v1.10beta 100+ immunities acting as psuedo absorb:

[Crystalion]

From another thread (Great Race) Ruvanal quotes me and points to an interesting AB thread...

Venom much improved (e.g. fast high damage, doesn't compete with fade/BoS auras; possibly slightly bugged in apparent partial conversion of physical to poison)

This was an error in interpetation of the earlier testers due to their choice of a 'test subject' (act 5 doors with 1,000 poison resistance). There is no conversion of physical to poison being done. See page 2 of this thread.
http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums/...56&t=31001

Might be something for one of your threads on "hidden" things in the game.

He has a point. I'm inclined to look on it as an unanticapted consequence of v1.10 beta's new immunity system--perhaps if Blizz comes out and says it is indeed intentional I'll consider it "hidden" and not a possible bug.

To recap, for those too lazy to read the whole AB thread, here is Ruvanal's clever insight...

Damage is calculated in stages. In an early stage damage is calculated separately for each fundamental type of damage (physical, fire, cold, lightning, poison, magic), including taking resist factors into account. In a latter stage, these "typed" damages are all added together, and the net result used (after further manipulation it will eventually alter the target's HPs).

As a sanity (which didn't exist in Hellfire, btw, as enabling the dual wielding class and equiping two "useless" weapons could allow you to heal monsters) this damage is set to a minimum of zero. The *total* damage is so corrected, but *not* the individual types. So when a resistance is over 100%, the individual type damage can come out *negative*. These negatives effectively subtract from the total damage when they are added together.

Since trying to break immunities is very hard, any resist approaching 200 is basically unassailable. But for some reason, Blizz gave some objects (barricaded doors, etc.) 1000 (one thousand) percent poison resist. As a result, some players with a lot of poison (read Venom assassins) ended up noticing that they could not break down these barriers (when Venom was up).

However--and this is why I'm posting--what Ruvanal says seems likely to be affecting far more cases than just this extremely odd one. For example, anything significantly immune to fire (i.e. more than 100) might be getting a discount on the physical damage dealt by corpse explosion. Paladins not cracking immunities with Conviction might be losing ground a bit with Vengence. Paladins using Holy Shocking on Lightning Immunes (more than 100) might be making the kill much harder on themselves. Players beating on Physical immunes (100+) with excessive force might be negating some of their elemental damage. Etc., etc.

Iron Golems made with diamond paly resist automod shields might be even sturdier than just immune. Assassin Shadows with Fade up, ditto.

So a bit of testing might be in order to determine whether this "problem" upsets the play balance (and perhaps Blizz should tweak the damage calc routine) or whether it is, rather, an unannounced new "feature".

(Hard to say, sometimes... I'm presently still testing a fantastic bug/feature with some of the new uber runewords that I intend to report on in a day or two--it's quite a boon to players, but I can't see any way to not consider it a bug).

[Ruvanal]

He has a point. I'm inclined to look on it as an unanticapted consequence of v1.10 beta's new immunity system--perhaps if Blizz comes out and says it is indeed intentional I'll consider it "hidden" and not a possible bug.
...
So a bit of testing might be in order to determine whether this "problem" upsets the play balance (and perhaps Blizz should tweak the damage calc routine) or whether it is, rather, an unannounced new "feature".

It is not a really 'new' aspect of the game. I was using the v1.08 of the damage application routine to look at how this was being handled. The main change now is that there are many easily accessable monsters that can have a base resistance that is 100+%; but very few will have over 130% to one type of resistance.

Yes, you will be getting a degraded damage amount against certain monsters with the way this works, particularly with a an attack like Vengance that can deliver large amounts of several types of damage in one blow. But in most cases the damage will not end up being degraded that much. Just try not to be using a form of damage against a monster that is showing an immunity listing against that type of damage. Like why would you be using Holy Shock against a Lightning Immune? Use something else like Holy Fire, Holy Freeze, Might or something (even if you don't have many skill point into one of them).

The largest amounts of resistance that you will typically be seeing in the game will come when there is a boss pack that gets something like Fire Enhanced while also having a high starting Fire resistance amount.

Some resistance notes (someone else can dig through the files for a better listing)
physical: Highest base resistance is 100%. Stone Skin boss packs will be the main concern here.

Magic Resistance: base max 100%. No boost on this that I can think of off the top of my head.

Fire Resitance: base max 140%, less than 10 types have 130+%.
etc. (I need to run now).

Last note is that only 'innanimate constructs' had a resitance that was at 1000%.

[Occhidiangela]

can heal it? Lightning attacks on a Lightning immune can heal it if its resist is > 100%?

For dual immunes, that poses a bit of a problem for any Vengeance Paladin: He is using four elements to cause damage, Physical, Fire, Cold, Lightning. With a strong Poison charm or two, a dual immune possibly gets healed by two of five attacks, and if it is a Spectral Hit boss, for example, has high immunities against all non physical attack.

My observation on a melee sorceress in Act II Hell starts to make more sense now: I was healing that damned Burning Archer boss with every hit! :P

[Crystalion]

Some resistance notes (someone else can dig through the files for a better listing)
physical:  Highest base resistance is 100%.  Stone Skin boss packs will be the main concern here. 

Magic Resistance: base max 100%.  No boost on this that I can think of off the top of my head.

Fire Resitance: base max 140%, less than 10 types have 130+%.

Aside from Stone Skin could Ghostly Champs be a problem? I'm also thinking that a Necro/Paly party with a diamonded paly shield Iron Golem and the Paly aura Salvation with Necro Summon Resists might have so much immunity that Spectral Hit bosses (and now their minions, right?) couldn't scratch him. This is rather odd, if true.

Reading between the lines, it looks like Occhidiangela is saying that, indeed, a melee (physical damage) Sorc with lots of Fire Enchant (+fire damage) was having trouble with a "real" (as opposed to barricade type) monster.

I see lots of ways at Arreat Summit's champ/boss bonuses page for +resists of a substantial order to occur, assuming that data is still close to correct? I'm under the impression that bosses are tranferring a lot of effects to their minions these days, so this seems like a good thing to test.

Just try not to be using a form of damage against a monster that is showing an immunity listing against that type of damage. Like why would you be using...

This is the first good argument *against* high level Enchant I've seen in v1.10beta, as removing Enchant is impossible except by waiting, dying, or new game.

I'm very curious as to how Revives resists are calculated now.

[Ruvanal]

continuing...
Some resistance notes...

Lightning Resistance: base max 130% again less than 10 types have 120%+

Cold Resistance: this one is ugly. 75 monsters types have a cold resistance from 130% to 210% and the gargoyletrap has a ResCo(H)=1000. With the sorceress Cold Mastery not even cutting through the immunity at all, it is not clear why there would be so many this high of a resistance (the other previous types together had less than this in the 101 to 140 range. Mageazons beware of what you try to use cold attacks on; same for some of the assassin attacks that also do cold with the other stuff.

Poison Resistance: There are quite few in this category also, but most are in the range of 100 to 120 resistance. There are some 'mobile monsters' that have up to 140 resistance. The bone prisons and the bone wall have a 200% resistance. There are several of the 'constructs' and other non-mobile monsters that have a 1000% resistance.

My observation on a melee sorceress in Act II Hell starts to make more sense now: I was healing that damned Burning Archer boss with every hit!

Not truly healing because the minimum damage that you will do to a monster is set to a lower cap of zero. It would require actually doing a negative amount of damage to heal the monster. But it would not surprise me that many of the attacks were reduced to zero damage or close to it.

Aside from Stone Skin could Ghostly Champs be a problem?
That would depend on if the coding for them was fixed from what was in v1.09. In the earlier versions the Ghostly Champs were getting a fiat physical resist=50 regardless of what their resistance was to start with. It actually made the Ghostly Ghosts have less physical resistance.

On the Iron Golem case it seems likely from what I have tested earlier. But I am unsure of how fast the golem would be able to kill on his own. A very effective 'immune' barrier though.

A note on that testing that I did is that when the resistance is raised by multiple sources other than just the resistance ratings in monstats.txt, they may not end up showing that the monster is immune. I had modded the game such that the necro skeletons plus the amount from the Summon Resist skill would be greater than 100%. They would not get a notation by their life bar as being immune, but none the less they were.

This in turn can tie into two other things that I can think of. The first appears to be a bug with the hirelings. There are reports from some that they occasionally appear to immune to some of the elemental effects. Either the cap on their resistance is not being applied or more likely it is only being applied before taking into account the equipment that they have. If the latter it should be possible to make some of the hirelings 'immune' through the right selection of equipment with an eye toward the resistance’s that can be gained. Needless to say the shield on the Iron Wolves can make an excellent choice for testing this.

A second thing to be ware of concerning this is the Ancients. Most do not realize that they will spawn with random equipment. Since this equipment should be rare in magical quality by hell difficulty, this is some thing to be wary of when approaching them there. Their natural resistance amounts plus what they can get from their equipment may put them over 100% to an element and it will not show as an immunity to 'worry' about.

Things are definitely looking worse that I first considered that thread concerning Venom.

[Baajikiil]

My observation on a melee sorceress in Act II Hell starts to make more sense now: I was healing that damned Burning Archer boss with every hit! 

MongoJerry's account of his 1.10 melee sorc(also using high enchant), mentions that he had a terrible time with 2 fire enchanted bosses- a council member and the cow king were fire enchanted, and took over 1/2 hour each to defeat. This seems like a likely explanation.

Question, how about a unique with magic resist(+ to all elemental resists), as well as enchantments. I'd assume both bonuses stack? Easy to push resists *very* high to one or more elements(even higher if the monster has a high base resist as well).

[Pren]

Manaburn grants 75% magic resistance to the boss in question, strange that magic resistant doesn't grant magic resistance, but eh.

Manaburn bosses > bone spirit necro. Heh.

Technically, the way this works is good. In most games, immune creatures absorb damage. At least, 7 years ago they did. With the dumbing down of 'rpgs' and gaming in general, the trend has mostly stopped.

This adds in a bit of thinking and side effects to skill and equipment choice. Unfortunately, with the horrible balance of 1.10, it'll probably just be another enormous headache (as stated with venom and enchant.) There are so few truly functional builds in 1.10 without insane gear that while I would PREFER this as a method of increasing difficulty, with the lame ones we already have (so many boss packs, might enchanted extra strong stuff, holy freeze nerf, etc) it's probably too much.

Edit: forgot the first thing I thought of when CE was mentioned. This is an excellent way to reduce the effectiveness of scaling CE, which is going to be the number one killer in parties. slvl30 CE, very easy to acquire, would simply cause everything not fire and physical immune to drop within 4 corpses. In solo games, getting one corpse isn't hard. In party games, with the necro supplying curses and the uber bone prisons of 1.10s, it should not be very hard at all.

[IlleglWpns]

Has this bug been reported to blizzard yet? It seems like a bug, and not a feature, because it really hurts builds who do more than one type of damage in per attack

[Crystalion]

Not truly healing because the minimum damage that you will do to a monster is set to a lower cap of zero.

Completely without expecting it, I ran into the "Ruvanal effect" in testing something PvP tonight. My test sorc (aka victim) was wearing MDR +5 armor and not taking any damage from my weenie Assassin attacks when the Assassin was using +fire damage 1-3 (but not when not). By "weenie" I mean around 10 to 20 physical, which is way more than the "5" of the MDR but way less than 5x10.

I'm rather suspicious, given the various numbers involved, that PvP /10 penalty is now processed before MDR, as I can make everything come out equal between "Ruvanal effect" theory and practice if so.

Nonetheless, the notion that MDR could trigger the effect makes me wonder if DR (physical damage reduction) can as well and if the order of calculation is the same? I don't have a circ/amu of Life Everlasting handy to test with, but their effect would be enormous PvP if the calculation is going the way I suspect the MDR was.

As usual, it could be some time before I get around to testing this myself, and I certainly will not scan the code for an explanation, so I offer it up to the LL "as is"...

[Jarulf]

At least in older versions, pre 1.10, at least for MDR (and DR), wthere was actually a minimum damage to which those effects (MDR and DR) could reduce the damage. It was set to 0 for all damage types (it was per damage type). I don't recall if it factored in resistance or not but can perhpas check if I have the notes still somewhere.

[brianc84]

By the way, I do get results like these when doing various MvP damage tests in 1.10 final. MDR/DR in large enough amounts ends up reducing too much damage from multi-element hits. Just a few examples of tests I've done:

I set up a monster to do 50 physical and 50 lightning damage. A standard control hit results in 100 total damage.

Tossing in 60 MDR actually results in a total damage of 40 (when it should be 50). Adding 40 more MDR results in 0 damage taken. The same applies with DR. With 60 DR, total damage is 40 and with 100, total damage is 0.

In another test I set up a monster to do 50 physical, 50 lightning, and 50 fire damage.

-With 60 MDR, the total damage comes out to be 30 (while it should be 50).
-With 60 MDR and 50 physical resistance, the total damage comes out to be 5 (when again it should be 50).
-With 90 MDR, the total damage becomes 0.
-With 60 DR, the total damage becomes 90.
-With 60 DR and 50 phys resist, the total damage is still 90.
-With 120 DR, the total damage becomes 30.
-With 150 DR, the total damage becomes 0.



The theory so far is that when MDR/DR makes the amount of damage for a given type negative, that negative value doesn't get corrected to 0. When they're negative, resistance and absorb steps would get skipped over and that negative amount ends up reducing the total amount of damage done when all the final damage amounts for each type get summed together way at the end of the damage modification process.

[Crystalion]

In another test I set up a monster to do 50 physical, 50 lightning, and 50 fire damage.

-With 60 MDR, the total damage comes out to be 30 (while it should be 50).
-With 60 MDR and 50 physical resistance, the total damage comes out to be 5 (when again it should be 50).
-With 90 MDR, the total damage becomes 0.
-With 60 DR, the total damage becomes 90.
-With 60 DR and 50 phys resist, the total damage is still 90.
-With 120 DR, the total damage becomes 30.
-With 150 DR, the total damage becomes 0.

The theory so far is that when MDR/DR makes the amount of damage for a given type negative, that negative value doesn't get corrected to 0. When they're negative, resistance and absorb steps would get skipped over and that negative amount ends up reducing the total amount of damage done when all the final damage amounts for each type get summed together way at the end of the damage modification process.

Lovely work.

Could you check an attack that does have physical and one that doesn't have any type of non-physical (as control tests, to ascertain, e.g., whether >0 damage must be present for the MDR or DR to have any effect)?

Could you check an elemental (or, iirc, Crescent Moon "magic") direct (not percent) absorb as well (looking for the negative underflow summation effect, naturally)?

[brianc84]

Could you check an attack that does have physical and one that doesn't have any type of non-physical (as control tests, to ascertain, e.g., whether >0 damage must be present for the MDR or DR to have any effect)?

MDR isn't affecting the damage from a pure physical attack, and DR isn't affecting the damage from a purely elemental/magic attack. It seems to me that more than one damage type is needed (not necessarily part physical and magical, just two differing types) in order for the damage reductions to 'overflow' to other damage types.

Could you check an elemental (or, iirc, Crescent Moon "magic") direct (not percent) absorb as well (looking for the negative underflow summation effect, naturally)?

Hmm I haven't seen any healing or reduction overflowing there so far.

[whyBish]

So the question becomes for players, which monsters have mixed attack types. (I assume that monsters dont have MDR/DR, and I think we've already seen the list for monsters with over 100% resistance)

[crumpuppet]

I don't want to sound like an absolute tit here, but I've known about healing immune monsters for a while now.

Firing a frozen orb into a group of mixed immunes (fire and cold), I've always noticed that the cold immunes get healed. This might just be the natural hell recovery rate kicking in, but it still always looked like the cold immunes got healed a lot faster, and the others actually lost health.

That's just me.

[gekko]

That's not what was happening. They were not being healed at all. That was where the final 'insanity check' kicked in, and set the damage to 0 if it would otherwise have been negative. So firing a cold only spell can only ever do zero or positive damage. You touched on the answer there already -- many monsters now have very high regeneration rates, and if you're doing zero damage to them...

This type of thing wouldn't affect a sorceress at all (melee sorcs being the exception, as well as, of course, the mercs accompanying sorcs). It would have an effect, however, on characters delivering 2 or more types of damage in a single "blow." Avengers come to mind.

gekko

[adeyke]

This post was about the beta. The issue was fixed for 1.10 final, so any resistance above 100% is equivalent to 100%.

The post was bumped due to a new, somewhat related discovery, involving DR and MDR.