Ok, so here's the problem: My physical resist was 45, and all my other ones (fire, poison, etc.) were at 40. I then picked up some new leggings that offered higher resists than the ones I currently had; however, when I put them on, the only resist that went up was Physical Resist (went up to 50). All the others stayed at 40.

I tried this with some other various pieces of armour that I found, and while all of them offered resist in poison, fire, etc., my resists never went above 40, with the exception of physical. It was like they were capped at 40.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?

Mostly likely b/c you have gm resist. GM resist gives you 40 resist but magic resist does not stack with armor resist. Count all the resists in your armor and most likely it doesnt add to 40.

Yes, I have GM Resisting Spells. So that means I can never benefit from good quality armour??

yes, you can but you need more armor resist, remember magic resist does not stack with armor resist. Reason why you see a change in phyiscal resist is b/c your total phyiscal resist on all your armor pieces total above 40.

Ohh, ok I think I understand. So if I were to, for example, have armour that totalled 52 fire resist, then my fire resist would be 52. But if all my armour totalled to 35 fire resist, then my fire resists would still be 40, because of my GM Spell Resisting. Is this correct?

Thanks for the fast responses!

Yes, that is correct.

YES, you got it!!

Magic resist is supposed to help out if you have say high phyiscal, posion, and energy but really low fire and cold then magic resist kicks in for the fire and cold. But you will see that is pretty easy to get all resist in the 60's.

You might ask then why need magic resist? Well, magic resist will help with not getting posioned all the time you will completely resist it, when resisted (posion resist on armor does not resist actually getting posion, but it helps with the amount of damage it does). Magic resist will also help completely resist paralyze or shorten the duration of the paralyze.

With this said, there are items in game that can help prevent posion, such as orange petals (makes you immune to posion for about 5 min) and greater cure pots, which you only need one free hand to take. A trap box helps with paralyze, if you get paralyze and open a trap box you will no longer be paralyze.

Most templates can get away without even having magic resist

Note that some spells also affect how your resists display. In that case, you add up your armor resists and they don't seem to match on your character display. Reactive armor, magic reflection, protection and arch protect are the ones that can alter your resistances. They toggle on and off, so to cancel their effects, cast it again on yourself (or have someone cast it on you). Here's the EA support page with all the details:

http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg...i=&p_topview=1

True, but the fact that he said his resist was 40 brought up a red flag

'Tis why I just added this as a "note" - FYI sort of thing for anyone who might search for problems with resists and come up with this thread