More often than not, the PC who poses the greatest threat on the battlefield isn’t the heavily armored Fighter swinging a greatsword but the dagger-wielding Rogue in leather armor. Strikers are designed to inflict a lot of damage. The trade off is that these classes sacrifice high defenses. In general, strikers are soft. This becomes painfully apparent when the guy with the lowest defenses is singled out and starts taking attacks from everyone not marked by a defender (and even a few of them too).

As I’ve progressed through the heroic and paragon tiers I’ve noticed that many of the monsters are dealing more than just straight up damage. Attacks now include energy types and in a lot of cases ongoing damage. So it’s not enough that I just took 12 points of damage but it turns out it’s fire and I’ve got 5 ongoing fire damage (save ends) as well.

As a player who favours the striker classes more than any other, I’m getting sick of being the party’s punching bag. And that’s when I realized that the key to my survival wasn’t necessarily higher defenses (although that certainly helps). The secret to surviving is energy resistances. It doesn’t matter if you get hit if you’re able to shrug off most of the damage and pretty much ignore the nasty ongoing side effect.

Upon making this realization I started acquiring items with energy resistances. By the time my Sorcerer was level 7 or 8 he had items and powers that provided at least resist 5 to six different energy types. Suddenly he was able to go the whole combat without getting bloodied. He still took a lot of hits, but with all of those energy resistances most attacks did minimal damage, if any.

From then on I made sure that every PC I played had a few items that provided resist 5 to one or more energy type.

I’ve found that sifting through hundreds of items in the D&D Compendium trying to find exactly what I wanted was extremely time consuming and a lot of work. So I compiled a list of all items in the D&D Compendium that grant one or more energy resistances. The list allows power-gamers (like me) to quickly and easily find an item that provides resistance to the energy type of your choice. Although my list is sorted by energy type, you can still easily find items by slot.

This list includes any item that grants a resistance all the time or that has a power that is good for an entire encounter. I’ve intentionally left off items that only provide resistances until he end of your next turn.

This is just the list of items in the heroic tier. Within the next week we’ll provide lists for items in the paragon and epic tier. If you know of an item that I’ve missed, please leave a comment below and I’ll update the list.

• Improve Your Defenses With Energy Resistance (Paragon)
• Improve Your Defenses With Energy Resistance (Epic)

If you find this list useful, you may also want to check out the list we compiled in Brave Warrior, Heal Thyself. It includes items that allow PCs to expend a healing surge and regain hit points during combat.

Energy Resist Items (Heroic Tier)

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