Rakiata's Flow Lineage Support with Resistance Penetration - How does it work?

Rakiata's flow says "treat enemy resistances as though they are inverted".

In other words, positive resistance becomes negative, and negative resistances become positive. Resistance penetration has no effect on negative resistances.

When does resistance penetration (fire resistance penetration for example) apply? The order makes a big difference.

Consider the scenario of fighting a monster while having 50% fire resistance penetration

Rakiata's Flow first:
a) -30 fire resistance on monster - rakiata's flow applies, monster is treated as having +30 fire resistance. Penetration then applies, monster effectively has zero resistance. While the monster takes less damage than before, the player damage isn't actively being lowered by resistances. So I look at this as zero change to player damage from vase values.

b) +30 fire resistance on monster - rakiata's flow applies, monster is treated as having -30 fire resistance. Penetration does nothing.= since resistance is negative. Player damage is increased from base values.

Penetration First:

c) -30 Fire resistance on monster - Fire penetration applies first, but since resistance is negative, it doesn't do anything. Then Rakiata's flow is applied, so monster has +30 fire res. Player damage is decreased from base values.

d) +30 Fire resistance on monster - fire penetration applies. Monster is treated as having zero fire resistance, rakiata's flow does nothing. Player damage is unchanged from base values (zero resistance).

We can see that when Rakiata's Flow applies first, secnarios A and B, the player damage is [not increased] or [increased], meaning it is never a negative for the player. In scenario C and D, player damage is either [not increased] or [decreased] meaning it is never a net positive (compared to base values)

---if you know boss resistances and actively swap in/out rakiata's based on that information, it could change the value of the gem.

Related: is there somewhere I can look up the resistances of bosses?

Penetration doesn't remove resistances from the target - it penetrates them and does so only up to the value of zero.

If you have Rakiata's equipped and the mob has any positive resistance then it takes that much increased damage from the skill it's slotted into.
Any penetration source that skill gains either from other supports or the tree doesn't do anything.

The opposite is also true, but mobs don't inherently have negative resistances unless you apply exposure to them, which would defeat the whole purpose of using that lineage support.

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arandan#3174 escreveu:

Penetration doesn't remove resistances from the target - it penetrates them and does so only up to the value of zero.

If you have Rakiata's equipped and the mob has any positive resistance then it takes that much increased damage from the skill it's slotted into.
Any penetration source that skill gains either from other supports or the tree doesn't do anything.

The opposite is also true, but mobs don't inherently have negative resistances unless you apply exposure to them, which would defeat the whole purpose of using that lineage support.

I am aware that penetration doesn't change the resistance. Perhaps my original post was too long, or I did a poor job explaining things.

The order still matters. There are 4 bosses in this list https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/guides/map-bosses that have negative FIRE resistance. There are also small monsters, rares, etc. I also didn't check the Abyss bosses, nor did I pay attention to non-fire resistances.

During the damage calculation of a hit, the order is 1) Compare resistance values against penetration 2) apply rekiata's

When the monster's starting resistance is negative, let's say -30, then rekiata's makes your damage worse. It would go 1) Penetration does nothing since resistance <= 0 then step 2) apply rekiata's inverting the original -30 to +30. You would end up against a monster functionally having 30 resistance.

But if the order is different, 1) apply reakiata's 2) check for penetration it DOES matter. A monster with -30 resistance would be treated as having zero after being inverted to +30 then applying penetration so it gets treated as zero.

So against at least 4 bosses this matters. And I suppose for some monsters it might. There are lots of monsters, I haven't really checked them. So I'm still wondering when rekiata's gets applied relative to penetration in the order of operations during damage calculation.

Unless you're assuming that penetration no longer applies AT ALL when playing with Rekiata's which makes it simple.

As far as I'm aware penetration always applies last, which means that it does nothing, since the resistance is already inverted.