You can always use a flickering flame on merc instead of self, as a crutch until you get full resists on gear, focusing on poison/lightning resist on boots. The merc resist fire aura will override the one on tainted without them dying now, so it can give you an extra 38% fire resist or so, and then doesn't have to set you back FCR. Getting max resists and cure is the endgame goal of finishing off gear, where piecing together your charms pays off. If you do the cheaper obsession build, you can max your resists easily but lose a significant chunk of damage.
And you can pretty safely ignore cold resist, since the only source of real cold damage in the game is frost novas on death for cold enchanted, which is still pretty tame
It's not about the res aura itself, it's about the calculus behind damages from Tainted: They seem to strangely gain the -%fire res from your gear (found in the wild: "I just checked the skills.txt file and they have both item_pierce_fire_immunity and the calculation stat('item_pierce_fire_immunity'.accr), which means they gain your -enemy fire res on your gear."). That means that the +3 all fire AND the -%fire res from flickering flame both proc.
The fcr is on wrath, that even allows for a SoJ instead of an opalvein.
If you look at the damages from my theory, we attain 2k higher, but it's cheaper, with better res
This post was edited by Constantin13 on May 22 2026 06:25am