[THIS IS THEORY AND HAS NOT BE TESTED]
First of all, I would like to say this is a hunch, but I believe it can be tested and I invite others to do so. This guess about how the system works is mostly from thinking about stuff in this thread.
So I think every piece of resist gear you have applies a multiplicative modifier to incoming damage. What this means is that your first piece of gear for each type of resist is super valuable, while subsequent pieces of resist gear provide diminishing returns.
An example with imaginary numbers:
Skolver Cap provides 50% piercing mitigation or a damage multiplier of 0.5 (1.0 - 0.5)
Royal Jelly band provides 5% piercing mitigation or a damage multiplier of 0.95 (1.0 - 0.05)
So wearing both and taking 10 piercing damage gives you:
10 * 0.5 * 0.95 = 4.75 damage
Wearing ONLY the Jelly band and taking 10 piercing damage gives you:
10 * 0.95 = 9.5 damage
The important thing to note is that the Jelly band is more valuable the less other piercing defense you have. In our imaginary example, the jelly band was worth 100% more mitigation (0.5 points instead of 0.25) when you were not wearing the Skolver cap. What this means is your best bang for your buck in damage trinkets probably comes from covering a type of damage your armor doesn't cover.
To make the example more extreme let's consider two imaginary pieces of Skolver:
Skolver Cap provides 50% piercing mitigation or a damage multiplier of 0.5 (1.0 - 0.5)
Skolver Coat provides 50% piercing mitigation or a damage multiplier of 0.5 (1.0 - 0.5)
Wearing both and taking 10 piercing damage gives you:
10 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 2.5 damage
Wearing one and taking 10 piercing damage gives you:
10 * 0.5 = 5.0 damage
So... the first piece gives prevents 5 damage while the second prevents only half that at 2.5 damage.
Some random things to note if this guess is how the system actually works:
- the order that pieces are applied makes no difference
- it is impossible to reduce damage to zero
- UVs providing damage resistance of a type already on a piece of armor are probably adding another multiplier in addition to the one already provided by the armor. This means UVs are more valuable if they are different from the damage resistances of the armor they appear on.
- The value of any piece of resistance gear is NOT STATIC and will depend on what else you are wearing. So saying "my trinket makes no difference" without giving the context of what else you are wearing doesn't mean much
Here is the big conclusion IF this is how damage resists work:
the value of a defensive piece of gear becomes smaller the more you wear other pieces of gear with that same type of defense. Wearing max piercing on a full skolver set may significantly impact the value of that max piercing UV
Apologies if this has been speculated on before.
this sounds like the most likely possibility from any ive heard up to this point, would answer a few questions, but i wonder if we will ever truly be sure heh