Azmarul wrote: »

The short answer is that for a cp 160+ character, you divide the resistance number by 660 to find the percentage value. So 20000 gives 30% mitigation and the cap of 33000 gives 50% damage mitigation. The entire process of mitigation is more complex than this, and this awesome dude Paul Simon has tons of goodies in his threads on the subject. But the 660 value is an easy way to translate the values into percentages. Some add-ons like Bandits do it automatically.

So yes, 33k physical resist means you take only 50% of the damage from skills that deal poison, disease or physical damage. 33k spell resist reduced damage from flame, magic, frost or shock damage by 50%.

But, keep in mind, this can be lowered by a debuffs or effectively lowered by penetration. For example, a boss in a dungeon or more frequently someone in pvp, can debuffs you with major fracture. This will reduce your physical resist by 5k or so. So that now comes off your resistances. Turning your 33k into 28k.

In PvP, players will run penetration in their build. Be that from armor, mundus stone or champion points. But, to keep it easy, let's say I'm running 4 k from cp, 4 k from mundus and 3.5k from my sets. This is easy to reach. Add in that to the major fracture I've put on you, and I'm now ignoring 16.5k of your physical resistances.

It's not this clear cut, but your 33k physical resist (offering 50% less reduction to my physical, poison and disease damage) is now effectively 16.5k (so only offering 25% damage reduction).

So while 33k is the cap in pve, in PvP there is no cap so to speak, as your resistances can either directly or indirectly be reduced.

Magica builds can get that number even easier as wearing 5 bits of light armor grants you 5k penetration, effectively ignoring 5k of an opponent's spell resistance. But the debuff (major breach) is harder to obtain than major fracture iirc.

Any armor set that adds "armor" basically means it adds that value to both physical and spell resist.

It's not that cut and dry as you also have other factors that reduce damage like champion points and flat mitigation sets (that offer % reductions). But it's sort of how it works.

In short, the higher either is, the less damage you take from either source of damage.