Resists at low levels

M

Maimai

Dalayan Beginner
I've been leveling up a monk alt recently and want to comment that in the early game it seems almost impossible to resist spells cast by mobs. My monk was using 3 pieces of diamondine jewelry (total +48 to all resists) aswell as numerous other resist bonuses on her other armour and using the Resist Magic buff from the Resistant Scroll. I don't have the logs but after one fight vs caster mobs in yaralith where they were landing every spell on me I decided to pay special attention, as I leveled I can estimate my resist rate was certainly under 10%.

The issue with this is that my monk had better resists than any newbie will ever obtain before they level up, low level armour has little resist stats like +3 magic resist but it seems to me that bonuses like this wont be making a difference.

Just wondering if this can be looked at for the benefit of noobs everywhere, imo a new character in 'moderate' armour for their level using endure or resist buffs should be resisting around 40% of spells or more.
 
i've noticed a lack of resitablilty myself. When i was leveling my SK up he was twinked pretty good, resists were all just under or right above 100 and he never seemed to resist anything.
 
Well what I meant was to get more resists when buffed, and wearing resist gear, at the moment i'd wager that the difference between a level 20 casting endure fire on themselves, and a level 20 not bothering is negligable.
 
Seconding this--one of my twinks has reasonably good resists, gets a full set of resist buffs from my other alt, and still almost never manages to resist the spells npcs cast.

It's not so much the generic spells landing that's the problem, it's when npcs can stick fear for ungodly lengths of time that it stings.
 
I've found this to be the case as well on the occasions I have fought casters, but not with twinked resist gear. My resist rates don't seem to be any different with or without the appropriate resist buffs (from either a cleric or druid) and/or bard songs appropriate for the level. My experience only covers dungeons through the 40s.
 
Wiz said:
If average resist rate was 40%, caster NPCs would be a joke.
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Yeah cause, if a caster mob could do hard nukes 60% of the time and still hit just as hard as a warrior mob their level, they'd be a joke.

Edit: And it's not an average resist rate, we're talking about characters with resist scores well above average. It's true that low level resist spells are never used. I'd love for a wizard to say "Oh we're heading into Ruins of the First City, some of these mobs nuke so I'm going to resist buff us all." No, it never happens and it should. There's no reason to waste time and mana on a spell that doesn't really have any affect. Only the best resist spells are used during special circumstances like raids.
 
Siquros said:
Wiz said:
If average resist rate was 40%, caster NPCs would be a joke.
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Yeah cause, if a caster mob could do hard nukes 60% of the time and still hit just as hard as a warrior mob their level, they'd be a joke.

Edit: And it's not an average resist rate, we're talking about characters with resist scores well above average. It's true that low level resist spells are never used. I'd love for a wizard to say "Oh we're heading into Ruins of the First City, some of these mobs nuke so I'm going to resist buff us all." No, it never happens and it should. There's no reason to waste time and mana on a spell that doesn't really have any affect. Only the best resist spells are used during special circumstances like raids.
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A) They don't hit as hard as NPCs.

B) You will nearly always have a class with the low level resist buffs.
 
Siquros said:
I'd love for a wizard to say "Oh we're heading into Ruins of the First City, some of these mobs nuke so I'm going to resist buff us all." No, it never happens and it should. There's no reason to waste time and mana on a spell that doesn't really have any affect. Only the best resist spells are used during special circumstances like raids.
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They do have an effect but I know your point, they rarely get used. I bet giving them a substantial increase to their duration would result in more useage (2 hour duration: why not?).
 
At longer duration I would still take another buff over resist buffs at lower levels, then again, how many times at level 35 are you going to have a full buff box? Doesnt even happen to me at adept raids so why not grab extra resists if I have the slots open.
 
Um, if you're low level and you're not getting buffed while fighting caster mobs, that's the buffer's fault. You could always just ask for the buff to be cast. I mashed 'endure magic' the second i got the spell, and it rarely left my buffbox as long as I was fighting casters. Maybe this has something to do with the 'oh god caster mobs murder me' threads we had a while back, lol.
 
Thinkmeats said:
Um, if you're low level and you're not getting buffed while fighting caster mobs, that's the buffer's fault. You could always just ask for the buff to be cast. I mashed 'endure magic' the second i got the spell, and it rarely left my buffbox as long as I was fighting casters. Maybe this has something to do with the 'oh god caster mobs murder me' threads we had a while back, lol.
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Well, in my group, our experience was something along the lines of pull a caster, kill it, realize "that was nasty" after the fight, buff up for the next one, kill it, repeat for the duration of the buff, realize that it was just as nasty and that the resist buffs didn't seem to help at all, give up on buffing resists.
 
GuiardoTuneweaver said:
Well, in my group, our experience was something along the lines of pull a caster, kill it, realize "that was nasty" after the fight, buff up for the next one, kill it, repeat for the duration of the buff, realize that it was just as nasty and that the resist buffs didn't seem to help at all, give up on buffing resists.
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Every little bit counts, the problem is that the early level resist buffs are very little indeed. I was suggesting longer durations to encourage their use, not so much to fix the whole problem... I guess it's a bandaid fix.
 
In this case, every little bit does nto really seem to help. It seems to function exactly like live...



IE... you are X levels above the mob or within 6 levels of the mob (or higher) and have resists greater than 225, you stand a fairly decent chance of resisiting or reducing the damage or effect. Otherwise, everything hits you, and resists or reductions are just luck. Kind of like a lightswitch.



The resist score implies a scale, and there probably is supposed to be one, probably even coded as one, but if you mapped it out on a grid, it is a parabolic curve. At the point that the curve intersects possible player levels and resists, the line is pretty much vertical.
 
Adalus keep in mind that not every class is present for groups/raids at low levels. This isnt like being raid buffed where you sometimes have to click buffs off to fit something good for this particular mob in.
 
If you have 100 MR at L 10, L 10 casters shouldn't be able to touch you.

One way to implement something like this would be to scale resists against the attacker's level.

Effective_Resists = Base_Resists * 85 / (Attacker_Level + 20)

Mob Level, PC Resist Multiplier
01, 4.05
05, 3.40
15, 2.43
25, 1.89
35, 1.55
45, 1.31
55, 1.13
65, 1.00
70, 0.94
75, 0.89

A formula like this would make resist buffs and resist gear at low levels be worth using.

Now, the above is a band-aid. If you wanted to change how spells work to that resistences made sense, the best way to deal with it is to make spells resist about half the time. Then increased "power" and "resistance" both have lots of room to play around in.

Tweak the game so that both PCs and NPCs have a 50% chance to resist spells by default.

Halve the (cast + recovery) time of offensive resistable spells. Halve the mana cost of the spells. Halve the aggro of offensive spells.

Halve the recast of NPC resistable effects.

"hard to resist" effects require work.

Set
Spell_Power = (Caster_Level * 5 + Spell_Skill + Specilization / 10)
// (for mobs or innate abilities, give them a spell_skill of level*5)
(A L 65 player with 230 evocation and 200 spec: evoc would have a spell power of 575)

Spell_Resistance = (Target_Level * 5 + Target_Resists)
(A L 65 player with 200 MR would have a SR of 525)

if Caster_Level > Target_Level, Level_Difference_Modifier = 5*(Target_Level - Caster_Level)
if Target_Level > Caster_Level, Level_Difference_Modifier = (-2) times the square of (Target_Level - Caster_Level)

(a creature 10 levels higher than you would have a -200 LDM.)

Spell_Penetration = Spell_Resist_Modifier + Specilization/10 + Level_Difference_Modifier

If Spell_Penetration is negative, remove it from Spell_Resistance
If Spell_Penetration is positive, remove it from Spell_Power

Chance for a spell to land = Spell_Power / (Spell_Power + Spell_Resistance)

This assumes that a typical L X character or mob has 5 + X*5 resists in order to resist spells.

It also doesn't provide for "partial resists". It also doesn't provide "elbow points" at which spells start bouncing off of you.

The key point here is if your expected spell resistance against a mob is about 50%, both increased resistances and decreased resistances can have noticeable effects.

Meh. ~_~
 
I think the basic point that some people are failing to grasp is that giving low levels virtual immunity to spells by twinking them with resist gear is not desirable from the balance perspective. I know that's shocking and all, but whatcha gonna do?

I am in agreement that there should be a significant difference in resist rates between having no resist gear or buffs and having lots of resist gear and buffs--much like you find at higher levels. However, seeing as how I haven't done any testing myself, I can't say that such a difference doesn't exist.

As usual, if you want to get changes made, I'd say your best bet would be to do some parsing. Get a character and do half a level with resist gear and buffs on, the other half without, while fighting caster mobs (in the same level range). Parse your resist rates for different types of spells. If an increase of 100 to all resists only results in a 1% increase in resist rate, you'll most definitely have a case. If you see it doubling your resist rate, maybe not so much.

Emperical evidence is, as always, far superior to anecdotal if you want to get changes made. If you're just looking to vent about something, by all means, go right ahead. But you aren't too likely to get changes made.
 
Nurgock said:
Adalus keep in mind that not every class is present for groups/raids at low levels. This isnt like being raid buffed where you sometimes have to click buffs off to fit something good for this particular mob in.
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It also isn't like being raid buffed in that classes aren't as restricted when it comes to what they can buff. For example, clerics get all five endure-class resist buffs, and many other classes get multiple types as well (except enchanters, but MR is most important anyway and they get resist magic pretty early).

Hasrett said:
I think the basic point that some people are failing to grasp is that giving low levels virtual immunity to spells by twinking them with resist gear is not desirable from the balance perspective. I know that's shocking and all, but whatcha gonna do?
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Diminishing returns isn't unreasonable. The difference between 100 and 120 MR should be much, much less imo than the difference between 20 and 40 MR at low levels. Besides, what point is it to have items like http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/wanelo/items.php?id=25078&charid=1218258 ? They give less bonus because they're low level and the bonus they give means less because they're low level.

It's very important to note that this is a thought exercise, nothing more. Chaning how resists are calculated is like to be a really damn crunchy task, from a programmatical standpoint. A better solution might be to stop npcs from casting fear on players at low levels--it's a really hillariously nasty spell when you can't shake it off. Stuff like slow, root, etc isn't nearly as bad.
 
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