I have 0 plague resistance on rings and no armor that gives some. I’m wearing full plate and it’s all level 12.
Plague hurts and everything hostile uses it so I figured it would be a good idea to get the Plague resistance rune.
I have 61% plague resistance in the “Defense” section of my character sheet.
Once I cast the rune, I go up to… 64%. Which is +3%.
It feels very underwhelming.
What am I missing here? Is it some kind of early game rune I’m not supposed to use at max level?
Diminishing returns and a hard cap of 80% have been introduced in the patch from yesterday!
Silas
On the recommandation of @askan94 I have made some additional testing (without rune → with rune):
Overall the effect of the rune is just awful. It seems like the diminishing returns rules implemented as of now have slaughtered this rune’s usefulness.
What’s not cool about this is that new EA players would see this rune and buy and equip it, thinking it actually helps when it really doesn’t and just takes up a very very precious utility slot.
It takes a bit more experience in the game to actually go and check the effects of a rune.
I will make a suggestion that something should be done about these runes: either remove them from the EA entirely or change the formula somehow.
Edit: The rune does also say it “mitigates poison effect”, anyone knows whether this translates to some actual DoT duration reduction or something else? NRFTW Tools only lists the Plague res buff.
Very interesting, thanks for going the extra mile!
Silas
I can assure you the rune was thoroughly underwhelming before Patch 1 as well. In optimal conditions you can milk about 5% resistance out of it. It sucks early and late.
Mathematically, what you are seeing is the exact opposite of diminishing returns. If returns were diminishing on the enchantment, it would provide a large benefit at low plague resistance and much less benefit at high resistance. This is obviously not the case, as is nicely visible from your numbers.
The rune possibly used to be more functional when separate elemental resistances were in the game, as from the scaling I assume it internally increases the ‘armour’ value that resistances are calculated from linearly.
From my testing, nothing. I compared buildup, decay, DoT strength. Buildup was slightly slower, but that’s likely because buildup scales with damage. It’s just a piddly amount of resistances.
You’re right! I mixed up the nerfs from Patch 1 with general diminishing returns.
Thanks for the additional testing.
If the rune has always been meh, then it’s indeed a problem for newer EA players. I have created a feedback post to talk about it.