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

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

Why does every upgrade require a re-balance of your entire loadout? That isn't natural at all. I can think of multiple games I have hundreds or thousands of hours in that don't require me to change everything I have equipped and force trading just to improve a stat slightly. It's not natural and it causes players like the guy you quoted to quit.

I can almost guarantee, without even knowing the titles, that the games you describe are nowhere near as complex as PoE, they probably have nowhere near the same number of different possible modifiers on a character, have nowhere near the same complexity of build diversity, etc.

And above all, I bet its hella easier on top of all that

You are trying to compare apples to oranges, while trying to fit them into


The player above is for sure not going to quit....he will be back for the next league. Dude is talking about gear in the HUNDREDS of divines. The complaint can't even really be taken seriously at that degree of investment.


Min/maxing should never be nudging one stat up and up and up: the whole point of min/maxing is problem solving, doing the math, putting in the effort, figuring out EXACTLY what you need to have BiS everywhere. That is what this game is, and frankly what it should remain. That is what's so damn cool about playing and building a character to that level. Just like other things, if it simply becomes a linear incremental.....thats boring, uninteresting, and brainless.

But I did say that a crafting bench SHOULD exist.....but gear with a crafted resistance on it will never be BiS, its a band-aid solution on purpose. They don't want people able to completely change one static mod on one piece of gear at the click of a button. At least not with 100% determinism.

Hey....maybe I'm wrong and the resistance swap will come back. I'm not a fan of it from a design standpoint, but I've used it to save time and effort. It's not a hill I'm willing to die on.

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I can almost guarantee, without even knowing the titles, that the games you describe are nowhere near as complex as PoE, they probably have nowhere near the same number of different possible modifiers on a character, have nowhere near the same complexity of build diversity, etc.

Probably so, if only from a numeric variables count.

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And above all, I bet its hella easier on top of all that

You are trying to compare apples to oranges, while trying to fit them into

Only thing hard about PoE2 is trying to figure out how everything calculates together. The game itself is insanely imbalanced and either your build sucks or you just win with 1 button with barely any room in between right now unfortunately. I just hope the game becomes more balanced and I think changing the resistance system would help improve the game balance among many other things.

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The player above is for sure not going to quit....he will be back for the next league. Dude is talking about gear in the HUNDREDS of divines. The complaint can't even really be taken seriously at that degree of investment.

Kinda hard to gauge that since the early access market is a complete mess right now. Also, I'd argue that complaint can totally be taken seriously. It pushed a higher end player into quitting the season earlier than they normally would. If something causes extra burnout then it's bad for the game.

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Min/maxing should never be nudging one stat up and up and up: the whole point of min/maxing is problem solving, doing the math, putting in the effort, figuring out EXACTLY what you need to have BiS everywhere. That is what this game is, and frankly what it should remain. That is what's so damn cool about playing and building a character to that level. Just like other things, if it simply becomes a linear incremental.....thats boring, uninteresting, and brainless.

I agree. I don't believe overhauling resistances would change this in any negative way though. It would actually add breathing room for people to min-max more if anything. People wouldn't be locked into a specific amount of a mandatory stat. They could go above or below 75% mitigation and actually have gear that reflects that. Currently the only resistance that matters for game-play is that last affix that stops you from getting 1 shot. You can't actually chose to have more or less than the default mandatory amount on your build. That is more restricting than anything. By having more consistent scaling it would enable more build customization and diversity.

Overall, I'm just hoping that GGG eventually makes gearing in PoE2 a lot more versatile and subsequently viable than PoE1 was.

Reading through some of this thread and all I can think about is that Poe2 severly lacks content/mechanics.

"Solving" resistances and resistance-min-max at the top end is fine in Poe1, you could even argue it is fun. We have multiple ways of getting our resistances at every stage of the game, from Passive tree, Ascendency, jewels, gear, flasks (+ flask effect), auras (+ aura effect), cluster jewels, even smaller things such as bandit reward and likely other mechanics that I can not remember at the moment. On top of that we have a way to swap elemental resistances freely on most of our items.
Then maximum resistances are not just a number, we have mechanics such as Melding, Purity of Fire Sublime Vision, Watcher's Eye dmg taken convertions, Eternal Damnation, Loreweave, Transcendence and so many more that I can't list all of them.

In Poe2 we have pretty much none of that. We get our resistances from gear and jewel implicits, some might increase their max res a little bit, that is all there is to resistances. The only thing that resembles something from the Poe1 list is Blackbraid, but we do not have any follow-up mechanics and armour is applied before resistances afaik, so why even bother?



TLDR:
The issue is the lack of content/mechanics related to resistances in Poe2, not the way resistances fundamentally work imo.

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SnoowXx#3157 wrote:

TLDR:
The issue is the lack of content/mechanics related to resistances in Poe2, not the way resistances fundamentally work imo.

yes yes yes, 100% yes. That is precisely my point. There wasn't an "issue" with resistances in PoE 1. It doesn't actually exist. And regarding content: before the harvest craft swap, we had benchcrafting. Before benchcrafting, the best most valuable items were tri-resist gear. It was NEVER a functional issue. Despite what others claim. Its just that....now the value has been returned to the pre-rolled tri-resist or dual-resist gear. Balancing resistances is part of the gearing process.

PoE 2, as it currently is, offers us less control. Sure, this is 100% true. BUT this could be explicitly by design as a throwback to what they initially wanted in PoE 1 (as explicitly stated by devs many times that this was their goal with PoE 2): it isn't MEANT to be easy to balance your resistances. This isn't a fundamental problem with resists.....its a fundamental problem with your interpretation of the game. And with a solution to reduce all resistance mods to a single stat is a very contrarian idea that goes against PoE design as a whole, and what makes PoE popular in the first place.

As for the "mandatory" nature of capping resistances. Every stat in the game feels mandatory.....until its not. Hitting monsters like a wet noodle? Damage is MANDATORY.....until its not. Getting killed left, right, and center? Survivability mods are MANDATORY....until they aren't. Resistances aren't capped? They are MANDATORY.....until you solve the problem and they aren't anymore. That is gear. That is character progression. That is the game.

I had mentioned that I can all but guarantee we will get some type of crafting bench. I still stand by that, no matter how "hard" the devs want the game. They went through countless iterations of bench-like crafting in PoE 1, from forsaken masters to the crafting bench to essences to fossils to harvest to....blahblahblah. SOME real crafting will be implemented. Even if the mods are weak, it will still solve every single issue the OP has. In fact, the solution somewhat already exists in the form of runes, allowing for fluid tweaks of resistances. Except in the very very rare situation of min/maxing to the extreme.

At that point, finding buying or crafting the PERFECT gear for your absolute specific build SHOULD be time consuming, hard, and expensive.



From a functional standpoint, the OPs idea offers no new solutions to any sorts of "problems" that may be associated with resistances, that have been presented by people within this thread and outside it. The only thing it offers is a dumbed-down system, which is simply NOT the PoE way. That's for D3 and D4. GGG is not going to reduce all character power and defense to 4 stats...its just not going to happen. It's true a simple "resistance mod" is easier to gear for, but that's the exact opposite of why they exist in the first place.

You are MEANT to struggle with these things! And I hate to say it, but if that struggle causes someone to quit....the game is not for them. Plenty of kids pick up musical instruments and give them up because they can't be bothered to practice and wonder why they aren't instantly good at it. Sure, the analogy is not 100% accurate because PoE is a product designed to make a profit....but still the developers are not going to destroy their own creation for the sole purpose of trying to keep everyone around. That is an impossible task. No matter what....some folks just can't be bothered to practice their instrument.

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SnoowXx#3157 wrote:

TLDR:
The issue is the lack of content/mechanics related to resistances in Poe2, not the way resistances fundamentally work imo.



yes yes yes, 100% yes. That is precisely my point. There wasn't an "issue" with resistances in PoE 1. It doesn't actually exist. And regarding content: before the harvest craft swap, we had benchcrafting. Before benchcrafting, the best most valuable items were tri-resist gear. It was NEVER a functional issue. Despite what others claim. Its just that....now the value has been returned to the pre-rolled tri-resist or dual-resist gear. Balancing resistances is part of the gearing process.

That literally is a problem. If a baseline system is foundationally problematic and needs support just to stand on its own then there is issues. You shouldn't need to layer band-aids in place of a bandage. Balancing resistances will always be part of the gearing process with or without a formula change too.

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PoE 2, as it currently is, offers us less control. Sure, this is 100% true. BUT this could be explicitly by design as a throwback to what they initially wanted in PoE 1 (as explicitly stated by devs many times that this was their goal with PoE 2): it isn't MEANT to be easy to balance your resistances. This isn't a fundamental problem with resists.....its a fundamental problem with your interpretation of the game. And with a solution to reduce all resistance mods to a single stat is a very contrarian idea that goes against PoE design as a whole, and what makes PoE popular in the first place.

Control? I would recommend this change even for PoE1 where there is MORE control, but obviously PoE1 isn't in EA and as easy to overhaul. You say balancing resistance isn't meant to be easy, but my recommended overhaul wouldn't change the fact that you need balanced defenses to survive. I never said to make all resistances into 1 stat either. Actually where the hell did you pull that from? You're straight up debating something that I'm not pushing.

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As for the "mandatory" nature of capping resistances. Every stat in the game feels mandatory.....until its not. Hitting monsters like a wet noodle? Damage is MANDATORY.....until its not. Getting killed left, right, and center? Survivability mods are MANDATORY....until they aren't. Resistances aren't capped? They are MANDATORY.....until you solve the problem and they aren't anymore. That is gear. That is character progression. That is the game.

The entire point just goes over your head... Resistances force you to gear +135 and there is no build variance allowed. If you're 1 affix short you always get 1 shot and the rest of your investment doesn't matter. If you're 1 affix over it does literally nothing and doesn't matter. Imagine if damage boosts didn't work unless you had over +500% increased damage, but then hard-capped at +550%. That is how gear resistance scales right now. It's not about needing stats, it's that every build is mandated to have the same amount with no margin for difference. That is the opposite of good gear and character progression and build diversity.

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At that point, finding buying or crafting the PERFECT gear for your absolute specific build SHOULD be time consuming, hard, and expensive.

And it still would be. You still want to be as tough as possible from your resistances and you want a good balance to not have weaknesses. This would not change with a scaling re-work. Players would simple have more gearing agency. Perfectly rolled resistance items would also be more desired since their would no longer be a hard-cap.

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From a functional standpoint, the OPs idea offers no new solutions to any sorts of "problems" that may be associated with resistances, that have been presented by people within this thread and outside it. The only thing it offers is a dumbed-down system, which is simply NOT the PoE way. That's for D3 and D4. GGG is not going to reduce all character power and defense to 4 stats...its just not going to happen. It's true a simple "resistance mod" is easier to gear for, but that's the exact opposite of why they exist in the first place.

Ah yes just dismiss everyone else in the thread that sees issue with the current system, because "clearly" they all dislike something for no "valid" reason. Also, how can you call a formula re-work a "dumbed-down system" when you yourself argued before in this thread that it was ""more confusion". Make up your mind. Another thing; the current resistance system we have right now is more "dumbed-down" than many other games' functional damage mitigation systems. The current PoE resistance system is LITERALLY the same as TeS(Skyrim etc.) elemental resistance, but you have -60 instead of 0 by default. It's as basic and lopsidedly designed as it gets dude.

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You are MEANT to struggle with these things! And I hate to say it, but if that struggle causes someone to quit....the game is not for them. Plenty of kids pick up musical instruments and give them up because they can't be bothered to practice and wonder why they aren't instantly good at it. Sure, the analogy is not 100% accurate because PoE is a product designed to make a profit....but still the developers are not going to destroy their own creation for the sole purpose of trying to keep everyone around. That is an impossible task. No matter what....some folks just can't be bothered to practice their instrument.

And people would still struggle to balance their defensive stats after such an overhaul. It would just be more fairly balanced and enjoyable to engage with. Struggle in video games is supposed to be fun. Upgrading gear is supposed to be a highlight of the game. The current resistance system taints that for many people, regardless of if they are new or old players. If you think the devs changing resistances to be more fun to engage with and upgrade will "destroy their own game" then you must think PoE is a pathetically brittle thing indeed.

I feel like you don't have a proper understanding of the resistance and progression system in PoE and are simultaneously misunderstanding my post while being disingenuous towards considering and/or debating my points.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

I feel like you don't have a proper understanding of the resistance and progression system in PoE and are simultaneously misunderstanding my post while being disingenuous towards considering and/or debating my points.

I will leave you with this: I gave you tons and TONS of actual information. Both mathematical and functional. You have disregarded all of it. At worst, you failed to grasp anything that I have typed so far.

I am not so sure I am the one that doesn't have a proper understanding here. Nor do I think the fact that "others in this thread agree" is an appropriate defense. There are tons of folks currently on the forums complaining about things that they fundamentally don't understand simply because they don't like them. That doesn't make them right. It makes them misinformed, new, not a good fit for PoE, or a combination of all three.

We are at a fundamental impasse here in this thread.


"make resistances more fun to engage with" is precisely the problem with your entire argument. You aren't thinking mechanically, you are thinking emotionally. You are trying to "cloud" the emotional judgment with something that SEEMS mechanical, but in practice doesn't really do anything different except simplify a large system into a teeny tiny box. There have been at least half of the posters in this thread that DO find balancing resistances fun and a crucial part of "the progression system" you claim I don't understand.

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I will leave you with this: I gave you tons and TONS of actual information. Both mathematical and functional. You have disregarded all of it. At worst, you failed to grasp anything that I have typed so far.

I did not discard any of it. I disagreed with you on some of it and proceeded to debated the parts I disagreed with.

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I am not so sure I am the one that doesn't have a proper understanding here. Nor do I think the fact that "others in this thread agree" is an appropriate defense. There are tons of folks currently on the forums complaining about things that they fundamentally don't understand simply because they don't like them. That doesn't make them right. It makes them misinformed, new, not a good fit for PoE, or a combination of all three.

I was talking about you dismissing other peoples' takes about what they disliked about the current system as a non-factor. While it's true that some people don't like the res system while not fully understanding it themselves, that doesn't mean they should be completely dismissed. I have personally corrected multiple people about why res wouldn't working if it scaled like armour in this thread alone for example.

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We are at a fundamental impasse here in this thread.

Unfortunately. :/

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"make resistances more fun to engage with" is precisely the problem with your entire argument. You aren't thinking mechanically, you are thinking emotionally. You are trying to "cloud" the emotional judgment with something that SEEMS mechanical, but in practice doesn't really do anything different except simplify a large system into a teeny tiny box.

I guess I must be a man-child that doesn't understand mathematical applications and cries about numbers on the internet while being unable to understand a system I've interacted with for 3k hours while comparing it to numerous other formats I've come across for other games. Oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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There have been at least half of the posters in this thread that DO find balancing resistances fun and a crucial part of "the progression system" you claim I don't understand.

This actually caused me to re-skim all of the reply pages for this thread. It's not even close to half. I'm not dismissing the <50% though. The point I've repeatedly made is that such a re-work wouldn't take away from people that enjoy balancing their gear. Players still want to achieve around 75%-ish mitigation in order to survive and as such would still want to balance their resistances to achieve similar if not eventually greater results.