Elemental Resistance is a Lie

[Butterknife Bandit (Envious)]

So this game does a very bad job at explaining how defense and offensive systems work and I swear you need a math degree in order to be good at this game.

Basically, after a certain point (around Devourer) Elemental Resistance mods fall off HARD.
After Devourer, you need to focus on HP, Defense, MP, or Shields. Otherwise your just massively shooting yourself in the leg. Dont worry, your big boy dps builds can wait until you get to hard mode.


Cant figure out why you cant get Pyro? Probably because of all the Bunny's running Fire Resistance and not HP and Defense Mods

[Mordtziel]

HP is just far more versatile and effective than any other survivability source. Resistance doesn't fall off, it was just never that great to begin with and unlike with defense, you can't get very much to begin with. It's not used much by enemies. Next time you run something, check out how much damage you take in the detailed view, very little of it is elemental because it's only used by special enemies and bosses. And you don't need a math degree, it's just a subtraction, division, and a square root. Is that even high school these days? For the record the formula is

elemental damage reduction = 1 - 150/(sqrt(resistance)+150)

For physical damage reduction, just replace resistance with defense. The only reason resistance is awful, is because, again, few attacks deal elemental damage and we're not able to get nearly as much resistance. But defense is also not that great either. They both pale in comparison to HP where we have things like Increased HP and Stim Accelerant granting over 200% increased HP each in comparison to Increased DEF's 160% and Maximize Resist's 180% (which aren't even going to reduce the damage you take by those %s).

Cant figure out why you cant get Pyro? Probably because of all the Bunny's running Fire Resistance and not HP and Defense Mods

And this is more like people relying too much on their guns raw damage instead of building elemental damage. Pyromaniac has very high defense (normal mode pyromaniac has defense on the same level as a hard mode colossus) but very low resistance (devourer's resistances are like twice as high).

[Baron01]

Everything in moderation is the way to go. You want to have base level of resistances for any fight with elemental attacks. You should also have as much HP as feasible on your external components. Defense is the next, and last, in the priority as you should have enough by having correct external components and some mods.

I can tell you from personal experience that elemental resistance makes a difference, on some fights more than on the other. Hard mode Executioner is an electricity-based colossus. If I build my normal Bunny for him specifically, I will have 6.2k electric resistance. I can tank him normal attacks, I can stand in his beam or get hit by his slam without any serious danger of dying. If I go in with my general setup that has some 3.6k electric resistance, I can still get hit but I absolutely can not ignore even normal attacks.
Hard mode Dead Bride has absolutely devastating chill AOE when enraged that was killing me extremely fast when I had base 3.7k chill resistance. I now can get over 8k resistance, which means I can reliably survive the AOE even if I'm in dead center when it goes up or run the wrong way.

Should you go out of your way to build elemental resistances? No, you always need to have decent amount of HP before you should look for other ways to mitigate incoming damage.