Can't Touch This!

Resilience? Say what now?

Back in my day, resistance was resistance. Stamina was stamina, damage was damage and crits were crits!

18 months can do a lot to an mmorpg, and the 18 months I missed was when it all happened. I came back to discover that end game tier sets didnt make you god in the battleground! Amazing!

I also couldn't figure out why almost everybody was a private. I later discovered that they ditched the ranking system shortly after my departure, invented arena, resilience and other new fangled things like spell hit and heroic mode dungeons. o.O

So what's resilience all about anyway? I certainly didn't bother with it as I leveled my way to 70, nor when working my way through all the new instances and raid dungeons, which kinda brings me up to now, and as of last night and my Merciless Gladiators Raiment purchase, I have 272 resilience!

This seems to finally be enough to make some difference. I wouldn't be the first to say you can "feel" it working as you take less damage. Perhaps its just the stamina though? I'm nudging 9k now, so perhaps thats why im staying alive so much longer than I used to?

Lets do a quick breakdown.

272 resilience =?

resilience rating 272 @ lv 70 = 272/39.4 = 6.9 % resilience. (for the maths head to WoWwiki)

Wonderful. So now what?

• chance to be crit reduced by 6.9%
• crit damage reduced by 13.8%
• dot damage reduced by 6.9%

Ok back to reality, all that maths belongs somewhere else. (there was more but I ditched it. maths is boring!) Lets talk real world for a minute.

I want to know what practical difference this resilience is going to make... So lets say Im fighting an equally geared mage. Lets say he hits me with a frostbolt...

As I said maths belong elsewhere, so trust me when I say that in my pvp gear a frostbolt will
crit for somewhere in the vicinity of 3.5k...

So if I have no resilience. I get hit for 3.5K. No calculator required.

But what if I have 100 resilience. This is about what you can get with two or three pieces of
blue pvp gear, which is well within anyone's reach.

(now bear with me while I go do maths some place else)

Right. With 100 resilience I got hit for 3325 instead of 3500.

That still hurt. In fact it hurt so much, it's almost as good as a full damage crit, nothing a quick icelance can't fix... zzz

Ok but 100 resilience is rubbish, you wouldn't expect it to do much. Lets try where Zupa is at the time of writing, 272 res.

... The frostbolt crits me for 3017...

Still hurts! although now its not hurting quite so bad. 500 hp extra is good to have, but
would I be better off with an extra 50 stamina? Guess its not quite that simple...

In fact its very much not quite that simple, because there is more than one frostbolt going around, and resilience reduces crit chance also. Lets talk 100 frostbolts now, thanks to my resilience I will dodge 6 or 7 of them, taking only normal damage.

What I've done is reduce my opponents 18.6% unbuffed crit chance to only 11.7% Hah! sucker!

Since @ lv 70 22.1 crit rating = 1% crit... so my resilience has affected my opponents crit rating to the tune of -152. take that!

Ok lets go perfect world. Same tests, but this time with resilience at the cap of 492 / 12.5%... so -25% damage and -12.5% crit chance.

3500 crit frostbolt now crits for 2625 IF it happens which is only going to be 6.1% of the time. So 6 times out 100 he crits me for 2625 instead of 19 times for 3500.

resilience cap ftw! Oh and it also reduces DoT damage! And makes you breakfast!

well almost =)