There was a thread a couple months ago about how important it was to cap dr%. The summary of my contribution to that thread was the "Effective Life" of the player relative to the element being resisted (phys in that case). I bring it up now, because the 6%dr missing from the 2 Skull in shield setup was equivalent to +22%Life. Even if you used a lvl 5 Fade item to gain another 5%, you're still missing out on +4%Life. The +%Life in this case takes effect after all regular +%HP gear such as the 10% on Enigma.

Here's a small table of resistance to one element and the effective life buff:
This table is meant to illustrate how important the lasts % of absorbs or phys res can be when it comes to maximizing your apparent life. It shows Absorbs being more important that resistances because they give a lot more effective life, but also they cannot be lowered. Although the numbers make it look like resistanves with Absorbs are awsomely godly, the numbers you come across start to become so low that you may as well pump your offense and drink a healing potion instead of capping your res.

Moral of the story:
If you've capped your Absorbs and dr%, but you're still taking huge hits, then those hits are either Magical damage or Poison.

the boost to survivability from having 40% sorb compared to 30 are HUGE, from personal experience with my pally at the start of the season. I generaly used res auras to cap my sorbs and got fana from the nec i was running with. Capping his Dr% along with maxed res and sob meant he was able to do all of hell baals minions + baal with a belt and a half of juvs. In comparison, my druid last season needed a good half cube of juvs along with a belt in order to do the same task and that was with around the same ammount of life.

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it is, but my point is that i think DR% comes first when you have a shield like dscale. my view is if and only if you get 50%DR from gear (not ber runes in sockets though), should a dscale be socketed with more sorbs, for reasons that you said (res auras to cover the rest of the sorb) or a unique ring to cover it. there are hardly any bosses in the game that require even 30% absorb of all 3 elements; usually a boss will have a very strong one element that can be covered by one of the 2 methods just mentioned.

Talking strictly from my own experience at the start of the season. When we were on route to hell baal, the lower res and conviction was really hurting our summons and the 3 of us too. I switched to salvation for that to counter it, but when there was conviction from the horadrim ancients along with Lr we were in real trouble. With 30+ passive absorb, you can use slavation to keep everyone else alive and pretty much negate lr+conv together.

You don't need ber runes to hit max dr% and if you can get near to full absorbs without using a res aura then you are free to use other party friendly auras like convic/fanat. I tend to switch between pretty much every aura on a pally, and every aura has its own hotkey. If I can pick and choose the aura with the most benefit to the party without lowering my own survivability then thats a massive +1 for me.

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Jah runes!! FTW

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I was never more at home than I was in battle. - Solomon Kane

Now Fury mentions hrs...

Did anyone think about putting 3 x sur in that shield?
+18% magic skill dmg... maybe worths if the rest of the equipment covers resists, sorbs and def...

♥

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"I am who I am. Your approval isn't needed"

Does +% magic damage work. Thought thats why they removed it from facets, because it didn't work.

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I was never more at home than I was in battle. - Solomon Kane

pretty sure it wont. I tried that with a sanc zealer and there was no increase to the magic damage from the skill.

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