Diminishing resistance returns

[Mushroomhermit]

After my most recent Cursed, It was pretty clear to me that the resistance system in its current form is more or less broken. There are certain areas in the game where entering with only 40% resistance to fire or blight or cold or whatever is utter suicide and those same places are completely trivialized by pumping that specific resistance to 100% (2 of the prides and a certain race through a volcano in particular). This can be fixed very easily with a diminishing returns system.

I played around with some formulas and I think that the following would be the easiest to implement and would make balancing magic damage much easier.

R = resistance

(R*(249/250)^(R-1))/0.92154

I know, I know... Thats totally useless to look at so here's a graph.



Here we see that 25 resistance still gives about 25% (24.64% to be exact)

an R of 50 gives 44.6%

100 gives 73%

150 gives 89.5%

200 gives 97.75%

and you finally reach a full immunity at an R of 249.

This will give DG a lot more room to put resistances on egos/artifacts without worrying about making it super easy to cheese certain dungeons or encounters. You still might be able to scrounge up 249 fire res if you REALLY REALLY want to but its going to nerf ya pretty hard. At the same time it takes basically the same amount of effort to hit 50% in several or 75% in a couple of resists if you know you're heading into a zone with a lot of magic damage being thrown around.

All this assumes that talents like Chant of Fortress/Resistance, Unnatural Body and any other talents that affect resistance (including negatives like Wildfire and Curse of Vulnerability) are converted over to work on the base resistance rather than the final % value.

Also, that formula will need to be hard-capped at 250 because the output starts to decrease after that eventually going back to zero at 500.

[Susramanian]

I do love a good formula and accompanying graph!

Here's an alternative if diminishing returns doesn't pan out: cap resistances at 70% or so. Make various powerful items actually add to that cap, so you might get a suit of artifact fire dragon scale mail that increases the fire resist cap by 10% in addition to actually providing a bunch of fire resistance. Such items are rare and thematic, and much more interesting than items that simply grant large quantities of a resistance.

I don't know which system I like better. Diminishing returns makes more sense, but in terms of gameplay, things like caps and breakpoints and whole numbers are usually more fun than simple increasing functions.

[Grey]

I think 73% resistance at resistance level 100 is too weak, unless the plane would be to rebalance all the enemy resistance levels as well.

I agree that it's cheesy to get 100% resistances. I think the same for enemies too - a strong enough fireball should still burn a red drakeling. Something like what you've suggested would be great.

[Mushroomhermit]

I gave that idea some thought too... I played Diablo 2 after all ... In the end here is what made me settle on the idea of diminishing returns.

With my formula you can fully equip yourself with fire res items and be at like 95% if you have a bunch of halfway decent gear even if you haven't gotten a specific artifact or super-ego to drop. Basically if you keep the best * of Fire Resistance gear that would normally be vendor-trash and equip all of it at the cost of stats and status immunities etc... you can reach a very high reduction in 1 element. Whereas with the flexible-cap system that you suggested, reaching that high reduction hinges pretty much completely on whether or not you had a specific item/ego/artifact drop and the additional protection that one item can add is staggering. For example raising the cap from 75% to 85% is a 40% effective difference from only 1 item.

To put it all spoiley:
By the time they're tackling Vor Pride or Mount Doom, everyone will have found a crap load of fire and cold res gear but not everyone will have found the Uber Shield of Temperature-Negation and that one item shouldn't decide whether or not the dungeon is tough.

Also, DG, if you put that shield in the game I'll make a sweet tile for it.

::EDIT::
Grey: One of the main points of this change is to allow magic damage to be rebalanced around a smaller range of resistance levels. In other words you won't be auto-screwed if you dont have 90%+ in a certain resist when you enter a certain zone.

[kingvictory2003]

I do like the idea, but I would definitely second or third the notion that resistances on items would have to be significantly bumped up. I think immunity should definitely be difficult to come by, but never impossible. Perhaps Mt Doom might be trivial with resistance, but I even with 75% resistance I can see many characters that don't cheese with probability travel/rush/disengage would take enough damage to play somewhat carefully. That's been my experience at least.

[Zonk]

I had considered diminishing returns myself, but I now have a different thought.

My idea:

1)Keep the resistance mechanics as they are.

2)Make high levels of resistance significantly harder to get, perhaps by nerfing some items(artifacts/some rings, mostly)which provide too much of it.

3)Add an 'armor'(needs a better name?)equivalent for each non-physical damage type.
Basically: a FIXED value which you subtract from that kind damage.
Not 100% sure about which to apply first - I'd be tempted to go with the absolute reduction first.


Random example:
Let's take an item which provided 30% fire resistance.
I'd change it to provide something like only 15% resistance BUT also reduce raw damage(before actually applying resistance) by X, where X would be <= 15.


This would make non-physical damage a bit weaker at lower levels, as the absolute decrease would matter more with low raw damage values.

At higher levels however - where I think it's much easier to get high resistance or even immunity right now, which is the problem the OP was complaining about - it would end up being somewhat stronger, as with big numbers, the % reduction(which will be nerfed, as I suggested in point 2)would matter more.

[edge2054]

I like this proposal.

The only real problem I see is communicating to the player that no, 150% resistance doesn't make you immune to anything!

[Mushroomhermit]

We can always have the character screen report the % not the base value.

[edge2054]

The tooltip will have to say that resists are on diminishing returns so the player doesn't freak out when he puts on a new piece of resist gear with 25% fire resist and only sees his fire resist go up by 10.

[Mushroomhermit]

Meh, let 'em read the changelog

[madmonk]

Meh, let 'em read the changelog

Fine when in development but it still needs to be explained at some point in the Help files.

I do like this idea though!

[Susramanian]

Here's a diminishing returns system that has a nice obvious pattern for the player to see:

Your first 50 points give you 50% resistance. Your next fifty points get you only 25% resistance, bringing you to a total of 75. Then you need 75 more points to get up to 100%. Thus becoming immune requires 175 resistance.

This could be adjusted easily. Here's another version:

First 25 points give 25% resistance. The next 25% requires 50 points, the next 25% requires 75 points, and the last 25% requires 100 points. Thus becoming immune requires 250 resistance.

And another version:

First 33% resistance costs 33 points. Next 33% requires 66 points. Last 34% costs 102 points. Thus becoming immune requires 201 points.


The benefit of these systems is that they're much more transparent. Their formulas are a bit awkward to write (they're best done piecewise), but the player knows what's going on and can do the calculations without the formula. Percentage points simply get more expensive at certain values, giving the player breakpoints to shoot for.

[edge2054]

I like break points myself and I think option 1 would be enough to discourage players from stacking 100% resists in 90% of circumstances while still making it possible to do so (though difficult.)

Keep in mind too that we could leave the system as it is and give resist penetration to some monster types (it would make a lot of sense for high pyro and cryo mancers especially and all it would take would be giving them the appropriate talent).

I think there's a few more uncommon creatures that already do penetrate resists and next beta I know at least one creature will have physical resist penetration. (Enough that you'd need 200% to be immune to it's attacks).

[Dervis]

Add me to the club of someone supporting this kind of change to the system. I'd probably prefer the more logical formula 1-0.99^(resist) though

[Sirrocco]

I'd rather not force the player to do complex math to figure out how much resist a given item is worth. The simpler breakpoints version works for me (particularly if you have color-coded resists for which breakpoint area you're in on the character sheet, with a handy reference standing by), the resist penetration works for me, having armor that affects spells and hazards be available while reducing the overall amount of resist available is something I'm actively a fan of in a few ways. Personally, I figure that playability is more valuable than mathematical purity.