> On the plus side, I somehow managed to live in a group without a cleric and
> no healer at all for that matter, the level 40ish druid dropped almost
> immediately. 234 Cold Resist. It *does* make a difference.
At 220s resist, I never resisted DragonBreath once. Each breath attack
took 1 to 2 bubbles of life away from me at 2000+ hp. If you do the
math that's 400-800 dmg per breath. My client wasn't bugged out,
I wasn't getting display errors, I was actually taking that sort of
magnitude of damage, so was everyone else in my party.
Dragon Breath is AE with diminishing damage from the epicenter. I
did notice that when I was blasted by AE in the king room, I barely
lost any hp. But since you're a bard, and you need to protect your
party so you have to get right up in there (allbeit, a step away from
the claws).
I'm not arguing that resistance isn't helping, I'm arguing that
even with strong resistances, DragonBreath isn't all or nothing,
and it cuts deep when it hits, which is literally everytime.
I dueled a Magician for fun about a month ago, played elemental
and guardian, and decided to let him nuke me until his mana was
gone (hoping I'd resist everything). Hell I even had GRM from
the enchanter with us. That put my magic resistance way over
250. While he couldn't Malaisement me at all, his DD shocks
penetrated hard. It took him about 2/3's his mana to kill me
with straight DD magic based, I never once resisted fully his
DD spells. They stuck for either a little dmg or full dmg.
Maybe if I had my resistance lower, I would have taken full
damage all the time, but with dragons even partial dmg is
deadly.
I'm not bucking the idea of resistance, I'm not trying to disagree
to disagree. Everyone has jumped onto the resistance bandwagon,
and think I'm an idiot for questioning it. But there is more than
meets the eye in this game for sure. Things have never worked the
way we've thought them to in the past, why would Verant make a game
calculation that made sense now? Having all those resist items when
fighting a dragon would mean you'd never die; they want you to die
when doing dragons. That much is apparent.
I still have more testing to do, I need more data. PvP and NPC
battles are two different beasts. I don't know how people survive
in dragon fights without a healer as 5 or 6 AE attacks will usually
kill anyone, resistances or not. If resistances were this definite,
my last Vox party would have lost no more than one bubble during every
breath attack. Someone here said they only took 200 dmg at most,
which is like half a bubble. I never once saw anyone in my groups
only lose half a bubble either of the two times I saw Vox.
I've got more observing to do. So far, my limited experience is
not backing resistances.
Got the chance to watch the initial gathering on Vox last night.
I saw no silver bracers (vox bracers), some people had helmets
indicating no crown, and no bards were there. I believe it was
around 18-24 people, they creamed Vox hard FWIW. No bards, heh.
I bet it's something like the INT/WIS fiasco. Anything more than
200 has no effect? Or something like that? I bet as long as you
have a 100 resistance in something, you'll get the partial/full
dmg that you would at 200 or 300. I've never been feared by
anything at 90 magic, hmm, so why have 200? hehe.
Harmonic.