Resists

Damage types, resistance rules, the 75% cap, innate resists, socket gems.

Damage types

Damage types are physical, fire, ice, poison, earth, storm and magic; dark and holy are spell elements. A monster has an element, a damage type, and optionally a split (for example 55% poison), which only changes the type of part of a hit: the total never changes, so with 0 resistance you take exactly the listed damage.

Resistances

• You can have fire, ice, poison, earth, storm, holy and dark resistance in percent. The total is capped at 75%.
• One item never gives more than 10% of any single element, however much is stacked on it (the material, a rolled affix, an enchant scroll, a socketed gem). The tooltip shows the capped value. Set bonuses, spells, titles and innate resist come on top, up to the 75% total.
• Sources: gear affixes and element materials (Hellstone, Frostforged), set bonuses, socketed gems (+4% each), spells such as Ice Armor (+25% ice), titles and talents.
• Innate resistance: casting an element school slowly builds resist, 0.15% per skill point up to 15% (reached at skill 100) for Fire, Frost, Poison and Earth.
• Fire and ice resistance gear first appears in the Mountain Pass (monster level 20): the first zones where fire or ice damage matters.

Weaknesses

Elemental weapons, spells and procs do ×1.5 against the opposite element, ×0.75 against the same element, and normal damage otherwise. Pairs are reciprocal: Fire ↔ Ice, Holy ↔ Dark, Poison ↔ Earth, and Storm also beats Earth. Void monsters resist every element and have no weakness. A mob's weakness is also listed on its page.

Practical advice

• Check the mob page before a boss: its element and its damage split tell you which resistance to wear.
• The Void Archdemon swaps between fire and ice every 16 seconds: its colour shows which resistance matters.
• Void monsters resist every element (x0.8) and have no weakness; Void Regalia and the Runestone set give Resist All.

Source: game data and scripts (v1.0.38). All guides