How Does One Reduce Reflects-Damage Affix Damage?

Elites in Diablo 3 have a "reflects damage" affix. What resist or setup do you need to reduce that damage?


Standard advice for dealing with reflects damage is to get life on hit or life steal, but this doesn't scale well with your dps. Armor and resists will reduce the damage, a combination of all three will be your best bet.

Unfortunately, all I've been able to find is speculation about exactly how resists and armor work against reflect damage. However, the argument that monks can essentially ignore reflect due to having very high mitigation (e.g. from One With Everything and Seize the Initiative) seems to strongly indicate that they do play a part.


Depending on your dmg output, life regeneration might be a easy way the counter/heavily reduce the impact of the reflect dmg affixes..... Maybe somebody has some numbers about this. For me with only 60k DPS(character info screen) it works wonder well :D even though I do a lot more dmg with +X% dmg to cold skills. Which isn't calculated in the info screen.

It might also be cheaper then getting a high LOH and/or Life Steal.


There are several things you need to do to mitigate reflect damage. As a demon hunter I bear the brunt of this afix keenly.

Firstly reduce your damage output ... I hate that answer, but it's true. If you are dragging your own HP low just by piling on the damage you aren't giving any of your recovery methods much time to work. For example I have to stop spamming Ball Lightning and using Vault with Trail of Cinders and use them more selectively.

Next, armor and resists will play a big role in reducing the amount of damage you will take. The mitigation, as noted in another answer, is not quite clear but it does exist, so this helps.

Following the above, it's important to maintain a healthy effective health pool. Sometimes more vitality will take some of the sting away ... if you see it hitting you harder when you've upgraded your dps then this is part of the equation. Your effective health pool needs to grow with your dps.

Finally don't use a single life recovery strategy, none of them scale fast enough to lay off all the damage. Add in some life steal if you can get it and regeneration where possible. Your primary mitigator is probably life on hit, but as noted, it does not scale, while life steal does. While you're in the awkward in between levels of dps having a balance of both will give you a little more leeway.

Also, when you can get it for free, don't overlook +x hp to globes and health potions ... when you're popping a mythic, 12,500 is good, 25,000 is a lot better.

Reflect is currently probably the most disliked afix in the game, but don't expect it to be dramatically reduced any time soon, it's working as intended$^{tm}$ :)