WP

I finally took the time to look at my character's resists and try to max them out and what I saw has me confused. I started by taking off every bit of my character's gear. At that point, standing there in a loincloth, he had 41 in all resists, which surprised me. I started to put pieces of gear back on and to my surpise the first few pieces didn't change any of my resists at all. The first 33 points of Fire Resist on my gear didn't count at all. The first 41 points of Physical Resist from gear didn't count at all. The first 35 points of Cold Resist didn't count. And so on. I tried casting Reactive Armor and Magic Reflection while fully geared and they functioned as expected. I didn't post this in the Bug Reports section because I'm sure there's an explanation. So who knows why the first 30-40 points of all resists on my gear don't count?

Sure. Your magic resist skill provides you with base elemental resists even when you're naked. But they don't stack with gear so to exceed what they provide you (30 or 40 or more depending on jewelry +resist stats) you still have to have 70 of all resists on your actual gear to cap it. Here's the uoguide explanation

http://www.uoguide.com/Resisting_Spells

Thanks very much for that info, Exodus. After reading that, I think I'll start playing with Protection on. That page says that Resisting Spells doesn't mitigate damage from DD spells, which was the main reason I bothered with it at all. Add to that the fact that it doesn't work very well with the spells it IS supposed to help you resist (i.e. at 105.3 I still get poisoned and cursed by every Spectre, Imp, and Imp's cousin's sister) and it's a no-brainer.

It should still mitigate some cure effects. -4 instead of minus 15 etc. But yeah, direct damage is checked against resists on gear. I personally run with protection unless casting a ton