Dealing with chaos damage...?

So, what's the trick?

Act 2 cruel with -20% chaos resist, with nearly everything doing chaos damage, leads to a decent amount of deaths.

My 3 main resists are capped, and my armor is 4.2k leaving me at around 68% DR.

I have a few questions now:

1. How do negative (specifically chaos) resists work; do I take added damage the lower they go below 0?

2. Is chaos resist an extremely rare roll on items? I've only seen one item with it so far, and it was a belt with 8%.

3. and finally, is CI/resist the only way to deal with it?

I too would like to know about this.

In my personal experience, chaos resist is a rather rare roll on an item, ive only seen 2-3 items that had any chaos resist, usually in the 4%-8% range, to deal with chaos damage, there are passive nodes on the skill tree that will increase it, but if you simply dont want to be bothered by it, CI is probably the way to go, provided you have a means of countering the whole "base life reduced to 1" deal.

No Ci and Resists are not the only way to deal with it, another way would be a lot of life or/and life regen. Instant/Bubbling HP Flasks..... Or try to avoid Hits with chaos dmg ;p

cheers

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Gialo wrote:

So, what's the trick?

Act 2 cruel with -20% chaos resist, with nearly everything doing chaos damage, leads to a decent amount of deaths.

My 3 main resists are capped, and my armor is 4.2k leaving me at around 68% DR.

I have a few questions now:

1. How do negative (specifically chaos) resists work; do I take added damage the lower they go below 0?

Yes. A negative resist means weakness and afaik it means you take proportionally increased damage, instead of decreased. IIRC this means both elemental and chaos resistances.

"

Gialo wrote:

2. Is chaos resist an extremely rare roll on items? I've only seen one item with it so far, and it was a belt with 8%.

Yes, as far as I know, it is. Chaos is supposed to be "true" damage, or at least thats what it was for the longest time. Compensating for it when faced with chaos using monsters seems to be the only thing to do, other then some minor resistance built up.

"

Gialo wrote:

3. and finally, is CI/resist the only way to deal with it?

Permanently, CI with obvious drawbacks. Other then that yes, if a Chaos Resist node is in your area, that would be a good way to compensate if you have the points.

Dodging hits is quite hard as a melee char, as I'm sure you can imagine.

What I'm more worried about is just the amount of damage chaos dealing monsters are dishing out, and if chaos resist is an absolute necessity, how can it be so rare?

Edit: Thanks for the info jamnik.

Use them in order: instant to keep from dying, slow and a lot to top you up, and the quicksilver to get the hell out of trouble.

Also:
I'm pretty sure you take extra damage from having negative resists.
Yes, it is pretty rare, and kinda on the low side early on:

No, CI isn't the only way to deal with it - kiting is effective if you're ranged, otherwise this is useful:

I have taken off my super health regen pot(1,240 over 12 seconds) and opted for a amethyst flask, it isn't necessarily as helpful as a health regen pot, but it at least gives me some sort of defense against chaos. I was also thinking about picking up the 16% and 8% resistance nodes around the witch's passive tree, but by the time I get there I'll already be in merciless, and 24% resistance isn't going to be super huge when I'm still 30% or more under, we'll see, but for now I just burst down chaos dealing mobs asap and pop a amethyst flask if my HP spikes.

You should invest in life nodes (and life regen nodes if you got some close) and life bonuses on items with every non-CI character. If you don't, you'll get smoked and not just by chaos damage.

I've had a 16% (or was it 15%?) Chaos resist roll on an Onyx amulet.