Dear GGG: You brought over a MASSIVE mistake from PoE1 to PoE2 and it hurts everyone! Resistance?!

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

Players gain resistance as a form of progression in order to survive fighting stronger enemies, however as players get into the higher levels resistance becomes easier and easier to reach the 75% limit on and this is a problem. There can't be any progression if a limit is quickly hit after all. The solution GGG first and still has is that as the player progresses throughout the game they lose 60% resistance.

You see two facts and mistakenly assume one is an issue and the second is supposed to be a solution. This is simply false. Following it is not surprising that your conclusion and supposed solution are also wrong.

The negative resistance per act is there so that players are more incentivized to keep upgrading gear. With your formula this would be removed. Because once a piece of item has 10-20 resistance it would be enough for the entire campaign because of the diminishing returns. You also have to balance monster damage around this which further disincentivizes investing in resistances. So you would achieve the opposite of what is wanted.

More investment has to give more benefit. With such a backwards system with diminishing returns you would very quickly reach a point where investing is useless. Currently getting + maximum resistances and the needed resistances needs effort and higher level items. Also the 135% sweet spot you mention in another post is wrong. This only accounts for -60% from the acts and the 75% cap. But in reality you also want an extra 20%-25% to run waystones with the "player is cursed with elemental weakness" affix.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

This leaves any source of inconsistent resistance like co-op sceptre/skill auras and the new PoE2 charms amidst other things dead in the crib for the super-majority of players.

Charms ok. This was most likely just taken from flasks in PoE 1. There it is very good because of Mageblood.

Auras are usually used by group players. So these players know they are playing at a group and build their characters accordingly. Just because something is not for 100% of the player base does not mean it is useless or bad.

The entire thread is a complete nothing burger. The current system is working. It has been working for more than 10 years.

What is even the goal or the issue here? Do you not like that stats on your gear are important and that you have to find a balance between affixes? That's just part of this type of game.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

If you get a new piece of gear that has better stats then you could still be stuck using the worse item you already have until you go through the loathsome process of re-balancing your resistances to match your new item

Changing some resistances is not that hard now that we can swap runes. So you can always change an item for a better one. It's not that big of a deal you try to portrait it as. But if the new "better" item is lacking resistances and you would lose too much, then the new item simply is not better.

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dear123000#3577 wrote:

Yeah, I'd like to see a bit of a rework to resistances. The mods take up suffix slots on your gear which makes it feel a bit limited for builds that need multiple specific mods. Especially, builds that need to stack skill levels (because their damage won't scale with equipped weapons) which makes it quite bad to balance defensive and offensive stats.

The point of reworking resistances is not to make it so people will not to spend mod slots on them though. It's just currently it works very clunky around 75%, and if you don't plan to go up to 75%, getting some earlier points doesn't do much.

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The negative resistance per act is there so that players are more incentivized to keep upgrading gear. With your formula this would be removed. Because once a piece of item has 10-20 resistance it would be enough for the entire campaign because of the diminishing returns.

Players are already incentivized to keep upgrading gear. I don't think anyone getting molested by fire damage wouldn't want more fire resistance. Greed is also infinite. Changing the scaling curve would not remove peoples' desire for more relevant stats. The diminishing returns curve would not be nearly steep enough for resistance tiers not to matter.

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You also have to balance monster damage around this which further disincentivizes investing in resistances. So you would achieve the opposite of what is wanted.

Monster damage would require absolutely no balance adjustments for this change to take effect, except for maybe a minor tweak for the middle acts of the campaign and that's a small maybe.

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More investment has to give more benefit. With such a backwards system with diminishing returns you would very quickly reach a point where investing is useless.

Under what arbitrary rule? Also, such a system would not be backwards. All damage mitigation has growing returns innately due to not being dead and multiplying the relative effectiveness of healing. The system we have now is what's backwards. Diminishing returns wouldn't make investment useless it would just make investment make sense. Every way to mitigate damage taken past 75% is valuable.

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Currently getting + maximum resistances and the needed resistances needs effort and higher level items. Also the 135% sweet spot you mention in another post is wrong. This only accounts for -60% from the acts and the 75% cap. But in reality you also want an extra 20%-25% to run waystones with the "player is cursed with elemental weakness" affix.

Reaching 75% to 90% mitigation with a new formula system would still need effort and higher level items. Nothing in the OP goes against tankyness needing investment. I technically didn't forget the "over-capped" res needed to counter de-buffs either. My example formula actually requires more than +135 res to reach around 75% mitigation since resistance de-buffs would be less effective, but more consistent against the player.

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Auras are usually used by group players. So these players know they are playing at a group and build their characters accordingly. Just because something is not for 100% of the player base does not mean it is useless or bad.

I am aware that the rare few that play in aura parties have dedicated gear for synergy. What I was getting at is that it's an overly niche deterrent of entry that de-incentivizes co-op play and party synergy for an already moderate amount of the player-base. Anything that inherently demoralizes people away from co-op is bad game design. I'll admit this is minor compared to other PoE2 issues that ruin the multiplayer experience, but it still adds to the pile.

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The entire thread is a complete nothing burger. The current system is working. It has been working for more than 10 years.

Working does not mean that it's a good system. GGG could leave the res system as is forever and it would still function. That does not mean it's a major positive for the game or that a new and better system couldn't take its place.

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What is even the goal or the issue here? Do you not like that stats on your gear are important and that you have to find a balance between affixes? That's just part of this type of game.

The goal is for defensive scaling to be less tedious, players to enjoy balancing their gear more and for difficulty scaling to be more consistent which is good for both the players and the developers. The resistances on gear would still be immensely important and everyone would still use them to the same degree, if not more depending on how tanky they want to be. Balancing stats will never not be important and a change like this would just make the mechanics more user friendly and less tedious, which would actually make players enjoy engaging with the mechanic more.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

Players are already incentivized to keep upgrading gear. I don't think anyone getting molested by fire damage wouldn't want more fire resistance. Greed is also infinite. Changing the scaling curve would not remove peoples' desire for more relevant stats. The diminishing returns curve would not be nearly steep enough for resistance tiers not to matter.

Couple issues: you give players too much credit. They need to be incentivized via a clear NUMERICAL value goal, otherwise they will continue to get wrecked by fire damage over and over and over again. Even veteran PoE 1 players prove this with less-than-obvious stats. You overestimate "defensive greed" across arpg players....this is rarely a thing unless your goal at the endgame is to build as tanky a character as possible. Only a very very small crew of players do this. Again, we see this across all levels of players: how often does someone complain about content being too hard, only for the next person to spot that their character has....no life, no resistances, no defenses, etc.

Also, while there are issues with the % system we have, it at least gives a pretty darn clear indicator to players what they need, how much they need, and where the maximum is. With a linear, ever-increasing system, this disappears. Players HATE mystery when it comes to character values. With a passion. How often is Armour brought up as a huge issue because of the "mystery" surrounding how those numbers actually functionally work? How about minion stats? DoT tooltip damage?

I do agree though, that if a system like this were adopted it would HAVE TO BE diminishing returns. The curve can be adjusted as needed in any way you want to make it "fit" the whole game, that isn't a problem. You can't possibly have an effective system in place with the reverse. This is why +maximum resistances in our current system is so unbalanced when compared to other layers of defense: it has a built in INCREASING return past the maximum, which makes investment feel much more mandatory and OP.

I really like Minecraft but squared blocks are an MASSIVE mistake, and have to change. NOW!!!!

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llindvior#2871 wrote:

I really like Minecraft but squared blocks are an MASSIVE mistake, and have to change. NOW!!!!

Minecraft needs an overhaul too. Trapezoids are the superior shape.

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MantisCore#7954 wrote:

Agreed.

One thing I never liked in PoE 1 was how you maxed out your resistances pretty much whatever build you were using, and the game was clearly balanced around this. It's the illusion of choice, and a trap for new players not aware that they are expected to max out these stats.

Increasing your resistance never really felt like powering up your character, just something you had to do to be playing at baseline difficulty.

Exactly, the illusion of choice is really making gears less interesting.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

Also, while there are issues with the % system we have, it at least gives a pretty darn clear indicator to players what they need, how much they need, and where the maximum is. With a linear, ever-increasing system, this disappears. Players HATE mystery when it comes to character values. With a passion. How often is Armour brought up as a huge issue because of the "mystery" surrounding how those numbers actually functionally work? How about minion stats? DoT tooltip damage?

I would argue that it's actually not all that clear. With the current system, you'd think max resists means you're going to ignore 75% of incoming elemental damage. That sounds fantastic and like you'd be able to practically ignore a lot of mechanics. But 75% resists is the expectation. So, in reality, the damage you take with 75% resists is still quite dangerous. Getting over 75% is when it starts to feel like you're mitigating a significant enough amount of the damage to experience comfort. So, you should probably be viewing 75% as nothing and every 1% after that as around 4% mitigation.

Also, why does everyone point at armour in this situation as though evasion doesn't also use a diminishing returns formula that no one complains about?

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drkekyll#1294 wrote:

Also, why does everyone point at armour in this situation as though evasion doesn't also use a diminishing returns formula that no one complains about?

Right? The Entrophy thing is annoying, because we can evade 99 hits, the one that lands is a massive slam crit which will OKHO.

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drkekyll#1294 wrote:

I would argue that it's actually not all that clear. With the current system, you'd think max resists means you're going to ignore 75% of incoming elemental damage. That sounds fantastic and like you'd be able to practically ignore a lot of mechanics. But 75% resists is the expectation. So, in reality, the damage you take with 75% resists is still quite dangerous. Getting over 75% is when it starts to feel like you're mitigating a significant enough amount of the damage to experience comfort. So, you should probably be viewing 75% as nothing and every 1% after that as around 4% mitigation.

Also, why does everyone point at armour in this situation as though evasion doesn't also use a diminishing returns formula that no one complains about?

1) Percents are clear, you are just misconstruing the meaning by comparing two different things. 75% literally means that out of the total damage dealt via an attack, 75% is resisted. Crystal clear. The nuance is not though, which I even stated in my post. This nuance confusion is ONLY TRUE if you are comparing one increase to another increase, and almost exclusively beyond the maximum. This kind of confusion is damn near meaningless to 99% of players. Compare all that to a numerical, ever increasing system: you have 10,000 fire resistance. What the heck does that mean upon taking a fire hit of x damage? Is it a flat reduction, is it a "hidden" equation (likely)? Will the tooltip "%" be accurate? Will it take into account map mods and other mods in a plus/minus fashion? How would map mod penalties even work, since flat rates would be significantly LESS harmful at higher difficulty levels unless they are absolutely insane. And yet if they remain %-based, now THAT becomes the new confusion....Far more nebulous.

Additionally, you attempt to ignore the fact that there is a HUGE difference between 0% and 75% resistance, by trying to say 75% is the baseline. It isn't. Mathematically and factually, it isn't. 0% is. No matter what the GAME balance is, this is always unequivocably true. Even with a new system, NO RESISTANCE is going to be the baseline, and you go up or down from there. You don't just get to arbitrarily assign a different baseline here to suit your argument: math is math. Whatever you START the game with upon waking up on the beach is net zero everything.

2) Everyone points to armour because of how unclear and unreliable the in-game "%pdr provided" is. Whereas evasion and "%evade", while also diminishing returns, is WAY more accurate in most situations. Sure...the entropy system is a bitch, but the numbers you see are almost 100% accurate when it comes to evasion. Someone also said in a forum post at one point that entropy doesn't even exist in the PoE 2 evasion formula anymore? Haven't been able to verify this.

Those complaining about diminishing returns in general as a system are simply wrong. Diminishing returns NEED to be in place. Without them, we end up far more hard caps everywhere. The comparison to armour is because of the accuracy of the data being provided to the player.