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I was following this LoD Hydra Wizard build and for some reason it recommends rolling Physical or Lightning Resistance for many items.

Why? What's so special about these two types? Does this build have other means of protecting against all other types of damage?

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    Same single resistance on all items only makes sense for monk (due to his passive) . Intelligence-based characters are having a lot to resistances already and should normally ignore additional resistance as secondary gear stat. More likely a copy/paste error (from monk guide? I never used that site, can you trust its guides?). Those 2 types of damage are the most dangerous if you stay closer to monsters, perhaps that's what you are doing? If you have to choose from 2 items by their secondary stats, that's not a big deal.
    – user135338
    Oct 5, 2020 at 14:58
  • They’re nothing special. Given their position on the stat order (2nd on the secondaries), they would only come into play if you had all the primary stats and the first secondary and wanted to roll off a useless 2nd secondary to “something useful”.
    – Greg W
    Oct 8, 2020 at 3:05
  • This is also seen in the Typhon Frost Hydra build. I had the same confusion icy-veins.com/d3/… Dec 7, 2020 at 20:10
  • Harmony hasn't had the "single source element" requirement for years.
    – Gloweye
    Jul 6, 2021 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

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That's not specific to this build, that's general advice.

In end-game content in Greater Rifts, these are the most dangerous damage types.

Physical

This includes the Khazra Spear-throwers, whose projectiles may be hard to spot in the chaos of all the special effects, while still taking out a huge chunk of your health pool. A more fragile build attempting to push GR can get 1-shot by these.

It's also just the most common damage type outside elites. If you're grouping some 100-ish monsters together, Physical is probably the most used one, and you're probably going to take a few hits here and there simply because you can't keep track of every single monster's attack animation.

Lightning

Lightning Resistance is primarily to defend against the Electrified elite Affix if you're melee - otherwise you might need to skip these elites.

Thunderstorm can also easily kill you if it hits multiple times, and Lightning Resistance helps to blunt the impact somewhat.

Why not the others

Other affixes tend to be dodge-able or to have lower damage. For example, Molten death explosion will do far more damage than Thunderstorm, but it's easy to dodge. Frozen Pulse is nasty, but can be avoided reliably with only a single tick. Very mobile builds sometimes even without taking hits.

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