The ability to shrug off some amount of damage in combat is attributed to your damage resistance derived stat. This statistic is a percentage, meaning that it will subtract an amount of damage from every blow based on a percentage of the damage. If your damage resistance is 10%, and you take 20 points of damage from a single attack, you will end up taking 18 points of damage after your damage resistance. You will need to equip armor to see your damage resistance increase.

Initial Level: Starting damage resistance is equal to 0%.