Having gone through everything now, I am noticing that damage resistance still seems to be way overvalued by the designers. Even at high levels, effects that give resistance only give low amounts of it. You will have people running around dealing 6d8 + bonus dice + high modifier damage per sword swing and even more energy damage per spell casting, but you're lucky if you can get decent amounts of damage resistance as a persistent option. Even high level feat commitments and expensive high level worn items can't do it. Very rarely you can get 15, but mostly it's 5 or 10. That is trivial even at low to mid levels, let alone high levels.
On a semi related note, sonic damage is barely acknowledged by the game. There's, what, one spell (Sound Burst) and one item (Horn of Blasting) that does it? Even old staples like Shout are missing. Most things that give energy resistance or interact with energy damage or do variable damage don't mention sonic. I would have hoped the new version would somewhat normalize the various damage types against each other, so you could have more viable concepts and didn't have some damage types arbitrarily nerfed and kept in the back of the class because nothing resists them.
I'm not sure I agree. I pulled up one of the end-game sections of Doomsday Dawn, for example, which has level 18-20 enemies, and enemies will be doing (randomly chosen), an average of 26 damage, 35 damage, 31 damage, 34 damage, and 36 damage on a single-action attack. Some other things are higher, like the average 63 on a breath weapon, but you get the general idea.
Now, the average HP of a PC at that level will differ, but at the lowest we probably have a 14 Con wizard. This is probably lower than any realistic aspects, but let's go with this for an extremely low bar. Even with that, they have 168 HP. Getting resistance 5 to the attack they're getting hit by will make it so they need another attack to be downed. A barbarian might have 20 Con and Toughness, having 368 HP. Resistance 5 would make them take two more attacks before they go down.
With the numbers I noted, I think anything over resistance 10 being common would be overkill on the pure amount of damage it's cutting.
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See, I actually find taking a couple more hits to be totally appropriate for a specific resistance like Fire or Slashing if you're investing character resources into it. Sure, universal "Resist All" should be scaled lower, but if you're spending feats and/or a bunch of money on Resist Fire, you should actually get multiple extra hits worth of survival time out of it.