I enchanted every possible piece of my armor with a magic resistance enchantment, but as that are only two pieces of armor if you don't use a shield I decided to add some elemental resistances on the other armor pieces.
So I now have two times magic resistance, some shock resistance from my armor and the 50% frost resistance from being a Nord. How do these resistances interact and add up?
Am I actually reducing incoming magic elemental damage when combining magic and elemental resistances? How are those resistances added up? Do magic and elemental resistances stack, and if is there a diminishing effectiveness or how does it work exactly?
Best Answer
If it's a multiplicative stack as others have noted, it should work like this:
Say you have a 40% shield, a 30% chest piece, and a 20% buff...
In a simple additive system, you would have 90% resistance (
40% + 30% + 20%). This is a problem because a user could figure out a way to completely mitigate damage and render certain foes permanently harmless, and what fun would that be? Generally systems that use this method implement caps, either hard (user can't score higher than x%) or soft caps (after x%, all bonuses are reduced by y%)In a multiplicative system the 1st item adds its full value (in this case 40%), but the next item only adds it's bonus onto the un-resisted portion of the damage. This works out as follows:
40% + (30% * 60%) + (20% * 42%) = 66.4%resistance. The result is a much lower effect when stacking items. This kind of system makes large-chunk items more effective than collections of small-chunk items and also guarantees that no one can ever reach 100% resistance, even without the use of maximum-caps.