Mid's - Weaken vs. Effective vs. Ignore Resist - Guide [3.0]

if i use 90% weaken so i can remove ignore resist?

Yes. Weaken doesn’t work with ignore resist.

Ignore resist makes attacks avoid resist calculation so weaken won’t apply and effective since it bypasses resists. Weaken is only effective when your attack gets affected by enemy resists.

1 hitting Epic mobs on floor 1900+ :confused: What Gears you currently used in climbing Floors?

Srsly hahah thats awesome 1 hitting 1900+ epic enemies plus huhuh

thanx 4 info bos

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Yeah also me cant believe it. But seems you can 1hit it if you have Frozen Set Affix.

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I have a new build on rogue but the problem is i cant upload it right now on youtube because of my poor network connection. I’ll upload it next time on via WiFi.

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Is that so? Omg gotta switch to frozen build then hehehehee

Bump

weaken percentage means both proc and effect value?

does weaken also double negative the natural resistance or only the additional affix resistance?

Weaken affects any attack that hits an enemy and that’s why I find it OP for a frozen build since it constantly multiplied my frozen explosions alone with the other factors such as 500% Frostbiting , demonic and relentless.

Weaken can affect dot , frozen explosion, explosive 400% , procs for sure , and manually casted skills.

As far as negative resists , I’m not too sure. Weaken does make enemies have laughably low resist to almost 0 or probably negative resists . While it does that, it helps the player gain lots of overall damage.

Ignore resist gets the enemies to have 0 resist which means whenever you attack, resist doesn’t count. Weaken probably lowers their resists to negatives which is why it can double your player damage or even close to triple.

by procs i mean the chance for weaken effect to occur. im new to this forum so i don’t realize that word procs can be easily mistaken for skill procs affix. but nice to know that its work on all various damage source. i thought it only triggered by on hit effect when the weaken word appear on screen before.

i just think if weaken can’t bring down ressist to negative value then how can be it worth more to have than 1x ignore ressist that can easily negates enemy multiple ressist affix.

Of course it affects procs. it affects all your attacks.

Its just how it works bruh.

Yup. Weaken ftw as always. Ever since weaken got buffed to 180% cap instead of 60% cap along with the crystal affix buff to 90% and epic to 30%, Weaken has been the Go to. Before that, weaken wasn’t truly worth it , even at max cap 60% and it was slot consuming. Although it may have worked with ascendant and you’d have got away with it but not many figured that out I guess or if they did, they didn’t share it.

The common thing happened to be ignore resist. Patch 2.3 made Weaken so much more worth it and less consuming and arcanist make ascendant great again. I mean ascendant was good even back then but not as useful without arcanist and only used in a weaken build with potential debuffer hirling or so.

Actually enemy resist reduces damage by 25% so if you attack an enemy that is resistant to your element, it reduces your damage by 25%. That means you deal 75% of your original damage or 1×0.75= 0.75 as nominal damage. Not 50%.

Greatly resist reduces your damage to 25% of the original damage or 1×0.25= 0.25 . Not 12.5%.

Effective basically removes that factor and especially on greatly resist enemies.

Although maybe codex definition of greatly resist could be wrong but effective does happen if you get past that 25% reduce resist to their own element (25% resist to fire for example means your fire attack deals 75% of the original damage).

Greatly resist reduces the element damage to that resist %. Enemy has 25% resist of the element so greatly resist definitely reduces all damage to just 25% of the original in that element. Immune probably means 0 or something but you can still damage immune enemies with your own element somehow .

Although the thing that reduces damage to 50% of the original could be when Midlumer says the enemy is saying shock resist on a shock enemy which is indeed correct if you take into account the innate 25% reduce resist. That probably means 0.25+0.25= 0.5 or 50% resistance to your damage .
So I think Midlumer is correct if it comes to that scenario.

Overall fantastic guide. It even taught me alot. I mean I already thought 90% weaken can increase your DMG to almost 2× aka ×1.9 and potentially reduce the resist from their innate 25% resist and potentially their add on greatly resist and/or resist on top of it.

It does seem that if you have 90% weaken, even in the worst of scenarios, your damage just gets to the original ×1 and in the best of scenarios , about ×2 or more.

I was thinking more on the lines of weaken reducing the innate enemy resists by 90% from 90% weaken so instead of 25% resist to element , its something like reducing damage by 12.5% instead and if higher weaken like 180% or 200% , 6.25% reduce damage from the element. Then the shock resist that is shown up on their also gets reduced to 6.25%.

It does seem that effective would be greatly reduced in effectiveness when weaken is used which is correct and even more so at higher reduce resist.

But if that were the case, greatly resist could be worse with weaken or maybe if weaken, greatly resist actually only reduce damage to 75% instead of 25%?

Although it’s not far fetched to say that weaken also adds to your nominal damage so that you deal ×2 damage or ×3 possibly because even on greatly resist enemies, they seem to be relatively easy. Midlumer is definitely on the lines of correct or very close but there are some things that are hard to be so sure about. It really takes testing

From testing though, it’s definitely hard to say but it feels from the damage numbers I’ve seen that Midlumer is correct. I deal up to 40B damage deadly strike from brutal and if weaken, I have seen double that sometimes hard to be too sure but it should be mostly correct.

Or it could be that Effective only is enough if you don’t add weaken theoretically. But weaken does seem to add to your original damage apart from just reducing resists so weaken is much better. Before weaken was buffed to 200% cap back in year ago or so , It was either effective or ignore resist. Effective did work very well but I don’t think it works on immunes. Weaken probably reduces immunes from 100% reduction of damage to matching element to a lot less. Something like 50% reduce damage with 100% weaken or 25% reduce damage with 200% weaken to matching element.

I find that actually enemies don’t have numbered resists like players so the resist formula and AR formula doesn’t work on them. Enemy resist isn’t like player resists.
Instead , it’s like damage reduction. 25% resist to the matching element means it reduces that matching elements damage by 25% so they have 75% damage Reduction to the element.

Greatly resist basically reduces damage to 25% . That effectively means the enemy has 75% damage reduction to the matching element.

Immune means immune to the element damage or 100% reduction of damage to the element but it does seem that weaken works very well on immunes as even immunes are easy now. Basically I think weaken at 100% halves the resist reduction to matching element and 200% means 75% reduction but also adding to your own damage as it’s possible that some end up with -% reduction to the element to those who don’t already resist your element. Effective already makes sure enemies have 0% resistance to the element or -25%. Sometimes more. .

I’m theorising or hypothesising as it’s hard to find a true answer but it’s safe to say that Midlumer is correct for the most part like 99% or so. Maybe even 100%.

Actually now that I think about it , Weaken was always good even before patch 2.3 but Ignore resist was just a better alternative since 60% weaken cap at that time was good but against immunes and greatly resists, it still reduced damage below the nominal damage of 1 but it was still good along with Ascendant.

It’s probably because nobody or barely anyone really knew the value of weaken since it was so easy to just use Ignore resist and done. I think had cronos not made his weaken arcane build, people still wouldn’t have used weaken nor if Arcanist didn’t come out.

Weaken + ascendant was still a good combo even back then but ascendant and wrath or iceburn wasn’t well known and not guaranteed.

I think it boils down to many people didn’t know things because the explanation in codex and game wasn’t so clear enough or maybe because Ignore resist was too easy to do and damage was more valuable to get.

It was definitely confusing that enemies said resist instead of resistance since when enemies said resists, it really meant damage reduction to that matching element .

Resist is for players to reduce elemental damage from enemies by resist formula. The enemy has resistance (not resist, damage resistance aka damage reduction of that element) which reduces all damage of that element by x% . Immune basically reduces it to 0.

Weaken reduces or completely nullifies the damage reduction of the enemies aka damage resistance to the specific element. Immune becomes nullified by 100% weaken because 0 becomes 1 and 200% makes it ×2 or negative -100%.

The 25% resist becomes -125% with 100% weaken or 225% with 200% weaken. Greatly resist becomes increase damage instead of reduce . That could mean at 100% weaken, greatly resist becomes increase damage by 25%.

That could be why effective gets less effective with weaken since the enemies no longer reduce or reduce less or very little.

Though before Ignore Resist came out, Weaken was widely used as the only choice and sometimes ascendant with it or so.
Even when ignore resist came out, some veterans still used weaken but some used ignore resist. Effective sometimes too.

LOL :grin:

Here’s my post on calculating weaken and other variables. It’s essentially the same as this guide calculations but I described it as if enemies have -% resists or negative resistance % .

That 120% weaken meaning 0-120% = -120% resistance also being 1+1.2= ×2.2 DMG is an example and that’s my way of confirming the calculation.

It’s just my interpretation of this guide and based on lots of testing with different scenarios. It’s pretty easy to test with a build with weaken, test different situation, remove weaken or put ignore resist, etc. The differences are visible which is great.

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I was thinking about something wrong on my Trex Warrior build but they are seems like will complete the gap.Ty both.