Ignore Resist vs. Weaken & Effective Guide by Mid (as of Patch 2.5)

Ok guys,

after a lot of inconclusive research about Ignore Resist, Weaken and Effective and how they play together/which is best, I decided to do the actual test to see which is which.
So I purged my Rogue from every complicated damage sources (basically used empty items), added Effective on a ring, used a second empty ring and did the same with Weaken and Ignore Resist.




Then I went to Floor 2, put them on each after the other etc. and looked at the damage I dealt. Here are my results:

  • Effective works as written in the text. Game-internally the usual weakness though is defined by -25% resistance (I’m pretty sure about that now, see calculations below). Therefore it is not a damage increase of 25%, the damage output varies with the actual monster’s resistance and can be way larger or in special cases also a lot less.
  • Ignore Resist IGNORES the monster’s resistances, as also already stated in countless other topics.
  • Weaken gives a xx% CHANCE TO DECREASE the monster’s resistance by xx%, as never correctly stated by anyone in this forum. If you reach 100%, Weaken triggers always.

This means that the Weaken text in the picture above and the Dictionary is not fully correct. How did I test that?

Well, I spawned a Greatly Resist Poison monster from a shrine and Weaken on. As you can see (in the picture above), I have ~80% of it. Now I changed the element of my bow from Arcane to Poison. The poison DoT triggered ~80% of the time Weaken with “high” damage, and 20% of the time triggers “low” damage.


So, how do (or don’t) all three work together? Here are my results:

  • Ignore Resist cancels out effects from Weaken and Effective. Which means, if you use Ignore Resist, neither Weaken nor Effective increase the damage in any way and are useless. (Weaken appears on the screen though, Effective does not.)
  • Weaken and Effective work together. No surprise there.

Mid, now could you please tell me which is better? Weaken, Weaken/Effective or Ignore Resist?


We all agree that killing Enslavers and Cartographers (or Epic, Legend and Mythic monsters) is the hard thing to do in the endgame. After I first put in some wrong info here (with totally wrong conclusions), the answer is not that easy. I tested again on a Shrine Monster (without Greatly Resist), see the damage values below:

  1. 236 with nothing on
  2. 472 with Ignore Resist (damage at 0% resistance)
  3. 589 with Effective
  4. 600 with Weaken
  5. 954 with Weaken + Effective

My explanation is the following:

-> The monster resistance is therefore: 236/472 = 50%.
-> Effective changes the element to the monster’s weakness at damage calculation (-25% monster resistance): 472 * (1 + 25%) = 589 damage.
-> Weaken reduces the monster’s resistance by 77.3% (50% - 77.3% = -27.3%): 472 * (1 + 27.3%) = 600 damage.
-> Effective + Weaken yield a monster resistance of (-25% - 77.3% = -102.3%): 472 * (1 + 102.3%) = 954 damage.

  • It seems like (crystal) Weaken is better than Ignore Resist, as long as its percentage supersedes the monster’s resistance.
  • Effective + Weaken is a killer combo, doubling damage easily with 2 slots. I personally didn’t know that, I always thought I’ll take Ignore Resist and forget about it.
  • Ignore Resist is the “cheap” option, ensuring your nominal damage. Crystal Weaken + Effective increase your average damage further (without Ignore Resist obviously); best would be 2x crystal Weaken + Effective (although I don’t know if a minimum resistance exists for monsters).
  • I still don’t know what happens if the monster’s usual weakness Element meets the Element of Greatly Resist Element, how great the corresponding resistance is.
  • I don’t know how the Ascendent (5) -62.5% resistance works, if it always reduces the resistances by 62.5% when Arcane hits or represents a 62.5% chance for 62.5% resistance reduction (which could very well be).

Hope I could help,

as always:

Best, Mid :kissing_heart:

PS: Please correct me where if you see something wrong.

10 Likes

Yes the weaken stated chance but then the text changed and it’s still chance kind of even though it doesn’t say in text. You can get 200% weaken though which is pretty high.

I did an additional test on floor 2 with an epic poison monster which had greatly resist poison + greatly resist shock (the “effective” element).

I found that its poison resist were ~87.5%, which I interpreted as 50% from resist poison + missing 50%*75% from greatly resist poison. Ice, Arcane and Fire Resists were ~10%, 10% and 0% respectively.

Light Resist resulted in around 63.8% without Effective but Lightning on Bow (I tried to attack without Debuff, but maybe some attacks had 12.5-25% Debuff I’m not sure). With Effective on, the Resistance seemed to be around 70.5%…
I have no idea how to interpret these Lightning percentages.

2 Likes

I’m very interested in tests regarding these affixes. I would do them myself, but I don’t currently have the currency to do so.

Here is my input + further questions into the matter:
Effective is changing your element to be something that the monster is Normally weak against (I.E. if the monster was on a poison map (level 2), then no matter what type of damage you normally do, it’ll treat your damage as if it was shock). What happens though when a monster has greatly resist against the element that it’s supposed to be weak against (your above scenario). It feels like in this scenario effective will do nothing for you.

Next question:
I’m most curious how immunities come into play and if immunity can be broken with effective/weaken. That is, how is immunity coded?
Is it 100% resist? 200% resist? Or just straight up if (target damage = immunity type) then target damage = 0.
In the first two scenarios, immunity can be broken by a high enough weaken, in the last scenario weaken does nothing for you. Luckily Ascendance builds don’t suffer TOO much even in this case due to the prismatic nature which can deal damage that the monster is NOT immune against.

ignore resist

Here I asked the mods\devs some info about this topic and (with some difficulty) I understood this:

Btw, I recall that they said somewhere that Weaken has a 50% chance to trigger, but I’m not sure…

Well Sir, you did see the damage values right? An additional slot (Effective) and you more than double the damage in ~80% of the cases? And still deal ~20% more damage if effective coincides with Greatly Resist?

Either you didn’t understand the matter or you are trolling :wink:

Well, it’s still in the Wiki (Affixes | DungeonQuest Wiki | Fandom) like that but that’s wrong. It is exactly like I described it…
Because with the whole Ignore Resist/Weaken/Effective matter many people post things they heard somewhere but never verified that are just wrong. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

The only thing I did not quite completely understand is how the internal monster resistances are calculated. But how Weaken etc. work is solid.

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Well I don’t know how the monster resistance is calculated if its weakness combines with Greatly Resist, but even if Effective doesn’t help in these cases and you get 75% or even 87.5% monster resistance, 90% weaken yields the same damage as Ignore Resist.

I’ll have an eye out for Immune monsters, but from what I’ve heard so far they are Immune to Freeze etc. (i.e. the elemental critical) and not to the elemental damage itself.

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I am not trolling this is my POV why I pick ignore resist

Ignore resist = For newbie
Weaken if max = Ignore resist
Effective = those who have extra crystal and stone

I always choose ignore resist to save some crystal for newbies

Okay,

that’s a valid point of view (Ignore Resist is cheap). Although Weaken if max does more damage than Ignore Resist in almost every case, since ~90% resistance is the maximum value encountered in monsters, and only rarely. With only Weaken 90%, one does 15% * 90% - 75% * 10% more damage against Greatly Resist monsters (if they don’t have Resist on top of it), 90% * 90% more damage against 0% resistance monsters, and a whopping 115% * 90% + 25% * 10% against a monster with -25% resistance.
So Weaken if max >> Ignore Resist. And Effective is useless if one uses Ignore Resist.

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But… I asked that info about Effective vs WK\IR to the dev\mods.
How can’t they know their own game? O_o
They never answered to some detailed examples in that thread, though…

Weaken 90% + Ascendant is enough imo for basically equal to ignore resist. I mean if floor 1400 is still a breeze for me, I know it’s real effective. Arcanist+Ascendant with frozen and 90% weaken is very brutal. The Ascendant is working because the arcane debuff is being placed by Arcanist which means the 4 resists reduced by 62.5% combined with 90% weaken and stacked up total Dmg from Arcanist. If I have hirlings, well, let’s just say you deal over quadrillion or more dmg depending on the build.

Still, I might test my orb build without weaken and see how much better it could do with ignore resist. Ascendant effect works without the need to use arcane attacks as Arcanist does the debuff . If you have 180% weaken, you reduce the monster resist modifier by 98.2% and that’s without ascendant. Not just modifier but the actual resists too.

Ascendant (5) and 90% weaken. Monster resists reduced by 62.5% by ascendant and then a further 90% from weaken as chance. That’s basically similar effect in my experience reduces monster resist modifier to 3.75% left. Of course it’s not just the modifiers being reduced but also the monster resists along with it. Goes very well with Arcanist. I know it’s not exact calculation but I tried calculation. Prismatic nature of ascendant is potent indeed with Arcanist.

The enemy resists are high because of enemy level and floor level. However with ignore resist or high weaken with Ascendant, this effect becomes less powerful or it goes. Idk if they get reduced to minus resists but if that was the case, that would explain many things.

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Not directly related to this thread of topics, but what do you use as your primary damage type?
I’m currently using ice on my orb wizard since he’s utilizing frozen for a higher chance that the elemental crit will be ice type and trigger frozen. Yes I know that the primary type can be of different element and still trigger frozen due to prismatic, but it’ll happen less often.
I’m using Shock on my warrior that plays with the mags to stack up the damage taken debuff (doesn’t require crit).

There should be no chance. Weaken is supposed to apply all the time. Will report bug.

Effective does not affect resistance. It gives a bonus 25% boost. If the enemy is immune to its own weakness, then 0*1.25=0.

I suggest looking up my posts on effective.

4 Likes

Ok thanks for the answer. I always thought weaken always applys even though it used to say change in the description. At least I know now for sure that it applys all the time. :sassyparrot: :smile: :wink: . I mean it no longer says chance in the description of weaken and the fact that weaken applys all the time makes sense given the description changes.

Well I’m even more proud of the 90% weaken or 20% weaken in PvP.

As stated, it is currently bugged. :frowning:

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No it does not effect the resistance (it changes the element to the usual weakness), but the usual weakness does! Therefore, Effective does not increase the damage by 25% - that is definitely wrong!

If it would work like that, my observations would have been different.

This is exactly what happens. The interaction with Weaken is consistent with -25% monster resistance. Otherwise the damage values would be different with Weaken+Effective together.

600*1.25 would be 750, not 904.

Edit: although I still don’t know what happens if the “weak” resistance gets resistance because it is an epic monster.

Oh, and while you’re at reporting bugs :relaxed::

Equality is bugged somehow, and Skilled Mythic does not show in the damage screen.

You don’t seem to understand me. Effective (The mechanic) IS just a 1.25x boost. The Effective Mythic Affix changes your element to whatever one that will give you this boost. The affix does not affect resist at all. Play an Ice Map with 100% Immune, look for a Fire Fury and hit it with Effective. You will see that you deal no damage. Then compare the damage of Ignore Resist and Ignore Resist + Effective against that monster. I recommend using something like Iceburn Set to reduce the default +/-25% DMG variance.

Weaken is bugged atm so I will have to look at it in more detail.

I will look into equality later but as seen in the dictionary, Skilled only works with MH skills. The other descriptions failed to update with the dictionary (game engine is old and you need to update everything manually).

Edit: Also Skilled is intended to not show up in the stat page since it changes depending on the situation (Discordance).

Hmm i didn’t understand at all…
So what do you prefer effective, weakened or ignore resist? Im currently at floor 1500+

Okay, I got Skilled/Equality then, thank you :slight_smile: must have overread Equality’s description in the dictionary.

But still, Effective gives you a 25% boost if you don’t use Weaken, Ignore Resist, you use a different element than the monster’s weakness (otherwise damage would be the same) and it has no resistances on its weakness.

That is a lot of ifs. Of course I know Effective does not change the resistances of the monster. But the damage increase with Effective works through the monster’s resistances.

The plain 25% boost you talk about is fairly correct, because with Ignore Resist, Effective doesn’t increase the damage. With Weaken, it didn’t increase the damage by 25%, but far more. If the description is indeed correct and it just changes the attack’s element upon damage calculation, it all depends on the resistances of the monster.
And the monster’s weakness must be realized via its resistance, why else would Effective show no effect on my damage if the monster has resistances against its weakness?
I don’t see Effective working with Ignore Resist, and I see Effective adding >50% damage on top of Weaken (of course again, depending on the resistance setting).
If I’m wrong with my conclusions, the damage calculation would be heavily bugged or very very complicated, in an uncomprehensive way.

On that matter, if a monster is immune, does it have 100% resistance? Can that be reduced to 10% resistance with Weaken? And, is 100% the maximum resistance or could it be higher internally, say 150%?

Effective + Weaken, if indeed the immunity of monsters can be broken by Weaken.

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