In Path of Exile you need both good offensive and defensive equipment. An important part of the defense are the resistances or resistances. If your resistances are too low, you don't stand a chance in the Path of Exile endgame.
The further you progress in the game, the more things you have to keep track of. So that you don't immediately fall out of your feet in the endgame, high resistances are an absolute must! In our Beginner's Guide to Path of Exile, we explain exactly what resistances there are, how they change over the course of the game, and how you can increase them.
In total, there are four different resistances in the game that increase your resistance to elemental damage and to chaos damage:
You can see how high your resistances are by pressing the C key and selecting the Defensive tab. By default, the maximum of all resistances is 75 percent. At the beginning of the game, all values are zero. You can increase your resistances with items and skill points that have the mod "+%" on fire/cold/lightning or chaos resistance.
This is important: you have to read carefully! Many items have modifiers like "+8 to all elemental resistances" which increases your elemental resistances by 8 percent. But not your chaos resistance. However, if the modifier says "+8 to all max resistances", for example, it means all resistances, including your chaos resistance.
In act two you also have the choice to help Alira or kill her. If you decide to help her, you will get +15 percent on all resistances. If you kill them, you get two skill points for your skill tree.
After completing the first part of the story (Acts 1 to 5), 30 percent of all resistances are automatically subtracted from you. So if you had all resistances at 75 percent in Act 5, by the time Act 6 starts you will only have 45 percent per resistance. The same thing happens again after you defeat Kitava in Act 10.
So you start the endgame of Path of Exile with -60 percent on all resistances. All in all, this means that you have to increase each resistance by 135 percent with items, auras, bottles and the like in order to push them to the maximum.
This is important: high resistances are extremely strong. A player with all resistances at -60 percent takes 6.4 times more damage per attack than a player with their resistances at 75 percent. Since the damage values in Path of Exile quickly reach millions in the endgame, extremely high values are achieved here.
In addition to the automatic penalties, there are also card-specific modifiers that can further reduce your resistances, e.g. if a card has the "-9% maximum player resistances" modifier.
So you should try to always have more than 75 percent on your resistances. This excess resistance is displayed in brackets after your maximum resistances in your character menu. Such an excess is important, as it often happens in the endgame that your resistances are reduced by modifiers.
As previously mentioned, the default maximum of your resistances is 75 percent. However, there are items and skill points for your skill tree that you can use to increase this maximum value, such as the "Ahn's Legacy" item. This grants you "+2% to all maximum resistances while you have no endurance charges".
This gives you a new maximum value for all resistances (including your chaos resistance), namely 77 percent. With such modifiers, it is possible to increase your maximum resistances up to 90 percent.
| More about Path of Exile |
Would you like to join our community and discuss Path of Exile? Then join our new Discord server, we look forward to seeing you!
