How important are increased max resistances? (more than 75%)

[MAGNUS SwellWand theShaftSwinger]

i mean is it makes much difference, is it really adds to your survivability to go fro 78% or 81% max resists, (using resist flasks or purity auras) or it's just not really worth it and i should better go for additional Phys mitigation flask or damage auras instead?

[HelhiganM]

res gets harder to maintain as you go up difficulties, pretty sure its like -20% more res each....max res is very important unless your using some already invincible class like the chaos passive or whatever......if you think you can live with less res then go for it, its all preferance, maybe wanna hold onto certain res sets for people like piety and so on......("oh i got life leech though" life leech isnt gonna stop you from getting 1 shotted from a majority of mobs in the mazes and atlas maps )

also might wanna hold onto any chaos res flasks and decent chaos res gear cause IMO sometimes all you need is a bit of res to kill a boss even if you got no damage

[The_Driver]

Resistances are very important, you should be at your cap as soon as possible, otherwise some encounters might be torturous. The interesting thing about it is that each point you raise the cap (and have enough to get to the new cap) is more effective than the last point. Going from 75% to 76% is a 4% decrease in damage from that element, going to 77% is another 4.2%.

And even if you haven't raised your cap, it's good to have a bit more than cap, as your value might get (temporarily) lowered by enemies or maps, e.g. via curses or essence-mob-effect-hits. How much you want to overshoot is dependent on what content you play and if you risk it or not (e.g. unidentified maps vs carefully selected ones), you'll often hear 169% instead of 135% for merciless when displayed as normal value (which is gone with 3.0, but whatever, take the 34% overcapped and add your raised cap to it to know where to aim at for dual-curse red maps).

[Purdurabu]

You might use a + max resistance flask on certain bosses who do primarily one damage type but outside of that you will rarely go out of your way to push your max resistances up unless you are running righteous fire(Which does 90% of your HP + ES as fire damage to yourself.)

[Kamiyama]

You pretty much have to if you want to map. Having piddly cold resist when running into a rogue exile on a map that casts vortex and frost bolt made me think twice about my build.

Stack resists as high as you can. Merciless has a -60% penalty to each resist.

Maybe we won't have to in Oriath. IMO removing the penalties would be a good idea since it would free up gear slots for things other than resist, resist, resist.

[Detergent]

If you use Taste of Hate then getting your cold resist as high as possible would help a lot. Same goes Lightning Coil + lightning resist or Eyes of the Greatwolf with damage taken conversion.

You probably wont notice +3% to max res, but getting all your resist caps into the 90s+ feels pretty huge.
IMO don't worry about it unless your building around the thought of 95% all resist.
Just do what I do now and find a friend with a dedicated aura build

[davidb11]

The thing is, max resistance increase is rare, so don't expect to ever get it close to 90% for all three elements.
That is not including flasks, by the way.
If you ever wanted to facetank the burning man's explosion of fire damage, I think it's all fire, in Merciless, An elemental shrine + the Shield of the Pheonix + Ruby Flash + Purity of Fire is the way to go. :)

There is no reason to do this except to say that you did though.

Keep in mind, resistances are very good to be at max, but more than max will still help.
I'm not sure how 76% resistance is 4% less damage than 75%, but that's probably due to a math formula. Since 76% less damage is not normally considered more than 1% more than 75% less damage, and the formula is a simple flat damage reduction. That's why you can get 100% resistance to an element via the Elemental shrine.

Oh, and fun fact, you can actually go above 100% resistance to an element! This is basically impossible without the Elemental Shrine of course, but it's fun being immune to an entire element. :)
Sadly, you don't turn Righeous Fire into super healing at that point. :)