This is intuitive, and how I thought it worked from the beginning. Resist all is obviously (to me, at least) a separate resist entirely, and should stack this way.edge2054 wrote:Sorry Talonj.
Say you have 20% resist all and 10% acid resistance and get hit for 1000 acid damage.
After resist all you take 800 (-1000 * 0.2 or 200).
After acid resist you take 720 (-800 * 0.1 or 80).
In other words, resist all and elemental resist are like an onion. They're not really additive. Your acid resist will only reduce the damage that gets past your resist all. You don't check each by themselves and then add the reduction together.
This is not. Not at all. Since (as stated above) they are obviously (to me) SEPARATE resistances, there is NO intuitive reason why the cap of the individual resistance would affect resist all.edge2054 wrote: I like Luke's suggestion. But I think we'd need a way to communicate how the resist cap works too. The player doesn't really have a type based resist cap it's just converted into that for ease of digestion. What you really have is a resist all cap that can be modified by type. Your resist all cap is 70 and when you increase an elemental resist cap you're actually giving yourself the value as an added bonus to your resist all cap when resisting that damage type.
<<example>>
My solution:
Get rid of the "resist all" display. It serves no real purpose other than misleading the player into thinking that by multiplying the "resist all" number and the "resist (element)" number that they will get their actual resistance. Since the multiplication is done for them (without actually telling the player) the number is superfluous. Instead attach the cap to the "Resistances" header, make it say "Resistances: (Cap = 70%)" or some such. Then you can have a "(+5% cap)" appended to elements that get cap bonuses from equips.
This is intuitive in the most basic sense: WYSIWYG. Equipping and removing a piece of resist all equipment would show the player a change in their resistances. It would inflate the window a bit (displaying individual resistances when no other source is provided but resist all) but I think that would be worth it.
Loading up the game I see that the game actually says that resistances DON'T work this way.
Under resist all, it says "stacks with individual damage resistances" which is essentially telling the player to do the multiplication mentioned above to find their resistance to a particular element.
I would add a mention in the other tooltip (since you'd be getting rid of this one) that resist all is included in the calculation, and that it is applied FIRST. This would imply multiplicative stacking (even though the actual order does not, in fact, matter) without making the tooltip too wordy, as well as explain the discrepancy mentioned in the OP. On top of this, it explicitly tells the player that he/she does not need to do any calculations.
Also, regardless of what you do, get rid of the Resist All information for enemies. It serves no purpose other than to freak people out. I found a monster with 60% resist all and something like 74% resist physical and thought I was completely out of luck. In fact, I still dealt 26% damage per attack -- around 2.5 TIMES the 10.4% damage I thought I was going to do. I ended up killing it, wondering why in the world I was hitting so hard...
