Aether Permeation versus res penetration and resist-all

[Delmuir]

I'm not sure how this works.

Let's assume you have 75% aether resistance and Aether Permeation. This grants you an effective 50% resist all.

Now let's assume you have 15% resist all.

How do these two work together. Does it stack and give you an effective 65% resist all? Does it reduce the 50% first and then the remainder is reduced again by the 15%? Does it only take the larger amount, i.e. 50%?

Now how does resistance penetration work? If an enemy has 15% fire resistance penetration, does that affect someone with Aether Permeation at all? Does it affect resist all?

This entire thing is an incoherent mess to me.

[jenx]

Each resist reduces the resist so far. So 50 & 40 would give 70, not 90. The order is irrelevant.

Resist penetration operates on resist amount. So if you have 50% rp against 40% resist, it goes down to 20%

[Delmuir]

Each resist reduces the resist so far. So 50 & 40 would give 70, not 90. The order is irrelevant.

Resist penetration operates on resist amount. So if you have 50% rp against 40% resist, it goes down to 20%

Well, that answers part of my question but it still doesn't explain the mechanics of the rest.

Anyone?

[jenx]

i thought i had explained mechanics of resist penetration.

If you have 15% resist all and say 20% resist fire on your char sheet, against fire, you just have 20% resist fire. the number of resist all is what is used for every element other than those with a different number (in this case, fire).

if enemy has 20% resist fire, then your resist fire drops to 16% (80% of 20%).

but I'm not sure what Aether talent does, so I can't help with that. i don't play archmages

[HousePet]

Last I heard, the fraction of you Arcane resistance replaces your resist all score.

[Delmuir]

Last I heard, the fraction of you Arcane resistance replaces your resist all score.

That is my understanding as well but it's still not clear how it affects resistance penetration.

My assumption is that it makes you immune to all but aether penetration, which is great. I'm just not sure.

I'm still irked by the fact that it nerfs any resistance above the new Aether check. Still think it ought to grant at least 5% to the Aether resistance cap instead of the 20% to Aether resistance... maybe 10% or 15% but 20% is too high to me and not useful enough considering that the cap is 70%.

Or, perhaps there can be a guaranteed drop (some sub-boss like backup guardian in the Caverns) that drops an item with 10% aether resistance cap on it... a helmet perhaps...

[HousePet]

It appears I am incorrect.

Each other resist type is replaced by two thirds of your arcane resistance.
Your resist all is unaffected and still applies as normal.

It does not change the incoming damage at all, so it does not change resistance penetration at all.

[Delmuir]

It does not change the incoming damage at all, so it does not change resistance penetration at all.

Sigh... goodness, the mechanics of this game are so opaque.

So, it replaces the "Resist all" stat and not just create a "x" percent for each stat independently?

My understanding is this:

You have "resist all" at 20% and fire resist at 40%. This produces a total effective resistance of 52% because resist all checks first, or at least the game says it does.

Now you get Aether permeation at 75%. What does this do?

Option A: replaces the resist all stat... which brings your effective resistance up to 70%.

Option B: Replaces each individual resistance stat, which would bring effective resistance up to 75% (let's pretend that it can go that high).

Option C: Replaces all resistances with just the Aether Resistance, thus bringing your fire resistance to 50%, i.e. just 2/3 or Arcane resistance.

Which is it? From what you've written Housepet, it's Option A. What I assume is that it's option C because that'd be the most useless and thus, the most likely for this game.

See how having a "resist all" stat is both confusing for the mechanics AND confusing to discuss. It's maddeningly clumsy.

[HousePet]

Option C.
As I said, it doesn't replace resist all.
It replaced each resistance total value with 66% of your total arcane resistance.

So in your example assuming you mean your total arcane resistance is 75%, then all damage is applied as though you had 50% resistance, regardless of damage type.
Which is what the description says, "In effect, all of your resistances are equal to 66%% of your arcane resistance".

[mikekchar]

Before you start calling it useless too quickly, there is something that you should know about resist-all. It appears to be *added* to all your resists. I only have one undeleted character on my machine with enough stats to check, but it seems to be the case. Add up all the resists you get from your items and then add resist-all. This will give you your final resist on your character sheet. (Note: it didn't exactly add up in every case for my character, but I think I might be missing something somewhere... either that or there is some more mystery... I should check the source code, but I'm too lazy).

This is particularly awesome when you are using phase door runes and get 30+% resist-all. Near the end game it is fairly easy to boost virtually every resist up to the cap, which is waaay OP.

I don't have an archmage to test it with, but it would be worth checking to see if the same thing happens with Aether Permeation.

As for the opaqueness of some of the game mechanics, I have to say that I would have been in agreement up until a few months ago. The more I play the game (getting up to 3 years now, I think), the more I realize that the mechanics have an internal logic that general makes sense (there are some exceptions, but I think quite a few of those are bugs). The main problem is the lack of discoverability of that internal logic. It would be cool if there were some characters in the game you could talk to that would explain how things work. It might make a good plugin....

[Delmuir]

[quote="mikekchar"]Before you start calling it useless too quickly, there is something that you should know about resist-all. It appears to be *added* to all your resists. /quote]

That's not what the game says in the character screen. It says that it checks resist all first, like this:

20% resist all with 50% fire resist against 100 fire damage.

Checks resist all which reduces damage to 80.

Then it checks fire resist which reduces damage to 40 (50% of 80). Thus, the total reduction is 60% and not 70%, which is what it would be if it stacked as you suggest.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know, but that's what it seems to say in the character screen.

Now, if one had Aether Permeation... it gets less clear. Let's just say that one has 75% Aether Permeation, which means 50% to each individual resistance but no effect on "resist all," then it would produce an identical outcome to the above.

That, of course, is why Aether Permeation sucks. It actually nerfs your best resistances. It'd be a good prodigy if, and only if, you got to keep any resistances above that, i.e. if you had max fire resistance then it'd check that. Anyway, I'm off course...

My problem with much of this game is opaque mechanics and unclear or inconsistent descriptions... that last one is my personal pet-peeve.

[Majestix]

That, of course, is why Aether Permeation sucks. It actually nerfs your best resistances. It'd be a good prodigy if, and only if, you got to keep any resistances above that, i.e. if you had max fire resistance then it'd check that. Anyway, I'm off course...

My problem with much of this game is opaque mechanics and unclear or inconsistent descriptions... that last one is my personal pet-peeve.

I don't know the right answer to your question, but in any case, I disagree with your conclusion. It's true that for fire archmages, fire resistance is their single most important resistance stat. But for almost all other builds, what the prodigy does to your best resistance is almost irrelevant, unless you know that you are about to fight a very mono-damage boss, or you do something funky like swift hands and a crazy amount of micromanagement. Personally, I think that 50% resistance against everything, achieved by stacking only a single resistance type, is extremely strong on many builds.

[St_ranger_er]

Maybe to late, but i'm do some tests on that prodigy, here is results:

- with Aether Permeation effective resist, which applied to other with 0.66 effectiveness, can't be more then resist cap. I.e. with 70cap and 100 total arcane res you don't get 66 all other resist. cap applied before reduce 100 to 70, and then 70*0.66 ~ 46.
- single res on charsheet (dot on numpad) counts as if allres stat already applied to single res. let say we have 20% allres and 25% arcane. Result will be: 100*(1-0.20) = 80(after allres); then 80*0.25= 20 (% reduction by arcane after allres); therefore 20% allres + 20% reduction by arcane only gave 40% total reduction.
- total reduction as in example above, can't be more then res cap of checked resist. 70%allres and 70% arcane (assume cap 70): [100*(1-0.7)= 30]; [30*(1-0.7)] = 9; 100-9 = 91% total reduction which reduces to cap 70%.
- additional single res doesn't added to 0.66 arcane.
- with 70 arcane res, you need 100*(1-0.46)=54; 70-46= 24; 24/0.54 ~ 45 allres to make all other reduction to 70% total. therefore it's cheap way to raise all single resist to 46, but take more investment to push resists to cap, because allresists applied with 0.54 effectiveness.

I'm hoping this explanation atleast partially understandable.

[Delmuir]

Thank you.

My testing showed something similar but I think you've nailed it.

Geez... it's such a bad prodigy. Not only is it crappy but it also masks just how crappy it is.

[HousePet]

Had a random thought of having it swap your base resist arcane with your bases resist all.