resilience
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Blood Pact: Changing resilience to weaken DoTs
Perhaps you've heard about the planned change to modify the resilience stat to effect DoTs? When I first read about it, I can't say I understood it. Resilience is an anti-crit stat, which reduces the chance that you'll take a critical strike and reduces the damage done by a critical strike if you take it. Specifically, each point of resilience (and at level 70, it takes 39.4 resilience rating to equal one point of resilience) reduces your chance to be crit by 1% and reduces crit damage by 2%.But the main downside to using DoTs as a damage source is that they're incapable of critting. So what in the world do DoTs have to do with resilience? Eyonix explains it for us:As it currently stands, each new tier of equipment adds to the amount of damage DoT abilities have, yet that damage is not mitigated through combat ratings found on typical equipment. This change will help ensure that DoT effects do not scale too well compared to other damage mechanics. The amount of damage reduced will be equal to the critical chance reduction effect that resilience grants.If you're as confused as I was about why this was being done, not to mention how it was going to work, read on.
Blue Notes: DoTs to be affected by resil., no gear swapping in Arena battles
Two resonably major changes have been announced by Tom "Kalgan" Chilton, WoW lead designer in charge of balance, in a forum thread. First, a change is planned to be implemented to prevent you from changing gear (besides what's normally swappable during combat, i.e. things that occupy the main hand, off hand, and ranged slots) during an Arena battle:We do plan to disallow gear swapping (other than items you can normally change while in combat) once an arena battle has begun.Ands secondly, something that has previously been the subject of much debate, with proponents on both sides of the fence. I think it's safe to say that it's the bigger of the two changes: DoTs will be affected by resilience. When asked "How about making DoTs affected by resilience sometime in the near future," Kalgan replied: That's going to happen too.
WoW Rookie: All you needed to know about stats, part 4
In the conclusion to this series of posts, we're going to be discussing the game's defensive stats -- which are probably only of minor importance unless you're interested in tanking. Though if you're one of those people (like me!) who has to know everything about the game, this is interesting information which will explain a lot of things about how damage is handled in World of Warcraft. If you're tuning in to all you needed to know about stats for the first time, it may be worthwhile to go back and read part 1 (covering the five basic attributes), part 2 (covering physical damage stats), and part 3 (covering spell damage stats) first -- but if you can't wait to know all there is to know about defense, resilience, spell resistance, dodge, parry, and block, keep reading!
DoTs and Resilience
Resilience, a stat introduced in the Burning Crusade, has quickly become very important in the new Arena-centric PvP world. In a nutshell, it reduces your chance to be crit, as well as the damage taken from any crits that do get through. And since PvP is all about burst damage, it makes sense that attacking crits would help. It helps against melee damage, ranged physical damage, magic nukes, anything that can crit. However, one very important class of damage is incapable of critting: DoTs.A DoT can't crit, and therefore it doesn't care about resilience. So what, you ask? Well, this means that as PvP gear improves, and gains more resilience, it protects more against all kinds of damage except DoTs. Which means that, relative to other types of damage, DoTs get buffed as PvP gear improves. Dahis of Shadow Gaming calls this "classist item scaling," and presents as plausible solutions "Either nerf DoT base damage and allow crits, or rework resilience with some flat damage reduction component, or just add some aspect that pertains directly to DoTs." And it looks like Blizzard is listening to the growing concern; in a discussion on resilience, Drysc said "We're looking into it."So what do you think? Does the DoTs/resilience situation need to be addressed in some way, or is it good as is? For more in-depth analysis, do read the article over at Shadow Gaming, which has several good points.
Resilience and crit-activated abilities
Not sure what exactly resilience is? Then I'll start out with an explanation: resilience is a stat which reduces your chance to be crit and reduces the damage done by crits when they do hit you. Of course, you'd think there's something of a downside to reducing your chance to get crit -- cool abilities that are activated by critical strikes won't activate, right?Actually, as confirmed by Drysc, wrong. Players have been reporting that crit-activated abilities activate inconsistantly when they have high resilience, and Drysc explains that this is by design. High resilience can prevent crits from landing -- but to allow crit-activated abilities to still benefit the player, whenever a hit occurs, the crit-activated abilities have a small chance of being activated. Abilities are checked individually, so it's possible for say, Blood Craze to activate without Enrage activating.
Level 70 Combat ratings values updated and listed here
With that great explanation of stats this morning, how fitting that this afternoon, we have Drysc's update on what the various combat ratings mean for each of your character's combat values.The combat ratings system was implemented when the expansion came around-- it used to be that instead of a "dodge rating" on a piece of armor, you just got a "+2% chance to dodge." But Blizzard noticed that in order to scale that gear up ten levels, they'd have to push up percentages, and eventually everyone would just be walking around with crazy high percentages-- adding enough armor up to a 100% chance to dodge would obviously break the game.So they developed the rating system, with each armor piece giving a plus to "rating" that then translated into different percentages at different levels-- an item with 18.9 dodge rating on it actually gives +1% dodge at level 70, but more than that at level 60 (about %1.5, actually). That way, Blizzard can scale the rating with level, and gear can get better without breaking the game. Much more on this, I'm sure, when Elizabeth continues her WoW Rookie feature on stats. And don't forget that RatingBuster can give you all this automatically ingame-- from what I understand, it has been updated with these numbers.But in the meantime, after the jump, I've posted what Drysc says all the ratings will give you at level 70. Feel free to bookmark this post for quick reference when comparing gear.
2.0.7 and beyond for Warriors
The resilience changes in the 2.0.7 patch notes may have some consequences for Warriors. To sum up, 2.0.7 is making it so that crits that are converted into regular hits by resilience will still trigger abilities that would be triggered by crits. This includes, notably, Enrage, which I'm already coming to rely on for my Warrior alt. The change makes it so that you don't have to worry about resilience nerfing your Enrage (and other such skills), basically. Quoth Tseric: In case you hadn't, there is a general change in 2.0.7 which has more relevance to Warriors than other classes. Any effect which benefits the victim of a critical strike will now trigger even if resilience converted the attack from a critical strike to a normal strike; this applies to melee, ranged, and spell. The affected talents, abilities, and items are: "Eye for an Eye", "Blessed Resilience", "Enrage", "Martyrdom", "Blood Craze", "Eye of the Storm", and "Bonespike Shoulder". This applies to those Warriors who may stack resilience, but fear that it reduces effectiveness of certain abilities gained through being crit. Resilience won't interfere with you popping enrage! Of other note, the devs have been looking at threat generation closely and we continue to get harder numbers and data regularly. It is possible changes to threat generation are down the road. When I hear more, so will you. Look, he even made his own "pop Enrage" joke. See? He's one of the good guys (I'm a big believer in "don't shoot the CM"). One more comment from him: Threat generation is being watched as it compares between warriors and druids. I've said this has been of priority and interest to the devs before and it still is. Group and Raid environments play out differently and this can affect the look of things as far as competition goes. When changes to warriors come down the pipe, there's a good chance the devs will be tweaking threat generation before anything else. This is good news, of course. I haven't been on the tanking end of the current Warrior vs. Druid vs. Paladin controversy, but I have healed for all three as tank in 5-mans, and I have to say, if I was forced to rank them, Warriors would come out low, especially for multi-mob tanking. This is clearly not right.Thoughts, on resilience changes and Warrior threat?
Possible changes to +crit in the expansion
On the leaked PvP set information, you may have noticed a few oddities. Firstly, +crit (rephrased as "critical rating") was being thrown around like candy (+32 spell crit on a single piece of armor?) and, secondly, a new stat, "resilience" was mentioned. Well, I still consider all of this to be rumor, but the Curse Gaming forums have some interesting discussion on what alpha test players are seeing with these stats. Poster Daviesh suggests that percent-based +hit and +crit have been removed entirely, and replaced with critical rating, which gives you an amount of both based on your level. And Poster Anders chimes in with precise numbers -- +10 critical rating for 1% to hit at level 60 and +14 critical rating for 1% to crit at 60. At level 70, the numbers shift -- 15.769 critical rating per 1% to hit and 22.076 critical rating for 1% to crit. As to resilience, it's still somewhat mysterious, but poster Ruinx suggests that it's an anti-crit trait (if this is true, that would make it similar to +defense on current itemization).Of course, the question on everyone's minds is how this sort of change will impact the game. And that's difficult to do without seeing how exactly these new stats will be itemized throughout the game. If we assume it will be itemized similarly to the current +crit and +to hit bonuses, we would have to assume that less (equivalently) +crit will be seen, since it will always be bundled with +to hit. And if the amount of benefit gained by crit rating does change with level, it may end up more difficult for a max-level player to stack +crit for a sky-high crit rate. But as to the actual impact this change may have on the game (and whether it will actually be implemented to the extent described) we may not know until the beta begins and more information is widely available.
