I'm very sorry for the months behind bump but I've not found any information anywhere on the internet other than the Queen Lanatheil thread on here, but the question wasn't appropriate for that thread.


I'm wondering how resistances work in regards to dual elemental attacks. I've heard two theories: one that it takes the lowest of your two resists, and one that it mitigates a portion of the damage from your higher resist and a portion from your power resist.

I ask this because many of the fights in ICC involve dual elemental attacks, and we're discussing whether to stack resistance for certain heroic fights (deathwhisper for instance). I'm of the opinion that stacking one resistance won't help much, because it'll only mitigate in this instance frostbolt volley, and nothing about the adherents or shade explosions.

Are there any newer calculations that anyone has done regarding this that they haven't posted?

This is absolutely how Frostfire works. But it says so explicitly on the tooltip. I've always assumed this to be true; however Frostfire could only be an exception.

I presume the only way to really test it, is to find some sort of dual-elemental attack that can be spammed or a mob that will spam/frequently use on a player. Then have a player wearing various configuration of resistance gear for both types.

The exotic hunter pet family Chimera has the ability Froststorm Breath which deals froststorm (frost/nature) damage, so it should be relatively easy to test (preferably with a shaman so you can have both or either Frost Resistance Totem and Nature Resistance Totem).

I'll try that out, thanks.

We were trying to brainstorm mobs easily reachable (EG not mimiron :p) that had dual elemental attacks, we didn't want to use a frostfire mage in case player spells worked differently than mob spells but I think a pet will definitely fall under mob spells

I'd also ask what specifically you're trying to mitigate. There's a lot of bad information about some attacks and people thinking they're resistable when they aren't, such as the second tick of soul reaper (which many thought was somehow shadow/physical damage) or the blood attacks.

Soul Reaper does in fact deal Shadowstrike damage (shadow / physical), though I'm not sure if it's on the first, second, or both damage "ticks". The tooltip for the ability says something completely different than what the spell actually does, but it's simple enough to see in the combat log. However, as there is no physical resistance (unless armor counts as this?), there's very little to gain from discussing that particular spell.

You can use a combination of Thottbot and WoWHead to search for mobs with such abilities.

E.g. how to find the Focus Wizards mentioned above:

1. Go on Thottbot and enter "school damage" in the search field.
2. Click on School Damage (Fire, Frost) and look out for skills without a "Rank" under its name. "Rank" normally identifies player abilities. Let's take the first Frostfire Bolt without "Rank" but with mana cost. Click on it.
3. Now this is where WoWHead comes into play. Note down the spell id of that spell (it's in the URL, here it is 51779). Thottbot uses "thottbot.com/s123456" as an identifier for spell ids in its URL.
4. Go to WoWHead, select any random spell and replace the spell id in its URL with the one you've noted down. Or enter it directly via www.wowhead.com/?spell=51779. I think it's clear how WoWHead uses spell ids.
5. Once you're there, scroll down and look in the "Used by" tab. This tends to be quite reliable.

It's still quite some work, but at least now you'll have a mean to find mobs besides random guessing.


Happy testing.

Got some samples from doing the Shadowmourne quest (1 wipe):
I used the 3 crafted Armor parts + the crafted ring + CW flask + FrR Aura = 520 FrResist

[16:07:18.437] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 19.768 (Resist: 19.768)
[16:08:55.609] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 22.945 (Resist: 15.296)
[16:09:39.734] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 15.838 (Resist: 23.758)
[16:10:45.078] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul Miss
[16:25:57.640] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 19.462 (Resist: 19.462)
[16:27:14.359] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 23.937 (Resist: 15.958)
[16:29:26.906] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 17.834 (Absorb: 5.735, Resist: 15.712)
[16:29:50.718] Sindragosa Frost Breath Cazul 19.175 (Resist: 19.175)

Only talent used, affecting results: Divine Purpose 2/2 = -4% chance to be hit with spells

I'm afraid I haven't really been playing much (or, consequently, checking these forums much), so I haven't really kept up with this for the Icecrown fights. While there's always a chance dual attacks could follow some strange system, it shouldn't be too hard to get a sense of what's going on even without a huge sample size, just by wearing a whole lot of one resist and *zero* of the other (no buffs).

For instance, if you've got >128 of one resist and 0 of the other, and you resist any damage at all, that rules out the lowest-resist-only possibility. Analysis of the resisted/taken amounts should determine if it's still a flat % of the base damage or if it splits it somehow.

I may try to test a bit out of curiosity, and for the sake of completeness since this seems to be the only real source for woltk resistance info.