New absorbtion cap in 1.10?

[lemekim]

IIRC in beta they had already moved it, since accidentally while doing testing I was unable to damage a character PvP while I had forgotten to remove their -damages items. I recall thinking at the time that this wasn't a good change, as it would ruin PvP on realm (surprisingly I have yet to hear that this is the case, but it seems clear to me that damage reduction, absorption and resists should potentially make it nearly impossible for another player to harm you significantly).

I am not sure if the new sequence would change PVP in any significant way.

If we are talking about physical damage, not only characters are doing at least the same or even more damage now (thanks to BotD runeword, 450% enhanced damage rares and synergies), but their damage is not as reduced, since in 1.09, an attack was reduced 16 times thanks to 75% damage reduce and 1/4 pvp penalty, but now is only reduced ~12 times, 50% for damage reduce cap and 1/6 (I know it's 17% but for simplicity sake) for pvp. A typical 3,600 damage hit will be reduced to 300 damage pvp hit, and that's a lot of -damage required to negate.

As for point absorb and -magic damage items in regards to spells, it all depends on where they are applied in the damage sequence. If they are applied before resists and % absorb, then they really will have little effect when considering 10,000 damage spells. Of course, if they are applied after, then they might be quite significant in that area, but even there I don't see how they would be different from 1.09, where people could get items that would grant them almost complete immunity from cold/fireghtning spells.

This is not to say that I think 1.10 made pvp better, because there are a lot of other problems outside of this issue, such as the new cross-skill items (most notably call to arms and enigma), some insane pvp damage skills (e.g. blessed hammer doing 2,000 irresistible pvp damage), and the change of cold mastery to straight substract instead of % reduction.