[3.3.2] Advice on resistances please?

[Cold_Heart]

I need some advice on what resistances should be the highest priority. From what I understand, fire, frost, acid, lightning, poison and free action are pretty much necessary at all times, but what about others? Say, what's more important, light, dark, chaos, or nether? And are there any resistances one could just omit and get by without risking too much?

[buzzkill]

I need some advice on what resistances should be the highest priority. From what I understand, fire, frost, acid, lightning, poison and free action are pretty much necessary at all times, but what about others? Say, what's more important, light, dark, chaos, or nether? And are there any resistances one could just omit and get by without risking too much?

Nether is helpful, chaos less so. I often overlook light and dark once I have an independent source of resist blindness.

Resist confusion and blindness are the two big ones that didn't make your list. In my (non-winning) book, just about everything else is nice to have but not necessary. I optimize for damage and stealth over non-critical resists.

[Magnate]

Nether is helpful, chaos less so. I often overlook light and dark once I have an independent source of resist blindness.

Resist confusion and blindness are the two big ones that didn't make your list. In my (non-winning) book, just about everything else is nice to have but not necessary. I optimize for damage and stealth over non-critical resists.

I agree with your second para but not your first - chaos >> nether. One merely drains xp, which is irritating but rarely dangerous (only if it causes you to forget a crucial spell). Hallucination is extremely dangerous. And darkness eventually becomes one of the more dangerous attack elements in the late game.

[buzzkill]

I agree with your second para but not your first - chaos >> nether. One merely drains xp, which is irritating but rarely dangerous (only if it causes you to forget a crucial spell). Hallucination is extremely dangerous. And darkness eventually becomes one of the more dangerous attack elements in the late game.

I forgot the rChaos = rHalluc. I was thinking that there were at least a few big nether breathers.

In any case, having a strong monster memory is the key to running around with resistance holes. One mistake will kill you.

[Derakon]

Light and darkness will simply blind you; if you have blindness resistance (or even just telepathy) then that's usually not a big deal. Their damage caps are also fairly low and there aren't many big breathers.

Shards will cut you, but again not a big deal and there aren't many big shards damage sources.

Sound will stun you; this can be a big deal mostly due to plasma hounds (IIRC having sound resistance will prevent plasma stunning). Otherwise, again not a big deal.

Nexus will scramble your stats and teleport you; this is definitely something to watch out for, and nexus hounds/vortices are distressingly common. If you can find a source of nexus resistance without compromising your other gear it's generally worthwhile. Otherwise you need to keep an eye out to avoid breathers.

Nether is basically just a relatively big damage source; the cap's 550. Unfortunately the damage reduction from resistance is semi-random, so even with resistance you can be taking upwards of 471 damage (on average you'll take about half damage though). It can be useful for increasing your combat endurance against nether users.

Chaos is extremely irritating but also rare. Confusion + hallucination + (pointless) experience drain. Just be glad it doesn't cause amnesia too! The confusion and experience drain aspects can be resisted individually without having chaos resistance, leaving you with just hallucination, which you can usually handle if you're careful.

Bottom line is, the only protections and resistances I consider absolutely essential are free action and fire/cold/elec/acid. Poison is the most important after that but it's rare enough that you can usually avoid the big breathers if you're careful (just drolems, swamp wyrms, and a few uniques). After that I'd prioritize confusion and then blindness, but they show up so rarely in my games that I've gotten used to going without. Everything else is niche.

[Cold_Heart]

Light and darkness will simply blind you; if you have blindness resistance (or even just telepathy) then that's usually not a big deal. Their damage caps are also fairly low and there aren't many big breathers.

Shards will cut you, but again not a big deal and there aren't many big shards damage sources.

Sound will stun you; this can be a big deal mostly due to plasma hounds (IIRC having sound resistance will prevent plasma stunning). Otherwise, again not a big deal.

Nexus will scramble your stats and teleport you; this is definitely something to watch out for, and nexus hounds/vortices are distressingly common. If you can find a source of nexus resistance without compromising your other gear it's generally worthwhile. Otherwise you need to keep an eye out to avoid breathers.

Nether is basically just a relatively big damage source; the cap's 550. Unfortunately the damage reduction from resistance is semi-random, so even with resistance you can be taking upwards of 471 damage (on average you'll take about half damage though). It can be useful for increasing your combat endurance against nether users.

Chaos is extremely irritating but also rare. Confusion + hallucination + (pointless) experience drain. Just be glad it doesn't cause amnesia too! The confusion and experience drain aspects can be resisted individually without having chaos resistance, leaving you with just hallucination, which you can usually handle if you're careful.

Bottom line is, the only protections and resistances I consider absolutely essential are free action and fire/cold/elec/acid. Poison is the most important after that but it's rare enough that you can usually avoid the big breathers if you're careful (just drolems, swamp wyrms, and a few uniques). After that I'd prioritize confusion and then blindness, but they show up so rarely in my games that I've gotten used to going without. Everything else is niche.

Thank you very much.

[Magnate]

Sound will stun you; this can be a big deal mostly due to plasma hounds (IIRC having sound resistance will prevent plasma stunning).

Not since 3.3 - you need pStun for that. rSound will only protect against stuns from sound attacks.

[Derakon]

Not since 3.3 - you need pStun for that. rSound will only protect against stuns from sound attacks.

Ah. Well, then sound resistance is a pure luxury item now. There are...16 sound breathers in the game (not counting the baby law/balance drakes in v4), and almost all of them have lots of other breaths they are statistically more likely to use instead of sound. Vibration hounds are the only foe where I'd really be valuing sound resistance now, and they're slow and fragile enough that I can take them on without it if I'm careful (unlike plasma hounds, who are fast and tough).

In fact, thinking about it I think that the only reason I valued rSound back in the day was for protection from stunning. Losing that has greatly devalued that resistance. Might we make it an unresistable element and thereby eliminate some junk items? Ditto for shards resistance, frankly.

[fizzix]

Might we make it an unresistable element and thereby eliminate some junk items? Ditto for shards resistance, frankly.

I agree with this. Everything that had rsound or rshards should get pstun instead. both shards and sound are then unresistable for damage. (might need to lower max damage from 500 to 350 or 400 or so, still more than max for other unresistables besides mana storm, (time, plasma, force.)

[Magnate]

I agree with this. Everything that had rsound or rshards should get pstun instead. both shards and sound are then unresistable for damage. (might need to lower max damage from 500 to 350 or 400 or so, still more than max for other unresistables besides mana storm, (time, plasma, force.)

I think that would be a shame. You might as well just most of the high resistances and just have rbase, poison and nexus along with pblind/conf/stun. Everything else is merely ... flavour.

I rather fancy adding a couple of semi-nasty monster spells (not breaths) that do sound damage instead.

My understand is that we are in a post-TMJ world, so shrinking the dimensions of the game to remove more junk isn't the way we want to go, surely?

[Derakon]

It's more that I used to value equipment I found that had sound resistance, because it meant that I wouldn't get stunned or knocked out. Now I don't value it at all -- I'd much rather have protection from stunning. But sound resistance is miles more common than stun protection, since a) it shows up hardcoded on several artifacts, and b) it's a random high resistance, which is much more likely to show up on useful gear than a random ability like stun protection. IIRC random abilities are limited to Defender (useless), Holy Avenger / Gondolin (rarely useful), Lothlorien (potentially amazing), and "Magi (usually superceded for non-arcane casters). Getting a useful ability on one of these is unlikely to be enough to make it worth using compared to its competition, especially where melee weapons are concerned.

Not to mention random abilities are horribly diluted by crap like slow digestion, featherfall, or redundant sources of see invisible or free action.

I mean, if you look at the old regime, where high elements also offered status protection, the only elements you weren't necessarily ecstatic to get resistance to were light and darkness. Meanwhile even back then, random abilities were almost always pointless since the only one you cared about was Telepathy, which statistically speaking would never show up. Nowadays we've nerfed the hell out of the high resistances to the extent that people very rarely care about any of them much. We've stuffed a few more useful abilities into the "random ability" rubric, but the odds are that you'll still not get one you want.

Speaking as a player who typically goes for randarts, I assume at the start of the game that I will not find a usable item with blindness or confusion protection until the endgame, if then. They simply don't show up. Certainly the game's playable like that, but it does get a bit tedious having to avoid every nightmare, etc. you encounter, every single game.

This is turning kind of ranty, I guess. Here's my suggestion for how to fix things: replace "random ability" with "random protection" (that is, pConf, pBlind, pHalluc, pStun, FA, and Hold Life) and then shove the lot together with "random high resist". So Elvenkind is as likely to get pBlind as it is rNether. This has the interesting property of always granting you some form of status protection -- either every consequence of a specific element is countered, or a specific consequence is countered from all elements. It does also remove the small chance of finding a telepathy Lothlorien bow, I grant, which is a bit sad. But you never could have found such an absurdly amazing bow back in the day anyway, so be glad you have what you do! More relevantly, this change would make those protections much more common -- and much more likely to be on gear that you would otherwise be interested in using, too.

It also means that you'll never find Slow Digestion or Featherfall on an item that wouldn't automatically have it. Boo hoo.

[fizzix]

I have a very different suggestion to the pblind/pconf problem. Let saving throw also work for melee attacks. If a nightmare had only a 25% chance of confusing on each hit instead of a 100% chance, then a reasonably strong character might take one on in melee.

I do think that the resistances need to be looked at a bit both for 3.5 and v4. I also think that sound should be changed to something like rforce and it should provide resistance to sound and prevent stunning from plasma, sound, force and gravity, but not melee. Then having both rsound and pstun are a bit redundant even though they are slightly different. That's ok though. Of course this goes against Timo's entire reason for splitting them in the first place...

removing slow digestion and feather fall from the abilities list would also be a step forward. Or at least make the abilities level dependent so that they can't show up below dlevel 40 or so.

[Magnate]

I rather like both those suggestions. Certainly, making the monster attack procs trigger less than 100% would be a great change in its own right. (Yes, it would make the game easier, but richer tactically with more options for combat.) But I also like Derakon's suggestion of "random protection" - this is trivial to implement in v4 as the affix Of Dweomercraft can just be R:PROT instead of R:MISC | PROT. (I think we'd need to change FA and HL to PROT instead of MISC too.)