Conviction: This aura lowers the defense and fire, cold and lightning resistance of monsters. It's especially useful in parties with Sorceress and Lightning Fury Amazon. But other classes like CE necro can benefit from it also. For nearly every character that deals elemental damage (Ice, Fire and Lightning), this is the best mercenary weapon since it actively reduces resistances, vastly increasing the damage output of the character. Only builds that deal magic damage, poison damage or physical damage do not receive significant benefit from the Conviction aura on this weapon. This aura will break immunities, but when doing so will only function at 1/5th of its effectiveness. The Infinity works on all three elements as said before. The problem with this skill is that it gives a Lvl12 Conviction Aura, -85% All Resistances. Immune monsters don't always get their immunity pierced because it only takes off -17% if the monster is immune. (If a monster is immune Conviction only works at 1/5th, so lvl 12 Conviction (85/5 = 17) Seeing as a monster could have a potential resistance of nearly 200%, that won't be enough to even scratch it. Monster Res = 99 or less, subtract 85, that will be their resistance. Monster Res = 100 or greater, subtract 17%, that will be their resistance. Monster Res = 117 or greater will not become vulnerable to that element. This weapon is used primarily on Lightning damage characters because you can pierce every monster, except bosses with special enchantments, of their Lightning Immunity. Monsters that are immune against Fire or Cold rarely ever have less than 117% Resistance, so Infinity is much less usable for those two elements. Cold Mastery, for example, will not deduct any resistance if the monster is immune, it will only work if they are vulnerable to that element already. Same reason -Resist items and gear like facets and griffon only work if the monster is not immune. Also, Blizzard capped the -Res on monsters, so they made it impossible for monsters to have below -100% Resistances. To add to your confusion, take a monster that has 99 Cold Res. Maxed Cold Mastery at lvl20 will take off 115% resistance, and take off another 85% from the Infinity. You're already 1 point over the cap, any further skillpoint in CM from Gear is useless and won't affect the battle in any way. (CM has no cap in pvp). The -45% to -55% Lightning Resistance of Monster stat only works for the person holding the weapon, in this case the Merc. That is one of the game's mechanics and a fact, but many people don't know that because they think that it will work for their characters as well. credits Ferret
Clear great work as always ! Yes this game is realllly hard to understand and master it take years ahh blizzard games
Conviction also reduced opponent defense. Thus, attacks which depend on AR will benefit from it as well. It is useful against opponent without +%defense, example mobs. Less effective in PVP as most of the character have +% defense bonus from skill. It will merely reduce a small factor from total defense.
And something else to add to this - boosting the merchant all skills will also benefit the conviction aura as adding more skills total
Not quite. +skills do not affect auras from gear when equipped. The slvl 12 conviction would stay as slvl 12 conviction. The merc's inherent aura and jab level will each be increased
Oh well, I havent the opportunity to test it in current version, but IIRC it worked like that in 1.12 cheers.
So lets say that the Sorc is wearing the Infinity. Does she gain the -45 to -55% as a stat that effects her skills? For example the monsters Immunity to Lightning is 100%. With Infinity you minus the 17% to knock it down to 83%. Then wearing the Infinity at a -55% Lightning Resistance that would knock it down to just 28% left?
As @inayat confirmed,it is exactly as you said. Thats also the reason, why overlooked cheap rw crescent moon is so good (especiallyagainst monsters with high light res).