magic damage reducing... the real story?

[kujonathan]

hey all,

sorry to be a noob, but....

i'm interested if somebody good with numbers can give me some hard information about "magic damage reduced by...." stats. I know this is a very desirable trait in an item, but i would like to know if there is any scaling or maximum value of its effectiveness. how much "MDRB" is "enough", or is more always better? when should one give up this stat for others, such as life, defense, etc... any rough ideas as to what its equivalent for saving your hide is in other standard areas such as life, resists, defense, etc?

my druid has -45 to magic damage total right now, and he's a hardcore in hell difficulty... just looking for advice for tweaking my equipment.

thanks a bunch all!

Jonathan

[Superhal]

there are two differnt types. one is reduce by x, the other reduces by x%. reduce by x only works well for frame-type damage, such as burning from a fire. reduce by % ( i don't believe you can get this for magic, only phys damage) works better against damage where it all occurs in a single frame, such as lightning damage.

x% is always better than just x, so if you are concerned about elemental damage, you should just raise your resists.

i believe that "reduces magic damage by x/x%" affects all elemental damage, not just the damage type "magic."

[igorpotapov]

there are two differnt types. one is reduce by x, the other reduces by x%. reduce by x only works well for frame-type damage, such as burning from a fire. reduce by % ( i don't believe you can get this for magic, only phys damage) works better against damage where it all occurs in a single frame, such as lightning damage.
Safety Shield in the only -% MDR item I know. You can find its recipe here (http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/crafted/safety.shtml). I believe you can get quite good Safety Shield if you will be lucky. I can post a link to the screenshot I made at my test of the Safety Shield recipe.

And IMHO MDR is VERY good mod if you want to be immune to weak attacks like Hydra or Charged Bolt.
The only problem is MDR items. Let us look at Safety Shield (10%MDR + 2 MDR), 2x Dwarf Stars (2*15 MDR), Gladiator's Bane (20 MDR), Vampire Gaze (15 MDR), String of Ears (15 MDR), Crescent Moon (10 MDR), 3x Mal (21 MDR), Ginther's Rift or Moonfall (12 MDR). This setup gives 10% and 125 plain MDR, good fire absorb, good PDR and many other things, BUT… I can’t change my full Tal’s set + 2xSOJ + SS for it because I don’t like defense, I like offense. And most peoples too.
However this setup can make you viable pure tank. 125 MDR is cool. It is immunity to all magic attacks with 125 damage or less. And this setup gives you 30% fire absorb. For example Hell Council deals 81 max damage with Hydra spell, Hell Horror Mage in WSK3 deals 74-176 lighting damage.

[kujonathan]

so it seems the thing to do would be to find out the farthest place you are going to take your character, figure out the maximum magic damage dealt by the enemies in that area, and then don't get any more "MDRB" than what they deal? where could i find that information?

thanks all,
Jonathan

[RTB]

Safety Shield in the only -% MDR item I know. You can find its recipe here (http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/crafted/safety.shtml). I believe you can get quite good Safety Shield if you will be lucky. I can post a link to the screenshot I made at my test of the Safety Shield recipe.
Safety Crafted shields grant +% magic resist, NOT Magic damage reduced by %.

They only reduce dmg from Berserk, Bone attacks, and a couple more.

Magic dmg reduced by % would affect all elemental and magic dmg, which the shield does not do.

[kujonathan]

so whats all this talk about damge per second, damage per frame, etc... somewhere i heard that the reason MDR was so good was that, say if you had -15 MDR, it would reduce 15 points of magic damage each frame, so thats somewhere like 24 frames a second, so you actually would get -360 to damage. is that total lies? and if it isn't, how does that relate to the ratings on monsters? if a monster does 250 lightning damage, is it 250 per second split into 24 frames?

sorry to be totally confused, but there are a lot of folks talking about stuff that have no idea what they are talking about, and i can't figure out what is real and what isn't

thanks again

[Dio]

so whats all this talk about damge per second, damage per frame, etc... somewhere i heard that the reason MDR was so good was that, say if you had -15 MDR, it would reduce 15 points of magic damage each frame, so thats somewhere like 24 frames a second, so you actually would get -360 to damage. is that total lies? and if it isn't, how does that relate to the ratings on monsters? if a monster does 250 lightning damage, is it 250 per second split into 24 frames?

sorry to be totally confused, but there are a lot of folks talking about stuff that have no idea what they are talking about, and i can't figure out what is real and what isn't

thanks again


Take a look at this web page http://www.hut.fi/~tgustafs/damagereduction.html

It talks about all forms of damage reduction and has a special section on MDR. It used to be that MDR worked like you suggested on frame based attacks but has been modified to be less powerful. All the skills effected by this change are listed at the link http://www.hut.fi/~tgustafs/mdrmod.html. Unfortunatly this makes MDR not nearly as nice against frame based attacks, but still pretty great against instantaneous magic damage like that dealt by hydras and oblivion knights. Hope this helps.

[Cloud_Walker]

There is no attribute called "Magic Damage Reduced by X%". There is, however, another attribute that works the exact same way, and that is called _____ Resist +X%... your simple resist attribute. Magic Damage Reduced by X is to resists as Damage Reduced by X is to Damage Reduced by X%. Magic Damage applies to all 5 types. Resists can come in all 5 types.

I made a post in the General Strategy forum dealing with DR vs DR%. The same basic rules apply to Magic. For magic damage under 100, MDR is more effective, simply due to the fact that 1 point of MDR negates more than 1% of the total damage, whereas 1 point of Resist% ALWAYS negates 1%. Resists are more effective when 1% is more than 1 point; when damage is above 100. MDR also is not found as easily as +resist% items are. The amount of points of a single elemental resist% for every 1 MDR point you find is probably 5 or more. Meaning for every attribute that has MDR, there are 5 other attributes accessible that have the same amount of Resist%. If you take into consideration all 5 types of magical damage, this brings these two attributes to a 1 to 1 ratio. This is a generous number for MDR, because it is FAR easier to get +200% to ALL resists than it is to get 200 MDR. MDR is also not found on the best of gear. Are you gonna put a Crescent Moon weapon on your sorc instead of an Occy? I know this is unfair, but the point is items with +resist% (remember, this is essentially MDR%, only sometimes for single elements) also have much more valuable stats. Sacrificing large amounts of life, defense, strength, skills, dexterity, attack speed, life leech, etc. to gain high MDR is not a good idea, because those other attributes will help you alot more. Given this situation, instead of a 1 to 1 ratio of effectiveness of MDR to Resists, I will change it to a more practical ratio of 1 to 4 (also remember, the 1 to 1 was generous to MDR to begin with) So, for every 4 points of Resist ALL you have, throw in 1 point of MDR.

These, of course, are not hard data, but gaining exact information would require WAY more research than I have time for.

Personally, I would stick with resist% because not only do I spend most of my time in Hell difficulty, where elemental damages hover around 100 (and greater in Baal runs), and where MDR% is more effective, but I will make up for lack of MDR with more life, which is much more easily attainable utilizing resist-all gear than MDR gear.

I hope this helps.

EDIT: I forgot that resist-all does not boost -Magic- resistance, so the numbers will vary a little, but the point remains the same.

EDIT: This is also a general comparison. For you specialized Travincal runners or for you duelers with the best runewords, throwing in some MDR for extra help is not a bad idea at all.