All Resistance

All Resistance (AKA All Res, Res All, AR or RA) is an item affix in Diablo 3. One of the most valuable, useful, and popular affixes in the game, this one increases the resistance to all types of damage; physical, cold, fire, poison, lightning, and arcane, by up to 80 points.

All Res can spawn as a random affix on every type of armor: helms, shoulders, bracers, chest armor, pants, belts, and boots, along with rings, amulets, and shields. It can not be found as a random modifier on weapons or non-shield off-hand items ([quivers]], sources, or mojos, though it appears as an inherent mod on a few legendary weapons such as the Empyrean Messenger.

Besides spawning in the random slot, All Res is an inherent property on many of the best end game legendary items in the game, appearing at +71-80 values on items such as Natalya's Boots, Ice Climbers, Vile Ward, Mempo of Twilight, Immortal King's boots and belt, Zunimasa's boots, and many others. These items can not spawn with a double All Res, from the inherent mod and a random one, but items in Diablo 3 Vanilla can spawn with All Res and a single resistance modifier, though the developers have said this will probably change in Loot 2.0.

All Res Future Plans

The developers haven't offered suggestions of how to make All Res feel less mandatory on gear, but they have talked about the interaction between single resistances, which max out at 60, and All Res, which goes up to 80. Wyatt Cheng spoke on this in May 2013:[1]

Wyatt Cheng: Let me comment on One With Everything the Monk Passive. I think the most likely — and I’m definitely not committing to this as a final plan — the most likely solution is to try and get a new set of resistance packages into the game in the future. That’s pretty far down the line probably. It’s part of the itemization changes.

Those will make the individual resistances roll higher than All Resistance can roll. People think it’s weird that resistance to everything is a bigger number than individual resistances, but let me explain how we got here. History lesson.

When single resist was way higher during testing, you were incentivized to keep a bunch of varied resistance gear in your inventory and swap it in for specific circumstances. So when you saw a Molten or Plagued or something, you’d change to your item with really big resistance to one modifier. So to change that we made All Resistance with the highest value, and that was kind of better than gear swapping, but I think ultimately we just traded one problem for another.

When the higher single res values roll out with the itemization changes, you will no longer see single resistances on the same item with all res. And OWE will still be a big benefit, but it won’t be as huge as it can be now. So to use some numbers, say that All Res goes up to 80 on an item, in the future single res will go up to 100 or 115. But you’ll never get both on the same item.

All Res Hardcap?

Fans have been suggesting a hard cap for maximum resistances since shortly after Diablo 3's release, when it became obvious that more All Res was always the best modifier on any piece of armor. While datamining has revealed some planned hardcaps for offensive stats[2] in Reaper of Souls, no hardcap to All Res has yet been detected.

Hardcap Benefits

An All Res hardcap at say 500 or 600 would limit a rich player's ability to mitigate elemental damage down to almost nothing, and would promote gear diversity since players would get X amount of resistance, but then not seek more since it would do no good above the hardcap.

That was how resistances (and many other useful affixes) were handled in Diablo 1 and Diablo II. In those games resistances worked on a % basis, and in Diablo 2 the hardcap was set at 75% resistance. That number could be raised higher by a few uniques that had +maximum resistance properties, and a higher number than 75% was useful when facing an enemy with a big resistance debuff ability, but for the most part, players in the previous Diablo games valued items with resistance, but with the hardcap on resistances it never felt like gear had to have All Res or it was junk.

If the Diablo 3 developers agree, they have not let on. Their only comments have been about raising the indiidual resistances to make them potentially higher than All Res. Fan suggestions for resistance packs, where one affix would create two or three individual resistances with varying values seem not to have influenced the developers.