SirDopey wrote: »

@Dagoth_Rac thanks for the explanation man, super helpful.

So just to make sure this has sunk into my thick head correctly. If we use spell resistance for an example, the player is using 5 pieces light armor, 2 sharpened swords and has elemental proc'd on the boss, they'll be copping roughly 6.2% mitigation loss. [(18200 - 5160) - 5088 - 4882 = 3068/100000 * 2 = 6.2%]

So when thinking about this in the form of build crafting, if we had a 5th set piece free with those numbers, we would only benefit from equipping spinner's garment's 5th piece if we couldn't increase our damage by more than 6.2% (through improving magicka pool/ spell damage etc)? Anything that would increase our damage by more than 6.2% would lead to a total dps increase over trying to remove all resistance?

Yes and no. It depends on if we are talking about tooltip damage or actual damage done.

Let's say you have a 10000 damage tooltip. The attack gets mitigated to 9380 damage by that 6.2% mitigation.

Now let's say you increase tooltip damage via max magicka/spell damage by 6.2%. The 10000 damage tooltip goes to 10620. An attack of 10620 mitigated by 6.2% = 9961.

If you left the tooltip at 10000 by not increasing max magicka/spell damage, but reduced boss armor to zero, you would get full 10000 damage. 10000 > 9961.

The issue here is that even if you increase damage by 6.2%, that added damage still gets mitigated by the remaining boss spell resistance. So you gain 620 tooltip damage, but 6.2% is mitigated and you end up really only getting 581 more damage.

To get enough damage to overcome 6.2% mitigation, you would need:

10000 / (1 - 0.062) = 10661 damage. A 6.61% damage increase.

This is generally only advisable in solo content or 4-man dungeons. In a trials group, between Major/Minor Breach, Destro passive, Light armor passive, Crusher enchant proc by tank, Alkosh synergy procs, and maybe one or two more I am forgetting, you can get boss really close to zero mitigation. At which point, more spell penetration gains you nothing and more raw damage is preferred. But that is rare. Even really good Trials groups will struggle to keep boss armor/spell resist shredded 100% of time.

In general, though, sharpened weapons and penetration gear bonuses are best increase to damage done. It is not intuitive because they do not increase your stats or tooltips. But sky high stats and tooltips are not much good if you have little to no spell penetration and cannot come close to damage indicated by tooltips.