Elemental damage and resistances

[Pete Concrete]

Even with 140+ hours in this game, I haven't figured out elemental penetration and resistances. Part of it is the game not explaining a lot of things well or at all, part of it is me being dumb I guess.

elemental damage:
The stats page of the characters only show armor penetration, no elemental damages, which leads me to assume that these are based solely on your choice of weapon and equipment. If I do enough damage in every stage except for the barracks, where enemies just eat my physical damage, do I need to up my armor penetration or do I need equipment with more elemental damage? Which elemental damage is the important one, if I only struggle during Barracks and Courts? I never have a problem with the last stage, The Dark Halls, for some reason, maybe because my lightning resistance is good or my physical damage works agains those light beings, heck if I know.

Is the degree of damage you do during the different totem phases an indicator on how much particular damage you do? Like let's say if the ice phase is over after 6 hits and the earthquake phase takes 40 hits, one would assume that fire damage is high, no?

elemental resistances:
Up to 10 minutes ago, I thought that lightning and ice resistance [some of the attacks look like ice beams??] are the two important ones and that poison resistance is only really relevant in the woods, which are easy. But then after my last run, I saw that "ice damage received" was at 7k, as opposed to 30k in lightning damage received. This leads me to believe that I only really need to worry about lightning resistance if I have a good enough char overall.

Where my NG+10 pros at? Then again, maybe you are NG+1 and have already figured this all out?

[Jabroni]

All I know is warlock levels raises them and NG+ obliterates them

[Rage]

Lightning damage is the highest because of the Palaptine mobs that shotgun you with lightning bolts and the death enemies that shoot electric orbs. Two of the highest dmging abilities in the game far as I can tell. So yah its nice to have...but I'm going to be honest with you. I'm only in ng+7 but at this point resists are just always negative unless you have a Markhams set bonus+rings of resist bonus. The penalties to resists with each ng+ are substantial and the shadow curse just builds faster and faster with each ng+. I focus primarily on health...%dmg reduction...evasion...parry...Anything that is a layer of defense not relying upon actually absorbing the damage.

The character sheet actually does show +% elemental dmg. It's under Character Sheet->Info->Stats...scroll to the very bottom. It'll be under the pen stat. The most important elemental damage for you is the most synergistic one for that PARTICULAR character. As an example, my wiz is evocation so fire is all I do. Thus I stack enchants such as hellfire to increase that. Hope this helps a bit.

[Pete Concrete]

Originally posted by Rage:

Lightning damage is the highest because of the Palaptine mobs that shotgun you with lightning bolts and the death enemies that shoot electric orbs. Two of the highest dmging abilities in the game far as I can tell. So yah its nice to have...but I'm going to be honest with you. I'm only in ng+7 but at this point resists are just always negative unless you have a Markhams set bonus+rings of resist bonus. The penalties to resists with each ng+ are substantial and the shadow curse just builds faster and faster with each ng+. I focus primarily on health...%dmg reduction...evasion...parry...Anything that is a layer of defense not relying upon actually absorbing the damage.

The character sheet actually does show +% elemental dmg. It's under Character Sheet->Info->Stats...scroll to the very bottom. It'll be under the pen stat. The most important elemental damage for you is the most synergistic one for that PARTICULAR character. As an example, my wiz is evocation so fire is all I do. Thus I stack enchants such as hellfire to increase that. Hope this helps a bit.

My mistake, I found out the reason I thought elemental damage is not in the character sheet is because none of my characters except for one have ANY elemental damage at all, lol. Maybe the reason I struggle during Barracks and Courts is because those enemies are resilient against physical damage.

Maybe I'll try a lightning damage character. Focussing on a strong main weapon and high physical non-elemental damage worked fine for me so far, up to about NG+6 to NG+9.

So far my resists are negative or around zero only in the beginning, having a lot of attuned trinkets helps, and a decent warlock for class bonus.

maybe I'll try a fire or lightning wizard, thanks.

Shadow curse is a non-issue for me ever since the update, since now it's a purely risk-reward thing. I choose the pyre bonus at the architect and take the +25% shadow curse drink that gives you +20% damage, why wouldn't you. Free damage boost.