Originally Posted by Benji
Spell Penetration:
I will say a couple things about mages and their spells that I'm sure all of us know.
Frost Resistance: Its binary. ie: Its all or nothing when its resisted. There is always a chance, even at 0 resist, for someone or something to resist your spell. For frost mages, that means here and there, you will get a resist putting your bolt at 0 damage.
Fire Resistance: Fire is not binary. You can resist a percentage of it. It sucks when you cast a fireball, and some random monster only takes 1000 of the 2000 you were giddy to see pop above their head, but at least you did some damage.
Spell penetration, while not always the most desirable statistic in PvE, is after all useful.
Especially those who are at a damage peak, and require different kinds of blue gems (to activate metagems) in order to increase damage occurance (as opposed to losing out on doing damage).
Contingency.
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Saying Frost is binary and fire is not is also horribly wrong. It generally turns out that way, but not becuase of the school.
Spells that have a nondamage affect are binary. Since the secondary affect can only be either resisted or not, and not partially, damage goes in the same category. Likewise, spells that have no nondamaging effects are not binary.
Generally speaking, most frost spells will be binary, becuase most frost spells have a slowing affect. Likewise, most fire spells will be nonbinary, becuase most fire spells do damage and nothing more.
But try and find a partial resist on Dragon's Breath.
I would love to find evidence of spell penetration doing something in PvE. Becuase you need that evidence to back up claims like spell pen causes an "increase in damage occurance". Otherwise thats just an assumption. I have a guildie who thinks that spell pen has to do that, becuase, otherwise "why would Blizz put such a useless stat in the game?"
If spell penetration will increase damage, I'm all for it. But since I've got no evidence to support that, and in fact, the WWS parses I've seen all show minimal variances in spell mitigation regardless of spell pen on the caster, I have to go with the working theory that the stat is dead useless in PvE.