Each playable character (or slayer) in Dead Island 2 has seven attributes: toughness, stamina, health recovery, critical damage, agility, peak health, and resilience. The first six attributes are pretty self-explanatory, but the seventh is a lot less clear. What exactly does “resilience” mean? And how is it different to “toughness”? Surely they’re pretty close synonyms, and mean much the same thing. Well, not in Dead Island 2 they don’t.
What Does The Resilience Attribute Mean in Dead Island 2?
While toughness affects how much damage you take in general – the higher your toughness, the less damage you take – resilience affects specific types of damage. The higher your slayer’s resilience, the more resistant you are to fire, shock, and caustic damage. So, high resilience means you’re less affected by the ignited, electrified, and melting status effects. A character with high resilience will suffer less when burned, when receiving electric shocks, and when coming into contact with acids. But a character with low resilience will burn, shock, and melt much more easily.
The slayer with the highest resilience in Dead Island 2 is Carla, who is practically fireproof. And the character with the lowest resilience in Dead Island 2 is Jacob, who goes up like a dry newspaper soaked in gasoline. We’d still say that Jacob is the best character in Dead Island 2, though. This is because most situations in the game don’t involve status effect damage, so resilience is probably the least important attribute. It’s much more important to be able to find large numbers of zombies without getting tired or killed, than it is to be able to hold a lit match to your hand for a minute. There certainly are some situations where resilience is useful, particularly later in the game, but even a character with low resilience will be able to survive them.
