Physical Resistance VS equipment bonus resistance.

It really depends on what you are fighting. If you get attacked mostly by magic, you want elemental resistance. If you are getting attacked mostly by physical attacks you want physical resistance.

I will assume your goal is just to be ready for anything. With that in mind I have the exact opposite view as the previous poster. I would say focus on physical defense and here is why. Defense works as an exponetial curve. A little defense goes a long way when you do not have much defense while a huge amount makes little difference when you already have a lot. Here is what I mean (the numbers are entirely made up because they change every level). If you have 10% physical damage reduction adding another 100 physical defense may very well raise you to 20% physical damage reduction. If you already have 50% elemental damage reduction adding another 100 elemental defense might raise you to 51% or may even leave you at 50%. This is because it take much larger amount of defense to make any difference as your percentage gets higher. 50% seems to be around the magic number. Once you get 50% damage reduction trying to get any higher than that really gets hard. Huge amounts of increased defense give only a few percent damage reduction. If I have to choose between 50 physical defense or 250 defense to all 5 elements I take that 50 physical defense because it makes a bigger percent difference.

My cleric has 5 vit, 5 dex, and just enough strength to wear the arcane armor. Such a cleric can be quite effective as long as you know what you are made for. You need to learn to kill opponents before they can get to you if they do physical damage. This is not so hard since one of our main attacks slows their run speed. Such a build will die more frequently than the other builds, but it also has more mp, faster mp regen, and more powerful spells of all types (both offense and healing).