So I have a lvl 87 seasonal Barbarian. I usually save up all my legendary drops and then do one big upgrade every once in a while. Recently I upgraded all my gear to 925 power. I didn’t lose any life, my total armor increased, my resistance stayed about the same, most are close to 30%. Also I made sure that the legendary powers all stayed the same or upgraded them if I could. But after the gear upgrade I seem to have lost quite a bit of survivability.
My skills are all the same, legendary powers all stayed the same. I don’t understand what changed for the worse.
EDIT: here are my stats,
attack power 30,721
armor 7571
life 17795
Resists: fire 28.6 poison 40.6 lightning 40.6 cold 70 shadow 7.6
Resists matter alot, specially in wt4 you get inherent negative resists just for being there and upgrading to 925 should of added armor so that’s my guess
For farming heltides Blood maiden you should have maxed fire and poison, its not hard at all. You know there is tempering right?
Think of armor as just one of the 6 resists (physical, fire, poison, lightning, cold, shadow.
Armor caps at 9230, at which point it offers 85% damage reduction. The other resists can go to 70% normally, but there are ways to bring them to 85% as well.
So bringing armor up is important, but so is bringing up your other resists. Any resist that’s less than 60% at your level is gonna get you stomped.
The armor cap is 9230 and the Resistance cap is 70% and both are a pretty big deal. You can lose several hundred armor at max or 15 resistance and actually feel it in the dungeons.
I would recommend maxing Fire, lightning, and poison if you are forced to choose b/c those are the most common and if you want a testing example use the Maiden fight with fire resist to see just how big of an impact resistance makes.
Armor or Resistance?
The community has decided and says “both.”
Also you’ll want to re-jig your paragon board to take +% to max life wherever it’s reachable. Especially the rare tenacity nodes. HP scaling does a lot for barbs.
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Because the game requires both to be viable in endgame content. By all means you can just ignore one over the other and see how far that gets you.
You need to hit cap for armor and ress… It is mandatory.
Btw is is something you should have almost at start of your entry to WT4. So around 60 lvl ±
Also your life is super low. I have 50k on necro. You should aim at 100k with barb.
Yep, that’s why the answer is both.
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How in the world do you have 50k life? I tried to prioritize +life and this is as far as I got.
Armor all slotted with Rubies? You pull that off you’re starting with at least 30k. Assuming all your gear has max slots.
Count up the +% max health in your paragon board as well.
I have 200k life…
You just stack all of the %x multiplicative life nodes, gems, and passives.
OK, so, seems like I need to farm the seasonal boss lady demon for gear, I have like 40 hearts. She wipes me with fire but I can usually find a group stomping her and just join in for gear drops.
So I need max socket gear for gems for life and resist. Use tempering for resist.
Is my attack power of 30,721 sufficient? I don’t seem to struggle with killing most mobs, my charge skill plus the legendary power explodes most groups of elites in one charge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urH8y4gRClQ
This will explain most of what you need. For health
Honestly, this number is merely referential and you gotta take it in context of all the multiplicative modifiers and what skill you’re using. That number can be through the roof but if your skills don’t synergize and compound the damage multiplier, you’ll do jack for damage anyways.
What build are you running?
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You can get scattered prisms by participating in world boss events, then use those to punch holes in your gear for gems. You also get lots of legendary gear drops just from killing monsters in general - doesn’t have to be the helltide maiden.
Rework your paragon board to bring up resist-all, put gems in your jewelry to bring up the resists that cause you the most trouble, look for gear aspects that synergize with each other (especially things that give multipliers to damage), and get as much health as you can.
I’d hold off on using tempering for resists unless there’s literally no other way to bring them up.
This is very accurate and you should NOT focus on AP.
A perfect example would be you have an item with +45% damage and you replace it with an item that has +90% close damage. Your AP would go down by 45% but as long as you’re in melee range you would actually receive a 45% increase to your actual damage.
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I’m not even sure how this number works, I assume it represents the damage output you get if you were to hit something devoid of any kind of circumstance or skill usage. Which is essentially not a scenario that ever occurs.
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OK, so, were should my stats come from? Should resistance come from equipment or predominantly gems, or paragon points?
Is there a preferred means of gaining +armor, +life, and + resistance? Like +armor from items, and + life from gems, and + resistance from paragon points?
Gems in jewelry are great for topping off any missing resists because you can’t put anything but resists/armor in jewelry gem slots. Plus they’re the easiest to swap around as you put together your gear.
Helm, bp, legs and boots tend to have only 1-2 stats you care about, and so are usually great for getting resists on (as natural affixes, not tempered). For the longest time I had +2000 armor from a greater affix in my legs. Juggernaut’s aspect is also great for armor.
After that, you get them from paragon nodes, and intelligence (which gives +resist all). You can sometimes make minor paragon path modifications to favor intelligence over willpower nodes, for example. I’ve manged to squeeze 2-3% extra resists out this way on some builds.
You probably don’t want to get rolled resists on jewelry since they are good sources of crit chance, attack speed, CDR etc.
Tempers should be reserved for skill boosts (like concussion - depending on your build), +damage and the like.