Spell suppression??? Is it even good???

But like, is it REALLY??? It SOUNDS good. But what even are spells? Without death recap (scam btw), how do I even know if spells are what's killing me? In a massive group of enemies, did spell damage do the most? Or, more likely, was it physical attack damage?

With all the unique monster abilities, how many of them are pure physical, or pure chaos?

Sure, Atziri's flame blast is obviously a spell. But what about... Shaper's balls? He thrusts them out of each hand, that could easily be an attack. What about his bullet hell? And while we're at it, what element of damage is that???

I know your first instinct is to tell me to Wiki it. But I'm not talking about a specific fight. I don't want to Wiki every two inches i travel on my screen. What CUE is there? What intuition is there? You can't even tell me to assume based on something like color. Blue gems are associated with lightning and green with cold, but there are blue visuals on both cold and lightning spells, so what damage type are these yellow green Shaper balls? What about this red lightning for Atziri? There's no consistency, so there's no cue.

What about the beam from the Vaal construct??? Attack or spell??? And what about the rock fall???




Spell suppression sounds good. Wow, half damage from spells. Hey, I do spells! And I know it's crazy when they have spell suppression!

... But what about THEM? What types of offense do THEY have? There's no real way to know how helpful spell suppression is. I have to invest in full 100%, then go play for a few hours and see if I FEEL like I'm noticeably taking less damage.

What an annoying setup...




So what are everyone's thoughts on spell supp? Is it worthwhile?

20 clicks on the title, and 0 people have thoughts.

Dead internet theory.

You just reinforced everything I've said, lol. I don't want to assume roughly half of all damage I take is spell damage. Just like I don't want to assume there's a 20% even split between physical, fire, cold, lightning, and chaos damage.

I would bet my life that a vast majority of incoming damage is attack and not spell. I would bet my life a vast minority of damage is chaos. Still, I cannot prove this. But assuming an even split is ridiculous. That's the whole premise of the topic. How useful is it really? That is the exact opposite of just assuming it's 50% of all incoming damage since there are only two types.

What do I want to hear? Thoughts and discussion. I guess you're saying that nobody really knows the answer. Which, again, loops back to my point that one of this game's biggest issues is the lack of feedback. Death recap would be very useful. And it feels like the only two reasons not to have it are either incompetence, or intentionally setting players up for failure, so pick your poison on that one.




As for your specific answers to the enemy attack types, thanks I guess, but it tells me you didn't even read my OP. I preemptively addressed this, and yet you still ran right into it...




Oh well. Don't worry about it. It looks like it's another thing that the players don't really know the answer to (which I'm not faulting the players for, obviously).

"

ShadyC#1006 wrote:

You just reinforced everything I've said, lol. I don't want to assume roughly half of all damage I take is spell damage.

Just learn to play the game and you won't have to "assume" anything lol.

You guys see what I mean? Lol.

How is that even a valid response? Go ahead, tell me what "skill" is needed to know whether you're dying to spells or attacks. If you're getting hit by both things, what "skill" tells you which one of the two is doing the most damage? What if the spells are doing 10% of the total damage just because they're undertuned? Or maybe it's the other way around, and they're doing 90% because they're overtuned. Or maybe they're exactly, perfectly balanced, doing 50%. What "skill" am I supposed to develop, as a player, that tells me how it's spread? Go on. Tell me, I'll wait.




Elitist posts like that always also happen to have the least amount of meat, lol. Just vague insults, and then the person vanishes from the face of the Earth.

The short answer is that yes, it is stupidly good, too good.

The higher you go in POE1 content, the more you realize how spell suppression is broken overpowered relative to everything else. GGG even specifically made numerous deadly boss mechanics unblockable, but they can still be suppressed.

Spell suppression started long ago as some "optional" feature for dex builds to get some more elemental defense, and then, unsurprisingly, all enemies/bosses were buffed up to make this defensive layer near "mandatory".

The recent buff to blocking for bottom and bottom left side builds doesn't help because as I mentioned blocking has little use beyond mapping. Blocking is also binary and doesn't follow evasion entropy rules, so you could have a nice streak of several failed blockable attacks/spell hits smash your face and kill you. Spell suppression investment if high enough percent is pretty much always going to be godmode.

In general, the mapping to bossing transition in POE1 is eye opening. Armor and evasion and attack block become irrelevant. Spell block barely helps. Spell suppression, life pool, and ES pool are king.

As for your more technical damage-type questions, you can find the answer digging around on this website:

https://poedb.tw/us/

Don't you love that? "Here's a tool to be able to survive more. Omg PikachuFace, people are using it to survive things? We can't have that. Let's negate this mechanic by doubling spell damage anyway!"

I feel like this happens a lot. Like, a LOT.




Anyway...

Thanks for the post, I was looking for some sort of anecdotal (or similar) experience about it. Sounds like it's worth the investment indeed (which isn't much, capping isn't too hard, but my DPS is gonna tank a little bit).

I'll check out that site, too. And maybe look into a recap app?