cows lightning builds, or hammerdin) where you have a build to go into immunities to go for, before finding your ultra end game conviction staff or -res gear.

I just dont think they’d know how to get -res gear in rare items, and not be super common. So as great as immunities are for caring about your build, the baby step is to make sure at least monster AI resistance for the type they are is there.

11

I’d rather not have immunities. I’d rather not have to compromise a build because I wouldn’t be able to progress because of a fire immune boss.

Resistances are fine to a point 75% max seems fine. Makes sense a fire ability wouldn’t be as effective on a fire mob. I would like to to see fire damage be more effective against ice/cold enemies and so on.

But a player should not be punished if they want to play all as one damage type. All immunities do is homogenize builds to a degree or force grouping. Since they have already stated you will not have to group up for anything, you can kiss immunities goodbye.

12

That problem can easily be overcome if Pierce Res is relative to the target’s resistance instead of a flat debuff like in D2.
For instance, a 20% Pierce Res would reduce a 75% res to 60% (75 x 0,8 = 60) instead of 55%. And a 10% res would become 8% instead of -10%.
That way, targets with high res would loose more than those with low res.

As for Immunities, they should happen occasionnally only in multiplayer dungeons, and more often as the group gets larger. No dual immune. No Solo nor World immune, only resistant monsters : I don’t want to be forced again into a dual elemental character.

13

The gameplay is not going to change much for monster resistance. For single build as such Fire Mage will just continue blasting the fire-resist monsters with more fireball shot.

For example, Diablo in Diablo 2 has 50 physical resistance and it doesn’t stop WW Druid to “Fury” the Diablo into oblivion, which only takes longer, but never inconvenient.

Only immunity will drive the players to change their approach by building 2 elements build or skip the mob completely.

14

That is quite unlikely.

if a monster has 90% fire resistance, some players would certainly consider adding a non-fire spell to their build. Instead of spending 10x the time to kill the monster.

Also, the whole point with resistances instead of immuneties, is that you have the option to keep spamming fireball if you really want to.
The goal should also be that doing so is not necessarily inefficient, as long as you have made a very good fire build.
The game should not drive people to change to multi-dmg builds. It should only encourage it and make sure that doing so is a viable choice. With single-dmg ALSO being a viable choice.

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15

It may also depend on how the skill system is set up. D2 had a system where to get to x skill you had to invest a point into y skill. Because of this, there were some option for classes to deal with the immune to “x” monsters.

A barbarian in D2 for instance might be physical damage aside from maybe a weapon that added some elemental damage but, he also had berserk skill that added magic damage to each attack. This allowed the barbarian to successfully kill an immune to physical monster.

This leads to how many difficulty levels there is though as D2 only had 3. If it scaled like D3, one point into said berserk skill wouldn’t have done damage in say GR 120…

16

Not really. Just means you’ll have to carry more stuff in your limited inventory. That’s not in the least bit interesting.

17

How are we supposed to counter monsters if we only have 6 skills? Runes are going to open up a bunch of options?

I think there is a strong possibility Diablo 4 is going to suck and be a D3 clone (sorry D3 fans, my opinion) if we are stuck at 6 skills. Literally how do you not be an arcade game if you only have 6 spells? Diablo needs to be an rpg, not an arcade game I play while I’m in the bathroom on my phone.

How am I going to counter different monsters with just 6 hotkeys? Unless this game is going to be an arcade game again.

This is like Diablo 3 all over, I complain for months and am skeptical. Nothing changes. Game is released and sure enough, the issue is in fact an issue. Well, from my D3 experience I now easily recognize D3 designs that I don’t want to spend time on because they’re not fun.

Diablo isn’t Whimsyshire jovial carnival time which you all seem to forget again and again. Sure you fixed the art, but a lot of your DIABLO fans aren’t into arcade games. I’ve never desired a dumbed down WoW as a game I want to play, that isn’t Diablo 2 LoD. If you’re trying to give us a dumbed down WoW as Diablo then why wouldn’t we just play WoW since it does WoW better than Diablo? Do you all have no idea what you’re doing anymore?

18

If they were going to have resistances again I’d say they need a bit more than 6 skill slots, but even that should be enough. It’s not like you need to run around with every damage type(nor should the game let you easily do that).

I get that people are skeptical of anything being like Diablo 3 after it burned a lot of us, but not being able to figure out how you can counter monsters with 6 skills sounds a lot more like a creativity problem than that game being legitimately bad.

Most of my builds in Diablo 2 didn’t use more than 6 active skills and I rather suspect you wouldn’t argue that was an arcade game you play while you’re in the bathroom.

Hyperbole doesn’t make for a great argument =P

19

Agreed, we need at least more than 6 skills. I don’t get why all skills need to be maxed or why we need a limit on the amount of skills that can be used. What about curse charges and 0skills and such.

I disagree about the number of skills used in D2 - I typically use at least 10. Sure you can write about a build or three, or as many as you want that only use 6 skills and I can do similarly with builds that use well more than 6 skills. The majority of D2 chars use 10+ skills. 99+% of my D2 chars have 10 or more skills bound and I don’t have the wealth for a bunch of Call to Arms. I am including portal in my hotkeying, but still.

My frenzy barb - frenzy, double swing, berserk, battle cry, shout, battle shout, battle orders, find item, taunt, leap (or you could use a staff w/ tele charges as well on switch) - that’s 10 skills not including portal or a lifetap wand on switch. My kick/trapper uses more than my barbarian.

20

Imo 7-8 skills would be optimal.
With monster resistances as well.

1 single target skill
1 AoE
1 seconday dmg type attack (ST or AoE)
1 CC/debuff
1 mobility
1 buff

That is 6 skills. But I think it is best to have a skill slot cap that is slightly above the bare minimum needed. That is part of what allows builds to diversify themselves (while still having a cap low enough so you cant just get everything you might desire).
Like, do you go for a second buff (both offensive and defensive as an example), or maybe both a single target and AoE skill for your secondary dmg type, etc.