ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, I usually ignore elemental affinities as I never gather enough of them to make a difference. Well, this time I did. I had 57% darkness affinity on a Necro… and 85% darkness resistance. Essentially, I could play the Necro a bit like a cold mage… just standing in my own damage.

The reason I ask is because of the Aether Permeation prodigy (although I couldn't get the prodigy this time, some day I might). I'm in Lichform and found a unique amulet that gives me +7% to all resistance caps and Aetherwalk (+5% to Aether), thus affording me a max resistance to all of 97% which affords a 65% resist all.

Now, I'm wondering if I had an aether affinity instead of darkness affinity, would it grant me a heal all? If it checks aether first then that should work, right? If have enough aether affinity to heal then I should logically heal for every attack, right?

I'm not sure how the mechanism works...

It only checks arcane resistance to calculate your others resists, it doesn't convert damage to arcane. You'd also still be vulnerable to hits big enough to kill you in one shot, because affinity healing takes place after damage is taken.

I guess I'm still not 100% on that…

Let's say I managed to get the 97% arcane resistance (giving me resist all of 65%) and 50% aether affinity… then I was hit with a 1000 fire damage let's say. If I understand you correctly, I'd take 350 fire damage and wouldn't heal, is that correct?

However, if I took a 1000 aether damage then I'd only take 30 aether damage and would heal, correct? How much would I heal? 50% of the damage taken or 50% of the initial damage?

Affinity healing is calculated before resistances, so you'd take 30 damage and heal 500.

Thanks! Excellent and informative response. Much obliged.

Keep in mind the following when trying to leverage resistance:

1) spellshock is -20% resistance
-going from 97% to 77% is pretty huge damage increase even if 77% is still above cap
2) Curse of vulnerability reduce by 40%

3) things can have resistance penetration


So my conclusion after trying to leverage large amount of resistance is that it is simply to easy to nullify, at for the harder difficulties where spellshock is much more common due to high spellpower, curses and res pen are more common due to more rares.


Basically you will feel really strong and then you will run into something that completely owns you even with affinity, because going from 97% to even a fairly high value 50% is taking an order of magnitude more damage making the time to live like 1/10 what it would have been.

You could easily think you are invicincble and then get completely WTFBBQed by the wrong sort of rare, or a rare with a caster add who spellshocked you. Even just on Nightmare this seems possible or even likely in a caster heavy area. And on Insane I don't think the strategy has much value overall, I could be wrong, but I think you will find most heavy resistance strategies to quite often run into random bosses/uniques against whom they kind of suck. And usually these builds take so much commitment and synergy that when it doesn't work you are seriously screwed.

stinkstink wrote:Affinity healing is calculated before resistances, so you'd take 30 damage and heal 500.

It is also exactly in that order. You take damage then heal. So affinity will never stop a killing blow. If your res gets reduced to 0 and you get hit for 500 and have 480 life you will die even though the healing of 250 would have made it net positive overall. Healing a corpse doesn't work.