Quote (LaughingSkull @ Jun 23 2022 03:32am)
I post AGAIN for two reasons:
1) to ask ^-joey- about something he wrote:
First of all, doesn't the "Magic resistant" monster affix only grant 40% to all res? You wrote "75%".
If this was different in pre-LoD then in LoD, then where do you get that info? What's your source? Is there a wiki dedicated to pre-LoD Diablo?
Second, in LoD, the Magic resistance affix is designed so that it actually DOESN'T add ANY resistance AT ALL to a specific element,
IF[/I] the monster's resistance to said/same element was at or over 100%.
Did Classic, pre-LoD behave the same?
So, if a monster was already at MAX resistance (which was 75% in Classic), it would NOT gain extra res from the Magic resistant affix?
What was the expected behaviour?
--
2) I actually rerolled my Cold sorc with a fresh start because I wasn't happy with my build, so that I can test Cold Mastery more thoroughly
AND I REACHED THE VERDICT THAT COLD MASTERY DOES WORK, BUT STILL NOT THE WAY WE EXPECT IT TO, as outlined above by Joey.
Here is HOW and WHAT I tested:
At level 29, with level 16 Glacial Spike (12 hard points + 4 skills), I noticed the perfect target for my test object:
GROTESQUES !!!
Reason was simple: They would either die from 2 Glacial Spikes, OR the 2nd spike would leave them at a very, very TINY sliver of health.
So, my conjecture was that once I've skilled Cold Mastery, the situation would change:
Grotesques (who have 40% Cold Resistance) would now ALWAYS die from exactly 2 Glacial Spikes, always.
...
Well.. come level 30, and I skill CM. In fact, it's now at level 2, because I have +1 to sorc skills ammy.
So, Grotesques would now have 40% - (34% of 40) Cold resistance, which is approximately 26% Cold res.
Which means that my Glacial Spike, when aimed at Grotesques, would now deal 74% of its damage, up from 60% of it, which is roughly a 23% increase of damage output.
Which guarantees that NOW, Grotesques would ALWAYS die from only two (2) Glacial Spikes, right?
Right?
...
WRONG.
The situation would remain EXACTLY the same as it were before I had skilled Cold Mastery at all:
Grotesques would either die from 2 Glacial Spikes, OR the 2nd one would leave them at a very tiny speck of health (same size as before), requiring a 3rd Glacial Spike to finish them.
...
So, CLEARLY Cold Mastery DOESN'T WORK.
Right?
...
...
WRONG.
I levelled up one more time and AGAIN skilled Cold Mastery, this time bringing it to level 3, (2 + 1), leading to 42% Cold Resistance pierce (according to the tooltip).
Well, gues what?
Now Grotesques would ALWAYS, consistently and inevitably die in exactly 2 Glacial Spikes
What is more:
Their health bar percentage remaining after the first spike is ALWAYS the exact same, every time. Trust me on that one -- I MEASURED IT MANUALLY xD!!!
...
SO WHAT IS GOING ON HERE, THEN ???
Well, here is my latest theory:
Cold Mastery in pre-LoD D2 works neither as a percentage-reduction, nor as pure arithmetic subtraction...
Rather, it works by either removing the monster's ENTIRE resistance altogether, or not removing it at all!!!
* Grotesques have 40% Cold Resistances.
* Up until level 3, Cold Mastery's "percentage reduction" progression is thus: 23, 34, 42.
* The first two levels, despite already offering a significant "reduction", however, don't really affect the strength of your Cold Spells' performance against the Creature at all !!!
* Level 3, however, is the first one that "reduces resistance" by more than 40, namely 42....
* ...which leads to the Grotesque's ENTIRE resistance getting removed, and leaving her with 0.
* Thus, FINALLY, your Glacial Spike's damage actually benefits from the "bonuses" given by the passive skill's "resistance reduction"
---
VERDICT:
Cold Mastery DOES work, but in the most unexpected way possible.
P.S. Will require a bunch of more tests, for which I shall need a CM with a resistance reduction value of 60 or greater. Will report back once I've reached it.[/SIZE]
This is indeed a strange thing how the game calculated with resistances.
I also agree that more tests should be performed before making a final statement.
What I know for sure:
Before 1.10 magic resitant prop was 75% to cold-fire-lightning. This is something that you can easily check via wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010608212518/http://www.battle.net/diablo2/monsters/bonus.shtml We also know that there were no immunities before 1.07
However (here comes the interesting part), if you check the original data.mpq file (I have it from 1.00 CD), in
monstats.txt actually you will find monsters having 100% resistance in Hell. For example Grotesque has 40% cold res in normal, 70% in nightmare and 100% in hell.
According to that Grotesques should have been immune to cold back then. But they were not.
So my theory is as follows:
Blizzard originally had the intention to give immunities to certain monsters (This can make sense, as there were immunities in Diablo1 as well), but for some reason they changed their mind before releasing the game and instead of properly udpating the txt files, they just simply hardcoded a resistence cap, which I believe was 75%.
However during the cold pierce calculations, the total ammount of resist was taken into account. I am almost certain that this is sure, as this might be the reason why it was so hard to kill bosses with multiple resistance affixes: their resistance was so high that even after cold pierce it stayed at capped 75%.
In 1.07, Blizz removed the resistance cap, and monsters could became immune (triple immune mosters were a thing in 1.07). Cold mastery - by its original design - was able to break the immunity in almost every cases, because let's say a monster had 40% base cold res and additional 75% from being cold enchanted, so a lvl1 cold mastery was able to reduce 115% resist to 86% (the mob was still displayed as cold immune, but you were able to kill it).
But, when you had a monster naturally immune to cold (100 base resist) + magic resistant (+75) and cold enchanted (+75), CM was not able to break the immunity.
This was only like 1% of the cases by the way, but clearly points out how CM worked back then (reduction instead of substraction), and also proves my theory that monsters could be immune to an element before LOD as well, but Blizzard blocked that for some reason. And they blocked that by hard coding, instead of properly updating the values in the txt files. And we all know that quick and dirty solutions like that can easily result in unexpected behavior.
So, based on the above, my summary is that CM in 1.06 should work as I explained before, but due to the quick and dirty hard-coding made by Blizzard to prevent immunities, there are some unexpected results - exactly what you have experienced.
Frankly speaking, I wish
was here, because he knows the coding and database stuff much better than me. I really think, he could solve this mistery.
This post was edited by -joey- on Jun 24 2022 02:20am