Blizz… you really need to reconsider how resists work… The entire point of resistances is to MITIGATE damage. Not all that useful if you “diminishing returns” everything into oblivion. -_- that’s terrible math and even worse in practice. Conceptually, it’s not good for video games.
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Druid is very bad untill very late game…
I disagree, watch some gameplays and eat your words. Druid is strong from mid-game.
I noticed this when I was preparing the build for my mage. I think currently both mage and necromancer are the worst classes by far, have serious scaling issues and don’t have much build variety.
I’m not even sure if it’s straight up diminishing returns, or some horrible relative math going on. As in, +X% is a percentage of some base value that they don’t really tell us, which results in the values being significantly worse than you would expect.
Just recently, I got an item that would give 58.1% to a resistance that was at 48.9% according to my stat sheet. I equip it, and my resistance went from 48.9% → 55.3%. Around 5.4% resistance. Then you look at the tooltip and it tells you that it actually prevents half of that, so I’m really getting 2.7% of that resistance.
That’s utter nonsense. It may be mathematically correct based on their formula, but beyond all other problems it’s extremely misleading to the player. The item appears to say it will give a lot but it gives virtually nothing due to however the calculation works.
I noticed there are some other values that are clearly relative percentage multipliers and not flat percentage adds, which is really, really unclear unless you’re paying a lot of attention and really analyzing your stat changes from a gear swap. Lucky Hit Chance is a big one. +5% Lucky Hit Chance turns my skill with 20% to a skill with 21%. Because 5% of 20 is 1. That is utterly trash, it makes all Lucky Hit Chance affixes worthless.
The funny thing is that skills tell you when they are one or the other in their tooltips, but items do not. You’ll see something like “Lucky Hits increase damage by 50%[+] for 5 seconds” which tells you it will add that, which is very different from “50%[x]”, which would multiply 50% in. Yet, for one of the most critical things, your gear, the game gives you the finger and expects you to figure it out.
Ultimately because of how this math works, Resistance bonuses have no value. As others have mentioned, this also applies to Paragon Board changes to Resistances. +6.0% Cold Resistance nodes gave me less than 0.5% Cold Resistance. Those nodes have no value in any scenario. In fact, I just checked it out and watched a 6.0% Cold Resistance node take my Cold Resistance from 55.2% to 55.5%. 0.3% for a stated 6.0% node. What.
Why exactly don’t Resistances just have a cap like every other ARPG and have every bonus be additive? There’s a reason every other APRG has a max resistances system and not this.
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It’s technically not diminishing returns I suppose, though I think if I did the Effective HP math for resists it’d be heavilly diminishing.
All elemental resist stats are multiplicative with each other. Your 58.1% resist itemdoes exactly what it says when you add it to your build: it lowers all the damage it itself mitigates in half (slightly more even).
The issue is that, with the “armour takes care of half the damage” and “WT4 ignores 40% of your resists”, the end result is that elemental resistances only work on 30% of the elemental damage you get!
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Multiplicative with…what? “Each other” means…what in this context? Because my character has very few resistances on gear, fewer on skills. But somewhere that number is being manipulated into a point where I would have to do extensive trial and error to really learn what’s going on here and how the formula truly works.
The reality is that it’s all multiplicative of a base value that you simply don’t see, just like Lucky Hit Chance (except you can see Lucky Hit Chance). It’s bad in both places, because the player is left to determine which values are additive and which are multiplicative. There should not be this “figure it out” game.
Your resistance is itself a percentage. By saying you add another percentage in any other ARPG, you’re adding that percentage on top of the other percentage. Except that’s not what’s happening here. It’s actually + (0.x * some unrepresented base value). There is zero indication what that base value is, the game simply doesn’t tell you unless you have no other modifiers at all. So the only way to know that now that my character is high level is to unequip everything I have, deallocate all of my skill and paragon points, then slowly log every individual change to figure out where things are going wrong. In this day and age, that lack of clarity is frankly inexcusable.
In fact, on other affixes, it literally is additive. +% Damage is a flat add to your associated Damage increase. If I add +20% Damage on my weapon, I get what I see. That’s always how it should be. You should get what you see. I see +58.1% resistance, but I don’t get +58.1%. I get +(0.581 * something), which is significantly different.
The very concept of “diminishing returns” is in the fact that that’s how math works. +200% → +300% is not as impactful as +100% → +200% by its very nature. When things shouldn’t get to some value in the first place, you have a cap. That’s how resistances are handled in every other ARPG because you don’t want the player getting immunity to an element like that, but you also don’t want the information to be confusing or unclear, either.
So what we have here are affixes that are extremely unclear, don’t do what they say they do at face value, and then on top of all of that, they are all truly calculated using base values the game expects you to know but you don’t.
This is all straight up bad design. I fully agree that there’s no math error going on. I don’t think that the game is doing something wrong from how it was designed. It’s just bad design.
Except Armor doesn’t appear to have diminishing returns, or the cap for that is significantly higher. I had around 3200 Armor, which resulted in 27% reduction in damage according to the game. I drank a +900 Armor Elixir, and it went to 42%. Even if armor started to get bypassed along with Resistances, Armor would still be a better option because +Armor = Better increases without any unclear math.
Armor Increases are me getting what I see, which is exactly how it should always be, and since Armor and Resistances both equally contribute to damage mitigation, I have no reason to ever go through the nonsense that is Resistance math when Armor is straight and to the point. Why does Armor work differently than Resistances?
The simple answer is often the correct one, and in this situation the simple answer is bad design. Two things in the same game that do the same thing conceptually, yet work completely differently for no apparent reason is, at its core, bad design.
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Did you graduate high-school?
Your cap is 60%(before armor considerations).
60%-48.9%= 11.1%
11.1% * 58.1%=6.4%
6.4+48.9= 55.3%
Then divide by 2
Actual reduction goes to 27.7%, up from 24.5%.
Marginal EHP impact is about 4.5% against that particular damage type.
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I’ll spell it out for you bro. He had over 52% resistance and he equipped an item with 50 more % resist, it gave 4% resistance and he divided it in half and claimed that all resistance is worth that much.
He took that value and put it into a spread sheet claiming that every single point of resistance was worth the same as the amount he gained while already near the upper limit. He was already at the upper limit because he was playing as a sorcerer.
If that is a struggle for you to understand on why it is wrong, then I have to ask. DID YOU?
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Man I was running around with boots with all resists thinking it did something. Blizzard pls fix this crap.
I love drinking a 25% res pot and having my res only go up by 5%
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The enchantress is making me suffer, she has absolutely no resistance and here’s why.
How this failure made it through testing is beyond me. Do they actual hire anyone that plays the end game?
Pretty easy fix i would think
% on gear = % you get
WT1 and 2 have no reduction, full resists
30% reduction for each tier WT3 and 4, so -60% at WT4
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So 50% resist;
- WT4 -40%
10% - resist mechanic ,halves the resistance.
5% - gear mechanic, the more you add gives diminishing returns, meaning the more you add the less you get.
Conclusion, resistances works fine.
Wanna test it? remove resistance and go fight cold/fire/poison elites and find out how much more damage they do, spoiler… a lot.
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But then please explain … what’s the point having + resist in gear when + defense gives you more resist to elements?
Because that part is bugged, and Blizzard is going to fix that. They already said it somewhere.
At this point i would not walk with less then 40% resistance. Also if you don’t have tons of armor, resistance does more. For me as melee druid, there is a big reduction in damage taken at 20% or 40%. Mostly from aoe puddles on the floor.
It’s not bugged. It’s working exactly as intended. Blizzard only said that resists are bad and need to be reworked. Not that it’s bugged.
Don’t believe me? Test them. The formula for resists is pefectly known and matches what they said on how they work.
The main issues with resists are:
- there’s not enough room in our item affixes to spend them on specific element resists when there’s 5 different elements
- WT4 nerfs resist values you really get by 40%, this is practically impossible to overcome
- Armour taking care of half the damage means resists values are cut by 50% too, this is super dumb
The final math means that as you stack insane amounts of resistances, the best you can reach is a 30% damage reduction for that single element. And it’s impossible to reach that value anyway. On the other hand, when you use your affixes and paragon points to improve your armour, you get not only a super important reduction to physical damage (remember how those giant crossbow skeletons OS sorcerers from offscreen? That’s because they lack armour) and more effective elemental resist out of them.
This is in part because armour scales linearly or something which is insane compared to elemental resists.
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I think we know the real solution here, nerf armor to only prevent physical damage and have dimishing returns. Make resists give the actual value on the sheet and not half just like d2