I recently got a mod that compliments Theorycraft, GLOCK, which is - supposedly - showing resistance on mobs. After a few rounds in Naxxramas with it, it seems that almost all the bosses in there (That I have access to atm) has around 150+ fire resistance.
I know spell penetration has been deemed useless in many cases, but this trend in boss resistance suggest it really isn't that bad. I'm getting Theorycraft reports of -10 resistance adding up to 40 dmg on average on lots of boss fights and trash in Naxxramas.
ATM I'm rolling with -63 resistance w/ gear/talents, but I cant really decide on whether to get more, or if im just being misled by a silly mod.
Edit: Should add my question...... Why are people deeming it useless? Is the mod just misleeding me?
Since 1.11 there has been a "bug" that no longer distinguishes between a spell miss (used to be white resist) and a full elemental resist (yellow resist).
Supposedly this was a "bug" that was introduced with elemental precision, and I don't know if this affects non-mage spells like the shadow/holy tree.
Having said that I do certainly get plenty of partial resists in Naxx with fire spells even with CoE and -40 resists (-30 from gear and -10 from talents) and the value glock reports for resist level of bosses (all seems to be at 100+) seems high even after assuming that it's counting spell misses as full elemental resists and factoring in ~26 built in lvl based resistance of lvl 63 bosses.
I haven't played with diff. gear set up yet to test whether spell penetration makes much difference though, since we've been pretty focused on getting the bosses down.
There's this strange idea floating around that bosses in Naxx have around 150 shadow/frost resist. This is basically being spread by people that don't understand how to interpret GLOCK resists. The OP says he's seeing around 150 fire resist from Faerlina with -63 spell penetration gear on. This is because GLOCK doesn't take into account the approximately 20 resist that all level 63 mobs will have against a level 60 player. CoE = 75, OP's gear = 63, innate resist for level 63 mob = 20.
75+63+20 = 158 which is the number GLOCK will spit out as Faerlina's resist. No matter how much spell penetration gear you put on, the innate 20 resist that lvl 63 mobs have will be there. GLOCK sees that you're still getting partial resisted so it assumes that the mob must have 20 more resist than CoE, CoS, and your spell penetration gear add up to.
When I first started Naxx, the first five easy bosses, I didn't have any spell penetration gear and GLOCK would invariably show a boss's resists as between around 90-105 depending on how lucky I got with partial resists. Started wearing doomcaller robe and suddenly the reported resists by GLOCK jump by 20. The mob's resists weren't changing, the spell penetration of my gear was, and GLOCK tries to take that into account.
There may be boss mobs with higher than 75 resist in Naxx, but I haven't seen them in the first eight yet.
I wish they would bring back negative resists only achieveable from -resist on gear. It would actully make this stat worth getting and wouldn't be entirely overpowered due to the few items that have it
I wish they would bring back negative resists only achieveable from -resist on gear. It would actully make this stat worth getting and wouldn't be entirely overpowered due to the few items that have it
Kulz explained the pseudo high-resist phenomenon well enough that I want to go into a quick tangent.
Spell Penetration gear is weighted extremely low in the itemization formula. If raid bosses had greater than 75 resistances, you would find that Don Rodrigro's Band outperforms nearly any other ring (Swarming Thought would be even crazier) and Rune of Perfection would be one of the best trinkets in the game. This is because bringing a mob from 20 Resistance to 0 Resistance increases your long term DPS by approximately 5%.
Allowing current SP items to grant vulnerability bonuses (which is essentially parallel to the 5% increase to sustained DPS, albeit a lot more "spikey") would require a massive readjustment of SP gear similar to what +Def received. Spell penetration would have to be cut by 2/3rds across the board for it to remain in line with current caster itemization.
5+63+20 = 158 which is the number GLOCK will spit out as Faerlina's resist. No matter how much spell penetration gear you put on, the innate 20 resist that lvl 63 mobs have will be there. GLOCK sees that you're still getting partial resisted so it assumes that the mob must have 20 more resist than CoE, CoS, and your spell penetration gear add up to.
Thanks for ensuring I didn't waste my time with this mod. Wow, what a terrible algorithm for calculating resists. Sure, you can't be certain between resist-score "resists" and miss ones, but that is just a bad algorithm period.
As we know from http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...sistances.html you only see a higher than 1% full-resist rate on partially resistable spells at _extremely_ high levels of resistance(somewhere higher than 180 if you convert that table to level 60). So, I would probably just calculate assuming any full resists over 1% are due to misses and otherwise calculate partials in to determine the score.
If someone can figure out the formula for dividing a given resist rate into the partial categories, you could probably write something a bit more accurate, but I don't really think it's important for such a mod to be accurate over a 180 resist score.
Anyway, it cant be weighted that low in the itemization formula, atleast when comparing the faerlina neck and the one from vek'nilash
It can't? Faerlina's neck gets +1dmg, +3stats, and +13 spell penetration for -1%crit. That's uh, a lot of stuff. Of course, it's also 2 itemlevels higher. Considering that 13SP is a 2.6% dps increase on a mob with at least 13 resistance, that seems pretty consistent to me, since you'd need a lot more than 1% crit to get a 2.6% dps increase.
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
SAncus, the point is is that there is no worthwhile mob in the game where the spell penetration *actually* gives the extra damage, hence making it a pointless stat at any price.
In my experiance spell penetration does mitigate the innate 15-20 spell resists of lvl63 mobs for binary spells due to their single roll for resist. I have 10%hit and 20 penetration and my average resist rate for frostbolt is 7% over tens of thousands of casts against lvl63 targets.
For fire spells however penetration simply does nothing.
I was recently commenting in the wow mage forums about fire vs frost dps and dpm. On paper scorch has higher dpm and dps then frostbolt (assuming the uber pve specs 17/31/3 and 28/0/23 respectively). However once you take into account the slight casting delay between each spell and the reduced damage of scorch from the lvl63 mobs frostbolt actually out dps' scorch while slightly less dpm. For a horde mage that is.
SAncus, the point is is that there is no worthwhile mob in the game where the spell penetration *actually* gives the extra damage, hence making it a pointless stat at any price.
For raids, I agree with you, though its easily possible that some raid mobs may have resists now or in the future. For example, given he's probably not immune, I'd expect Sapphiron to have *some* frost resist. That aside, though, not all raid items are optimal pve items. PvP toys abound for the simple sake of variety and the fact that not every mob you are going to nuke is going to be a level 63 boss mob.
Originally Posted by xyruul
In my experiance spell penetration does mitigate the innate 15-20 spell resists of lvl63 mobs for binary spells due to their single roll for resist. I have 10%hit and 20 penetration and my average resist rate for frostbolt is 7% over tens of thousands of casts against lvl63 targets.
In my experience Frostbolt completely ignores the level-based resist scores entirely, which is indeed a small advantage for it. However the benefit of a Fire mage is not Scorch dps, that's a minor point. Rolling ignites and the ability to trade decreased DPM for much higher dps by using Fireball is the point - and you end up with considerably higher dps.
I've never heard of someone switching to Fire and not seeing much higher dps on every fight they participate in. An in-a-vacuum comparison of scorch vs frostbolt is fairly meaningless.
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
Yes, frostbolt definitely doesn't have the innate level resist that non-binary spells do - or if it does, it's not noticeable through parsing atall, as I've parsed every boss in BWL multiple times and never noticed it.
Level based partial resists definitely do seem an oddity of coding that is from an earler era of the game, given that they are unnaffected by any gear, only affect non-binray spells, and there's no indication anywhere on Blizzards site that they even exist.
Nejyn - think you were just unlucky there, our fire mages don't report increased resists on any AQ40 boss at all.
Final point to Sancus - that would bve fine, were the - to resists stat on pvp toys. But it isn't, it's on our very best supposed PvE gear. UNlike every other class, the item budget has yet again been wasted on tier 3 gear and equivalents, because some points are spent on a pointless stat. Tier 3 is, for other classes, some of the most effective gear you can get, whilst ours wastes points on spell penetration again. That's fine on the AQ stuff, which is supposed to be for alternate situations, but not in Naxx.
Int is useful for trash mob healing and for raising spell crit % for Inspiration. It's not great, but it has uses for healing - Kaubel can explain it better than me there though. It's at least of *some* use compared to spell penetration, which reamins pointless in all forms for PvE beyond MC and the Gauntlet in BWL as far as we can tell...
I've never heard of someone switching to Fire and not seeing much higher dps on every fight they participate in. An in-a-vacuum comparison of scorch vs frostbolt is fairly meaningless.
Some mage on my server went down on patchwerk dps when he went fire, he used to pull 700+ dps as frost, wearing the imba 2% dmg to undead set.
Priest Tier 3 set still has a bunch of points wasted in int, which really doesn't do much more for raid healing than spell penetration does.
I don't know about you, but I'd feel uncomfortable in a lot of fights without ~7k mana buffed.
I have very limited Naxx experience, but before that the only boss I can think of is Huhuran as a PoH spammer. Buffing would be kinda annoying, but boss mana management would be pretty trivialized if you took about 3k mana off the pool and turned it into 200 spirit (or 100 spirit and 40 mp5).
I've never heard of someone switching to Fire and not seeing much higher dps on every fight they participate in. An in-a-vacuum comparison of scorch vs frostbolt is fairly meaningless.
Some mage on my server went down on patchwerk dps when he went fire, he used to pull 700+ dps as frost, wearing the imba 2% dmg to undead set.
600 tr 650 as frost is about the avg for pro gear and avg crit rate on patchwerk. That's what i avg and i'm consistently our highest dps. I did all the math on fire, and got all giddy about the rolling ignites along with timed combustion and pi's for increased ignite dmg again... so our other pro dps mage and i switched to 17/31/3 build to try it out for a week.
I just typed a giant example from most bosses in nax/aq, but i removed it to make it simpler. Suffice it to say I had to use more mana pots and did less damage on most bosses except the super short bosses where i could spam fireball or the ones that we killed right after i got in another combustion/pi/wtfbbqignite stack. It actually looked worse when you factored in both our damage vs both our old damage.
I could see how 5-6 fire mages with coordinated pi's/combustion could be a significant dps increase, but the loss of utility from pom/iceblock/impdampen/amplify and 4%aecrit or 6%mana and 150armor doesn't quite justify it. If we had paladins it would be a totally different story.
I still have yet to compare the amount of damage loss from crits landing after the 5 ignite stack compared to the free damage you get from keeping it up.
If partial resists could be mitigated with spell penetration fire would be worth it imo.
Lastly i have done fights in aq20 were we had no coe, and noticed a decidedly increased resist rate for frost. Hence why i assumed you can mitigate it rather then it just being non-existant.
Yes, frostbolt definitely doesn't have the innate level resist that non-binary spells do - or if it does, it's not noticeable through parsing atall, as I've parsed every boss in BWL multiple times and never noticed it.
Level based partial resists definitely do seem an oddity of coding that is from an earler era of the game, given that they are unnaffected by any gear, only affect non-binray spells, and there's no indication anywhere on Blizzards site that they even exist.
Nejyn - think you were just unlucky there, our fire mages don't report increased resists on any AQ40 boss at all.
Final point to Sancus - that would bve fine, were the - to resists stat on pvp toys. But it isn't, it's on our very best supposed PvE gear. UNlike every other class, the item budget has yet again been wasted on tier 3 gear and equivalents, because some points are spent on a pointless stat. Tier 3 is, for other classes, some of the most effective gear you can get, whilst ours wastes points on spell penetration again. That's fine on the AQ stuff, which is supposed to be for alternate situations, but not in Naxx.
I dont agree with that really. FF only has about 23 -resist on it. 13 of this are on the robes which is overbudget anyways and the best item in the slot AFAIK. The bracers are kinda crappy considering the alternatives available out there but that's about it. Even if you had both pieces -23 resist would not be very unreasonable to have if you pvp'd at all.
We're not just talking about Frostfire though - although again, as a pure PvE set, it shouldnt have any of it on it. There's all the other stuff that has spell penetration on it as well.
I still maintain that its working differently on the internal servers than the live ones, because I can't understand how they could be satisfied with a stat that does absolutely nothing in PvE...
We're not just talking about Frostfire though - although again, as a pure PvE set, it shouldnt have any of it on it. There's all the other stuff that has spell penetration on it as well.
I still maintain that its working differently on the internal servers than the live ones, because I can't understand how they could be satisfied with a stat that does absolutely nothing in PvE...
remember when Arcanist gave 9 million mana and very little +dmg? Blizzard is slow like that. I agree with you though as far as penetration being useless. Maybe when we finally dont even have ONE warlock available to raid it may be useful (not too far right now, many nights we just have one >.< ).
If the "two warlocks is optimal" thing continued to get worse, then I could definatly see sometimes not having CoE being an actual problem. 1.12's lifetap change should help a lot with that, though.
Well as useless as spell penetration maybe in PvE today, it's quite possible that blizzard knows about the non-working as intended behavior and are lazy about fixing it.
Given the way they seem to handle alot of mechanics changes, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they stealth changed the level based resist mechanics in a patch somewhere.
Has anyone tested to see if spell penetration gear works to mitigate level based innate elemental resists on 1.12 PTR?
08/05/06, 5:14 AM
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