Vhal

Asking in its own thread, as I haven't seen much of a response in others.

This is a combat mechanic that stands to have a pretty big change to raiding mechanics in TBC, and I'm intensely curious as to if it's going to be a player-only thing or something to deal with in a PvE environment as well.

I'm sure the most common result is "I don't know", but I'm sure there's someone in beta with the knowledge necessary to run some manner of experiment to determine if it is so.

 

Phlis

Combat stats or something similar should work for testing purposes. If, over a large enough sample, your actual crit% is markedly lower then you're actual crit% then yes. Also, if you're crit damage is lower then what it should be(easy enough to calculate, pure crit and then take armor into consideration), then yes. If neither, or there exists too large a range to make conclusions, then no.

 

◊ Lactose

Arcane Shot something.

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

spronk

its almost impossible to tell atm since there is very little raiding going on with level caps still 67 (mags lair is open but doubt any progress will be made at 67 due to resists, CBs, etc). anecdotally in 5-man instances and farming mobs have not had any resilience, based on sws stats.

 

VIB

I know both Arcane Shot and Immolate do a fixed ammount of direct damage. So it should be easy to test it, if it crits for less than what it should then the mob got some resilience.

60s: Vakuia(Druid) Lokuia(Lock) Kuia(Priest) Kukuia(Hunter) Shakuia(Shaman)
@ Warsong (US PvP)

 

Abaxial

arcane shot would work as long as the AP scaling is taken into consideration =P

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...ks/Abaxial.png

 

• Maels

It's going to be terribly annoying if raid bosses have resilience; I don't think they will, but who knows.

 

Fenrus

I suspect that resilience will be PvP only. The reason I think this is because if you look at all the gear, the only stuff that has resilience is gear aquired through PvP. By making resilience gear only available through PvP, Blizzard offers pure PvPers a slight advantage over raiders who don't PvP much.

That being the case there's not much practical reason to give mobs resilience, unless they simply wanted to make them "tougher", but there's plenty of other ways to do that already.

I could be reading way too much into this though.

 

Mosh

Playing an Affliction Warlock, I think all mobs should have massive resillience ratings.

Jokes aside, I haven't noticed anything in this regard while playing beta (I've played DD builds too).

 

Kody

I don't see a problem with mobs having resilience here and there. It's a game mechanic that will affect both PvP and PvE(it's not just PvP gear in beta that has it) so I'd expect some mobs to have a resilience rating. Why exactly is that a bad thing? It's no different than the mobs with high armor, mobs immune to spells, etc.

 

Fenrus

I'm not in the Beta and I haven't been keeping up on all the new items so I have no idea if there's PvE gear with resilience. If there is indeed all sorts of non-PvP gear with resilience and there's mobs with resilience, it kind of confuses me as to what they're trying to accomplish with this new mechanic. Looking at it from a development side, what exactly does having resilience in the game do? Was players burst damage in PvE a problem from a design perspective somehow? I'm not saying having resilience in the game is a good or bad thing, just trying to understand what the point of it is I guess.

 

Krag

I hope some mobs/bosses have a heavy dose of resilience as I think it could give some variations in how you fight. I don't know nearly enough about the dps classes' optimal cycles to say if it could actually change that, but it might at least promote some classes like warlocks with dots more on certain fights.

 

Hypatia

I'd personally hope that resilience and crit chance can vary from mob to mob in BC. Stacking too much of them would be bad (OMG, the crit-immune boss! and OMG, the crits-me-all-the-time boss!) because they'll encourage carrying different item sets to deal with the problem. (i.e. you must have at least this much resilience to ride this ride.)

On the other hand, having some variation in resilience and other such features, instead of having everything based on mob level, means that more variety in specs and equipment loadouts can have an interesting impact. Not so much that switching for one fight is a no brainer, but enough that, say, a caster who specializes in massive crits might do slightly better in one fight, while a caster who specializes in consistent damage would do better in another. (I was talking with a warlock friend the other night, is why I bring up this example.) The crit-specialized caster is going to take a damage decrease against the mob that can be crit less often--their talents that increase crit damage or debuff on crit are going to be less effective, and that will be sad. On the other hand, that means the caster who focused on more consistent damage through boosts to base spell damage will be doing better (they won't do more damage, but their damage will decrease less than the person who was utterly focused on crits.)

That kind of setup would allow for the crit style to have the potential for higher DPS in the majority of situations, with lackluster DPS in a few situations, compared to the baseline style which never really *shines*, but works solidly against absolutely anything.


That's my take on it, anyway. Personally, I think that having all the percentages based on level is a little silly, but I suspect it makes things a heck of a lot easier for Blizzard to balance. But having a variety of strengths and weaknesses instead of just a variety of abilities adds versimilitude, so I'd love for more action on that front.

 

Maledict

Erm, without sounding pedantic - this talk of mobs resilience rating making non-crit builds suddenly work in encounters doesn't really match with how the game is played currently. The vast majority of mages don't choose "crit or damage" - they choose the item based on the damage over time factor it gives them. So form me, +1% to crit = +15 spell damage, and I base my item choices on that, not whether I like crit more or less than damage.

Suddenly nerfing that output on certain fights would make about as much sense as suddenly declaring a mob to take lower damage from swords & daggers so that mace rogues can shine. Nerfing other classes in their entirety just to make one talent build shine on an artifically constrained fight seems rather over the top to me. Just make affliction actually decent on it's own maybe?

 

• Maels

Exactly. I don't want to have a formula for how much my +crit is worth per boss.
Just give the boss more resistance and armor.

 

TL-Seria

Resilience works on spell damage too?

 

Lhivera

Yes, resilience works on all crits.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Fenrus

Yeah, as a special 1 time only thing a crit immune boss might be interesting, but something like that should be a novelty and not the norm. I agree that resilience shouldn't really be put on mobs. Some people might get a kick out of certain mobs being more vulnerable to builds and gear that favor constant damage over burst damage, but generally I think it would be more annoying than anything else. And anyway I'm honestly not convinced it would offer enough variability to make it interesting from a micro management standpoint "Oh those guys have high resilience, I better switch to my constant damage gear, weeee". Just my take.

 

Hypatia

Well, that's the thing from my POV: It should not be enough of a factor to make you switch builds or gear just for a fight. What it *would* do is give a bit more variety to the game.

Back in DAoC, there was a distinction between different armor and weapon types. Blunt weapons worked best against plate armor, slashing against leather, piercing against mail, etc. Because of this, my paladin who specialized in piercing weapons had a really hard time against certain mobs solo (trees, for example: highly resistant to piercing damage, extra damage against plate armor.) That was a much bigger thing than this would be, but any kind of variety like that makes things seem "more real". Verisimilitude, a seeming of truth.

In current WoW, there's one kind of distinction like this already. When I go out to farm twilight cultists in Silithus, I go for the melee guys, because protection and tank gear makes them laughably easy. The casters with the earth elementals, on the other hand, I avoid like the plague, and the boulder-throwing guys are sort of in between. (Twilight masters are laughably easy for other reasons.) Other classes and builds like killing the casters a lot more.

Right now, the division is basically between "does it do magic, melee physical, or ranged physical", and "does it have better armor, hp, or special abilities?" Having creatures with some level of resilience shouldn't mean the difference between being able to kill them or not, or choosing a spec and gear to optimally kill them. But having such enemies *would* make people a little bit less focused on such extremes of min-maxing.

And that's really precisely why I think resilience would be a good thing. Min-maxing is all well and good--we all do it, because it works. But there's also value in having the world be less clean-cut. If min-maxing is situational--not to a huge degree, but to a factor of 5-10%--then there's a larger variety of builds that are useful. Choices aren't quite so obvious and clear-cut. +1% to crit is still *about* equal to +15 spell damage, but in some fights the person who focused on crits does 5% worse, and the person who focused on spell damage does 5% better. (And the person who kept them even doesn't see much change one way or the other.) As long as the world isn't dominated by one type of fight or the other, things don't change much... except that characters are differentiated from each other just a little more.

The real place this kind of difference can be effective is not so much boss fights, where things can be *very* tight performance-wise, but on world mobs. Places where you can choose what you're going to face. "Oh hey, the fungus monsters in Zangarmarsh tend to be especially resistant to crits, the flying trees in XYZland have a normal amount of crit resistance, and the megadonkeys in Alphaville have a low amount of crit resistance."

More options, less clear-cut choices, and new different ways to minmax. (Aim your gear/talents for the type of creature that's most lucrative to farm? Or maybe go for a less popular choice, knowing that there'll be less competition.)


Anyway, that's the last I'll say on the matter.

 

Kody

Definitely. While we're at it we shouldn't have mobs that use Overpower - that really penalizes tanks that focus on dodge and avoidance. Also, we shouldn't have mobs that slow attack speed, that really detracts from the capabilities of melee dps. Oh and then there are the black dragons, fire elementals, water elementals, et al - those shouldn't be there either because they're immune to a spell type! And pfft, how about those stupid mobs that mitigate every spell school ridiculously but one, and that one is magnified substantially. Cut 'em.

Apologies for the snide tone but incase my point wasn't clear earlier, it's simply another game mechanic. We'll have to learn to deal with it, whether it be in pvp or pve. You can bet it will be used, because it's another way of designing an encounter. Who's to say it's all bad though? I could totally see an encounter that has resilience, but is weak to normal damage in such a way that they take 10% increased damage when you don't crit. Resilience on mobs doesn't seem all that bad now, does it?

Just because there's a negative about a mechanic, it doesn't mean you absolutely have to exclude a positive about it.

 

Maledict

You've changed the topic of the debate though. It's gone from "Monsters should have resilience ratings", to "unique one off encounters could use resilience like mechanics".

Big difference between the two - a mob where you couldn't crit, but normal damage was increased might be amusing as a one off. Adding the stat as a whole to the majority of bosses on the other isn't appealing for the reasons above.

Erm, none of the things you listed require a person to change their build or equipment. You simply do less damage because of them. Having resilience on bosses would effectively mean some classes need to carry 2 sets of gear around with them.
And Blizzard have already said that making mobs immune to a school of magic, like Onyxia and BWL drakes, was a mistake that they wouldn't be repeating again.

 

RK

Well, not that they made mobs immune to a school of magic. It was that they made the first three raid zones (Ony, MC, BWL) each contain large numbers of bosses immune to the same school of magic.

Just as "the crit immune boss" would be fine as a gimmick, so are "the fire-immune boss" and "the frost immune boss", but not 8 completely fire immune bosses out of the first 19 raid bosses and a raft of fire-immune and fire-resistant trash.

 

Vhal

Well, the big question is still if monsters have it...

Speaking strictly as a rogue, it matters mostly because of the impact resilience has on reducing the damage done by crits -- it impacts the balance between dagger and SS/hemo specs for rogues, as a large chunk of the damage done by daggers is raw crit bonus (a combat daggers rogue gets +40% crit rate from talents on Backstab, while a combat swords rogue gets +5% crit rate on Sinister Strike). The difference in crit rate is large enough that even small amounts of resilience on the expected target can significantly alter the balance between the two specs.

But anyway, it's a new mechanic in TBC. It may or may not exist in raids. If it does, it has ramifications for optimal raiding specs for some classes. Whining about it is silly.

 

Fenrus

My point though is that if it's simply "just another game mechanic" that the devs have added, why was it added? As I see it, you don't add a new fundamental mechanic like this without a good reason. The devs obviously saw a need for it. I originally assumed it was going to be used as a way to reign in player burst damage in PvP and would hardly ever be used in PvE, and if it was it might be for a novelty boss fight or something. I personally just don't see a reason to add it to all sorts of regular mobs. Are players killing certain mobs to fast due to burst damage? Well, just give the mobs more health or armor or resistance. Resilience just seems like a superfluous mechanic in PvE, but I do see a practical reason for it in PvP.

And I must appologize for derailing the thread somewhat. This thread's topic was simply asking if mobs in the BC Beta currently have resilience and I seem to have turned it into a debate on whether they should have resilience or not.

 

Kody

Mobs can vary a lot compared to players(though obviously resilience will be on players to varying degress too) which is the entire point of why it isn't all that bad of a mechanic to have - much less so than what people may make it out to be. And actually Maledict, some of the examples I listed DO give similar results as a mob having high resilience. A mob overpowering would completely destroy a warrior with high dodge - ultimately forcing them to have to change their gear setup some. Mobs being completely immune to a damage school force the player to completely change their playstyle and talent spec for an entire zone.

But yes, I'll agree with the initial sentiment of the thread, mobs shouldn't have resilience to any noticeable degree across the board.