Guide to the Resistances in Diablo 2: Resurrected Including Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison & Magic Resistance
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This page will discuss resistances for both the player and monsters, as well as the different types of damage and their ancillary effects, as well as the effects that equipment, skills, and difficulty have on resistances.
There are four different types of elemental damage in the game: cold, fire, lightning, and poison. Physical damage and non-elemental magic damage are much less common in the game than the four types of elemental damage. Your resistances determine whether the damage you take from these elements is increased or decreased, and your resistances can change depending on the equipment you are currently wearing, any charms you have in your inventory, specific character skills, as well as the difficulty level you are currently playing at.
Spells and attacks that are similar to spells are typically what cause elemental damage. Unlike melee and ranged attacks, which are the primary sources of most physical damage, there is typically no hit or miss chance associated with elemental damage. Your Attack Rating, Defense, and Block Chance are usually irrelevant; the only thing that matters is whether or not you are in the area of effect of the spell. Fire or cold arrows shot by certain variants of the Corrupted Rogue, a Mummy's touch could inflict poison, and so on are just a few examples of how some sources of elemental damage can vary, and how they frequently accompany other attacks.
The maximum possible value for each resistance is typically 75%; however, with the right gear and skills, this value can be raised to 95%. The resistance can only go as low as -100% at its absolute lowest. The player is unable to achieve a resistance value higher than 95%, but monsters can, and on the Hell difficulty setting, nearly all of the monsters do. This information is displayed under the monster's name when it is highlighted (on consoles, this is reduced to a less player-friendly icon). When a monster has a resistance to an element that is at least equal to or greater than 100%, they are immune to damage caused by that element.
Fire Resistance
Damage of this type is utilized by a wide variety of enemies, including Megademons, Vampires, Fetish Shamans, and of course Diablo himself. FireWhen they expire, enemies that have been enchanted will also deal damage from fire. It inflicts a moderate amount of damage and has a moderate range between the most damage it can do and the least damage it can do.
Resistance to the Cold
The amount of damage done by cold is typically less than that caused by other types of elemental damage; however, it also has the narrowest range of possible values, both in terms of its minimum and its maximum. Damage dealt by cold also causes the characters it affects to become frozen, which slows both their movement and attack speed. When you take damage from cold, your Cold Resistance does not determine whether or not you become frozen or for how long you remain frozen; rather, that is determined by a separate mod that is found on certain pieces of D2R ladder runewords for sale. Both Duriel and Mephisto deal cold damage to their targets, as do cold-type Skeleton Magi, Abyss Knights, and Oblivion Knights. When they are vanquished, creatures with the Cold Enchantment will let loose a powerful Frost Nova.
Insulation Against Lightning
Another uncommon element, lightning is both the most damaging and the least damaging of all the elements. There is a significant difference between the minimum damage that any attack will inflict (which is typically one point of damage) and the maximum damage that any attack can inflict. There is a large amount of variation in the damage caused by lightning, which can make it more perilous. If you get a low roll, you might fool yourself into thinking that you are safe. Lightning is an ability that Mephisto possesses, and it is also a part of Diablo's incredibly damaging "Lightning Inferno" attack. The Willowisps are the worst kind of enemy because they are incorporeal spirits that like to attack you from off-screen with bolts of lightning. When Death Beetles and Lightning Enchanted foes take damage, they will let loose a ring of Charged Bolts, making it risky to engage them in melee combat.
Poison Resistance
The infliction of poison damage is relatively common and can be caused by a wide variety of creepy-crawlies, such as Giant Spiders, Sand Maggots, Mummies, and Greater Mummies (the former inflict poison damage with their melee attacks and leave behind a cloud of poison gas when they die, while the latter can exhale a gout of poisonous breath), as well as Andariel. When poison is applied to a target, unlike other elements, it does not deal damage all at once but rather deals damage over a period of time. Poison Resistance reduces the amount of poison damage that is inflicted per tick, but it does not reduce the amount of time that a player is poisoned for. That is accomplished by a separate mod that is found on certain pieces of equipment. Even though players themselves cannot be killed by poison damage (their summons and mercenaries, however, are a different story), being reduced to a single Life will make you extremely vulnerable.
Resistances and the overall level of difficulty
When in normal mode, all of your resistances are normal, which means they are all initialized to a value of 0%. You won't face much in the way of elemental damage early on in the game, with the exception of the occasional attack from a Fallen Shaman, Skeleton Mage, or Misshapen's lightning ball. Furthermore, the various pieces of equipment that provide relatively small boosts to resistances don't appear to promise any significant protection either. By the end of Act 2, approximately half of the foes on the majority of maps will be able to deal elemental damage of some kind, and this pattern will not shift as you continue to play the game. Elemental resistance is an absolute requirement for making it through harder Acts and more challenging situations.
Because your resistances are reduced by 40% in Nightmare and by 100% in Hell, even the most difficult part of the Normal difficulty level is a piece of cake in comparison to those two difficulties. If this causes your resistance to drop below 0%, the number that represents it will turn red on the screen that displays your character, indicating that you are susceptible to the aforementioned element. Because the elemental damage output of enemies appears to have been designed with the idea that it will be reduced in some form, having a vulnerability to an element is a significant disadvantage when playing on the Hell difficulty setting. The amount of damage that Burning Souls are able to deal to characters who have 75% health. Lightning Resistance is already a terrible ability; engaging in combat with certain foes while you are defenseless against their attacks is equivalent to committing suicide.
Fortunately, gear also scales with difficulty, and the increasing stakes mean that it is in your best interest to seek out higher-tier arms, armor, and charms in order to... well, let's just say keep your head above water. A single resistance can receive a significant boost from specialized sets and one-of-a-kind items, and it's not unusual for multiple resistances, or even all of them, to receive significant buffs as well.
Magic Resistance
Magic Resistance is a relatively uncommon form of resistance that reduces the amount of damage a character takes from sources other than the elements. The Berserk skill of the Barbarian, the Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer skills of the Paladin, the projectiles cast by Abyss Knights and Oblivion Knights with purple auras, and the projectiles cast by Succubi all contribute to this damage. Other sources of this damage come from Necromancer skills such as Teeth, Bone Spear, and Bone Spirit, as well as the Holy Bolt and Blessed Hammer skills of the Paladin. In the Hell difficulty level, Greater Mummies are one of the few enemies that are consistently immune to damage from magic. The value of a character's Magic Resistance is not displayed on the character screen, and in Nightmare or Hell difficulty, characters do not take damage to their Magic Resistance due to the difficulty level.
A challenge to one's body
In the same way that one can defend themselves against the effects of elemental damage, one can also defend themselves against the effects of physical damage. To begin, there are not many Diablo 2 resurrected runes for sale in the game that confer physical resistance through the use of the mod "Damage Reduced by X%," so those that do exist are highly prized. Some examples of such Diablo 2 runes for sale include the Harlequin Crest, String of Ears, Vampire Gaze, Shaftstop, and Stormshield. In contrast to the elemental resistances, the maximum value of a character's Physical Resistance is capped at 50%; it is not displayed on the character screen; and in Nightmare or Hell difficulty, characters do not suffer penalties to their Magic Resistance.
Elemental Absorption
Damage absorption is a property that is related to resistance and is found on some equipment, although it is not technically a resistance. It can be in the form of either a flat damage absorbed value or a percentage of total damage absorbed. Damage absorption is a type of damage reduction that is calculated after damage has already been reduced by resistances. It heals a character whenever they take damage from an element that they absorb, effectively lowering the amount of damage they take. For instance, if a character who was wearing a Raven Frost ring, which grants the mod "Cold Absorb 20%," suffered 100 points of cold damage, the character would be able to regain 20 life points through absorption. If that same character had a Cold Resistance of 50%, they would be able to avert 50 points of cold damage from the same attack, but they would only gain 10 Life as a result, bringing the total amount of damage they took down to 40.
Resistances and Immunities of the Opponents
The player's resistance will decrease as the level of difficulty increases, but their enemies' resistance will increase as well. However, unlike the player's resistance, monster resistances do not have a soft cap of 75% and do not even have a hard cap of 95%. To the point where they are immune to all forms of damage, foes can acquire a 100% resistance to a variety of attacks, and in later difficulties, they actually will. Even on the Normal difficulty setting, there are very few foes that are immune to any type of damage, and even on the Nightmare setting, immunities are still uncommon. Expect every enemy in the game to be immune to some form of damage or another when playing on the Hell difficulty setting. The immunities to the game's four primary elements are the most common, while the immunities to physical and magical damage are thankfully uncommon.
In the Hell difficulty, the vast majority of enemies will have a natural resistance to a particular element. This applies to unique monsters as well, as they have the same natural resistances as their more generic counterparts. However, due to the fact that uniques acquire new random properties as the difficulty level rises (they have one random modifier in the Normal difficulty level, two in the Nightmare difficulty level, and three in the Hell difficulty level), it is possible for them to become immune to multiple types of damage simply by gaining more and more resistances from the unique random modifiers that they possess. The following is a list of the one-of-a-kind modifiers and the resistances that they confer on the target: