The -60% penalty and subsequently inflated elemental resistance values are bad for the game.

When I played poe1 I always thought the -60% resistance penalty was a poor design choice that only existed as a homage to D2. I was certain it wouldn't survive into PoE2. I was slightly correct, but mostly wrong. Only was the chaos resistance penalty removed along with the rebalance of chaos resistance values. The scaling for elemental resistances are still a mess.

It takes about the same amount of modifier investment to cap out chaos resistance as it does elemental resistance. Excluding mod pool crafting weights which are irrelevant to this topic. So why does elemental resistance and the -60% penalty feel so much worse?

The immediately dislike comes from the feeling of your gear progression being sapped throughout the campaign and early endgame. People want to earn bigger numbers to fight bigger threats; not feel like they are on a progression treadmill.

The later and more devastating impact is how disproportionately punishing it is to be short 1 resistance modifier with the resistance penalty. Worse case scenario if you are short a high tier chaos resistance suffix you will take double damage. Worst case scenario for elemental resistances you take triple damage. With the artificially inflated resistance values it becomes oddly painful to swap gear out if the player falls short for an elemental resistance. Too much friction when it comes to balancing out gear progression easily turns from interesting to irritating.

Overall the -60% elemental resistance penalty is a net negative design choice that makes stat progression feel worse to engage with. Removing the penalty and having all elemental resistance modifiers more closely resemble chaos resistance values would be a direct design improvement.

Elemental resistance should only be more important than chaos resistance because elemental damage is more common. Not because it's also literally more.

You can socket resistance runes to fix any resistance on gear. It's much easier to do now.

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2836742981#3689 wrote:

You can socket resistance runes to fix any resistance on gear. It's much easier to do now.

Uh, you might be replying to the title and not the full post?

The amount of investment it takes to max out resistances is not being criticized or debated here.

in short - yes, its a bad design. Only exists because this is how it was in diablo2. No excuses.
But its how its. Or dev have no vision (or gamedesigner) for such fundamental game mechanics. Or they just fine with it.

This is the last thing devs care about. I prefer not to have it because I do sometimes have to change out 2-3 slots of items if 1 item is providing a lot of resistance but it is what it is. I pretty much quit the league already so don't care too mcuh for it.

As a player that only started playing ARPGs about 1.5 years ago: keeping this kind of thing from D2 is so... Incongruous? It's like if we still had to have a dedicated potion gridventory instead of flask charges, or still had a stamina bar, etc.

Why have the resistance penalty in the first place? Like, the strength of resistances on items scales with their (modifier) level already, right? That should be enough to encourage gear upgrades on its own.

The affixes need to be reworked then, the resist affixes need to give two times less at least in case of no penalty. Otherwise there would be a massive power creep thanks to the numerous freed affixes.