They're also Shadow Vulnerable. Gogo 5k crit without BG buffs!

Perhaps this is the answer?

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...mp=1#post993834

Curse of Shadow (and Elements) do not stack with spell penetration gear (like some +resist buffs with... other +resist buffs).

So to actually test this a person would have to wear significantly more than 75 spell penetration.

Just throwing this out there, can't personally comment on it's validity.

Interesting post there, but that would render Spell Penetration absolutely useless in raid situations - which are exactly the situations the gear was supposed to help in. It would be a waste of item budget, because to get 75 spell penetration I'd have to give up a ton of +damage, +hit, or plain ol' stats. More than would be made up for by having that much penetration, I think.

That's a bold statement, and I'd like to see damage parses from a few runs of BWL/AQ with and without curses to see if that's actually the case.

Wait, who's claiming that?

Spell penetration was added for pvp, don't be foolish.

edit: Hamlet, post 15 in http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...mp=1#post993834

But I don't raid to get PvP gear. I raid to get PvE gear. :(

Whatever the case, spell penetration not stacking with Curses would be just plain stupid. Sure I'd cast them for the 10% damage bonus, but why provide PvE raiders with a statistic on their set pieces (with mainly PvE-friendly bonuses) that has no use in PvE? It makes even less sense than I've come ot expect from the Itemization Team.

Ok, that post isn't really specifically claiming that CoS/CoE are broken, he's just tossing out possible explanations for the mysterious partial resists that were the original topic of this thread.

It seems that level-based partial resists may be what's going on. That would be silly though, since we already contend with a level-based hit roll. This one might hard to get to the bottom of.

I raid for PvE gear as well, and this is all generally annoying. I think it's clear what was going on. -resist was first implemented without the 0 cap, but the vuln procs this would allow were broken in PvP. So, a last minute change (between Test and live) capped resists at 0, making -resist useless (or at least, too situational to be worth its item budget) in PvE. However, the change came after everything was already itemized.

Not even enough penetration to make up for top-rank Shadow Protection, let alone any latent resists on Tier 1/2 equipment. I'm not sure how much spell penetration costs in the item budget, but whatever it cost, it's that much less damage, hit, crit, or int/stam.

If spell penetration ends up not stacking with curses, it's basically an item budget point sink, like Spirit on rogue gear. Take up points but don't make the player any more powerful in any meaningful (raiding) context.

If Blizzard has put in level-based partial resists the question is are we now seeing our 17% damage reduction (full resists) on a level 63 mob spread evenly out along full and partials or are partial resists stacked on top of the 17% full resists?

Spell penetration and curses not stacking wouldn't be a big issue (since the partial resists we see stem from level difference, not +resistances).

Spell penetration would be useless in PvE, plus we'd have to type shit out like "level-based partial resists". Is +hit our only friend?

Stupid game.

The thing I like about +hit gear is that it can be directly correlated to +dmg.

An item like Neltharion's tear has 44 +dmg and 2% hit. If your avg shadow bolt hits for 1000 (with decent +dmg and curse of shadows), you can pretty much say that 1% hit is worth about 10 +dmg in the long run. So the tear in essence is worth about 20 dmg more. Simple numbers rather than this lvl resist/resistance resist bullshit.

Not to mention the "mystery" that blizzard likes to apply to casters but not melee dps. Mouse over your attack power on your paper doll, and you see "Increases your dps by x". Yet they won't even do casters the courtesy of implicitly explaining how much int it takes for 1% crit on our char. sheets. Instead we get to cast a bajillion spells at the same mob to get our crit rate, a process which takes a hell of a lot longer to get the same sample size as melee classes use.

Curses do stack with -resist gear.
Simple test:
Yetis in winterspring have 120-130 frost resist. If i have -80resist from items, i get partial resists, with CoE on i get none.

Isn't frostbolt a binary spell? If so, how are you getting partial resists? Or am I misunderstanding the term "binary spell"?

frost damage wand or blizzard is not binary frost spell

Ah, that makes much more sense. Forgot about all those other frost abilities

Got a partial resist of Fireball today against Huhuran, with CoE on.

Something is up.

Way up.

http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.asp...=1&tmp=1#post15

This is the way crit is calculated on your "hover over attack icon" thing.

Basically Crit % = # Crits / # Swings

Most mods (probably including this one) caluclate it wrong...

they do: Crit % = # Crits / # Hits.

Since # hits is lower than # swings, the % appears higher.

If they'd actually calculate it this way, a 25% crit rate (with say a 10% miss rate) would give you 225 crits for every 1000 swings (or 25% of the 900 hits), when in actuality they calculate based on your swings, so a 25% crit rate woudl give you 250 crits for 1000 swings, just as long as your miss rate is between 0% and 75%.

Priest regurgitating linkspam that only marginally applies to the situation and is long since understood by all posters on the thread....

I'm guessing thought was not part of the posting process for Mr. Bulkamania.

Yes, I misread the quoted post as a "zomg crit rate!!!111" post.

I still disagree that it's something known by "all posters" when you have people posting here that still didn't understand what a binary resist is... and on top of that, you're neglecting the lurkers :P

can someone take the glancing addon posted in the rogue forums and modify it for partial resists so we can do some tests ? my skills @ lua are like -1 :)

well, my lua skills improved a lot in the last hours it seems because i think i have managed to modify the glancing hits addon to work for partial resists.

http://paradoxguild.net/gogu/resists.rar

command options :
/glancing report
/glancing reset
and i think /glacing whisper <name> or something like that.

you can change it from shadowbolt to frost bolt / firebolt very easy by editing 2 lines in the lua code.

if you find any mistakes, math beeing done wrong, please post.

I hope the original author won`t mind as I lost the link and i have no ideea what his name his.

Original author posts on the WOW forums as Billmaan. I don't believe he's on the EJ forums, nor do I have contact info.

I don't mind, but I would suggest you remove everything related to blocks, since spells can't be blocked. I suspect you'll get some very unusual results the way you have things set up now.