So over the course of normal questing and grinding I've run into some warrior-type mobs who I swear have high resilience (the Shadow Council Deathsworns in Nagrand as an example). It could have just been really bad luck, but it sure seemed like the pieces fit for resilience. As a frost mage they were quite a bit harder to kill and it got me thinking about the consequences in PVP. And I'm scared.

But it's not just frost mages that should be worried. Any class (or spec) that relies heavily on crits to succeed in PVP could stand to have quite a reality check - depending on the impact resilience has. So lets get a discussion going and hammer out some unknowns.

- First off, how stackable will resilliance be? If someone went all out with it, would it be almost impossible to crit them?

- Even if it's possible, would it be worth it overall? I know there has been a little discussion here about resilience's value in an overall sense, and some (Mist) have discounted it as not worth it. I can certainly see the reasoning behind wanting stam over resilience as it defends against all classes, not just the crit dependant ones.

- Another thing to consider is PVE. Frost mages can attest - when you don't crit it takes much longer to get the job done. Resilience could be an alternative to stacking more hit points on a boss to prolong an encounter.

Anyway, chime in, maybe tell me my fears are unwarranted and not based in reality. Because really - I don't want to go arcane. :)

I think another good additional question to ask is how does resilliance crit mitigation get determined?

Resilliance was stated to reduce the damage you take on crits, does this count towards AC mitigation? If a tank is at 75% mitigation does this effectively not work because you can't mitigate further or does it still help crit mitigation on top of the AC mitigation? (i.e. are they considered separate stats and do they stack? If they do stack is it multiplicative, additive, or independent of each other?)

Resilience is an interesting problem for sure. As is this item mod seems *by far* to be overpriced for what it does Especially since the reported conversion at 70 is 40 resilience for 1% less crit 2% less damage from crits. I am just not sure who this

40 resilience has the same impact on item budget as 60 stamina. You can also get superior mitigation from item budget in parry/dodge/defense.

I dunno it is a pretty puzzling stat right now. I do find it odd that they are stacking the PVP gear with resilience though since in almost all cases it seems like Stacking Stamina would have superior returns.

For reference, the Gladiator's Battlegear 5 piece arena set has 144 resilience before sockets. Add in 6 +10 resilience gems and it's up to 204. At level 70 conversions that's 5.1% less chance to be crit and 10.2% less damage from crits. Certainly not game breaking, but that's only 5 pieces.

I can't believe it's 40 rating for 1%/2%. Even just looking at the gems for comparisons that dramatically overprices resiliences.
From a simple minded point of view, it should be 'worth' just much to mitigate something as it is to gain it. The equal level crit rating to 5 resiliece is 4. Just a simple bit of math shows you the ratings don't add up, even factoring in the added damage reduction on crits.

As is, if what is the current received wisdom is correct, than as an item value investment Resilience is appalingly bad.

Resilience is an excellent pvp stat, especially against classes that rely heavily on crits for damage.

This point is argued well by Ming in this article. He concludes that in a rogue v rogue situation, resilience is actually the most bang for your buck in terms of itemization cost. In an attached spreadsheet, he compares two mutilate rogues hitting each other, one with +0 resilience and one with +316 resilience. He finds that the zero-resilience rogue needs an additional 700AP or 350 crit rating to hit as hard as he is being hit.

If we compare three epic PVP gems:
[Sublime Mystic Dawnstone]
[Smooth Ornate Dawnstone]
[Bold Ornate Ruby]
We see have a choice of, 10 resilience, 10 crit rating, or 20 AP.

But in terms of pvp utility for the rogue-rogue scenario: 1 resil = 1.42 crit = 2.22 AP (from 316r = 450cr = 700ap)
So the utility/cost of these gems (higher is better):
Resilience Gem: 10
AP Gem: 9
Crit Gem: 7

This makes resilience the most valuable stat per itemization cost (in this particular rogue-rogue calculation). Don't ignore resilience if you plan to PVP; it is one of the most useful stats you can have. Its an excellent way to provide distinction between PVE and PVP sets and will finally help to specialize the effectiveness of PVP gear for PVP and PVE gear for PVE (for dps classes).

That ming article seems a mess to me.

Considering 316 resilience equates to 474 stamina I REALLY doubt we will ever see a rogue where 474 stamina does provide far greater than an 11.25% increase to hp.

Stamina is king, embrace it.

I think any mage with shatter or any rogue using backstab doesn't have too much to worry about. You are still going to break 50% (easily for the mage) crit, where as fire mages and sword/mutilate rogues will be hit far harder as losing 5% from 20% hurts far more than losing 5% from 60%. Combine this with things like Molten armour and the various talents such as the druid one (forget the name) that reduces melee opponents crit rate by 5%, and you are looking at situations like feral druids being virtually unkillable by melee.

This is probably going to hurt warriors most of all due to rage mechanics, crit reliant talents like Flurry and Impale/deep wounds, and not having the highest natural crit rate (especially in stamina heavy pvp gear).

On top of all that, to get this item you have to score 500 PvP kills around Halaa, which could take anywhere from days to impossible depending on the server.

Could you edit the thread title to the proper spelling of 'resilience' please? It's hurting my eyes.

edit: Thank you!

Druid's survival of the fittest is 3%, though druids are often unkillable by melee in bear form even without any resilience.

I don't think it's that cut and dry though, the gear with resilience already has heaps of stamina on it, and if I'm not mistaken, the cost of a stat on a given piece of equipment increases (exponentially?) after a certain point. If that is in fact true, I don't think it's valid to argue 316 resilience versus 474. As far as longevity is concerned, resilience may be the next best stat to stamina.

Also, wouldn't there be a certain hp 'cap' where incoming damage in arenas cannot kill you faster than a healer can land heals? (in other words assume a scenario where you have 11k hp, the opposing team can only output 7.5kdmg every 5 seconds and your healer(s) can heal you for 5.5k every 5 seconds)

In that scenario wouldn't it be better to stack resilience instead of stamina to make it easier on your healers mana pool?

This is discounting 1v1 and situations where you have no heals incoming of course.

EDIT: I just had a thought. It would be interesting if they added an effect to resilience to increase the chance heals have to crit when cast on you.

Also the fact that at least as a sword rogue rogue vs rogue fights are all about who gets the opener, maybe I usually outgear my oppenents but with cheap shot, 5 sec gouge, 4-5 sec kidney + blind + another cheap shot and any rogue oppenent is usually dead, usually even before the blind. If blind is on cooldown I just vanish and do cheap shot again so this is almost always the same scenario.

From what I saw having a trinket with something like -30 resilience (Runed Fungalcap) at around L62 it seemed quite costy, was only about 1.5% crit and -2% crit damage. While I have another blue trinket, Bladefist Breath, has 26 crit rating which was about 2% more crit chance. Id rather have the crit chance which is useful in all scenarios besides when I lose the opener against another rogue and get stun locked since thats usually gg there anyway.

While that would be a fun stat, that would give the stat more PVE implications when it's primarily a PVP stat. Right now the only real pve use is for bear druids to achieve crit immunity. I don't think Blizzard intends it to be much of a PVE stat.

It would be pretty sweet to have it as a pve stat to stock up on to keep up inspiration/ancestral fortitude and give paladins more free heals.

From what I was reading about WoW Alpha/Beta +healing on gear used to work like this. For example a warrior would want to stack +heal and +crit heal on his gear because it affected his incoming heals. Seems that since it was once in game and isn't anymore the designers made a conscious decision to not do things like this, for whatever reason. I think it makes more sense anyway, as to have a workable situation you have to have a good healer and a good tank, as opposed to just one uber warrior who can tank anything with anyone healing him.

I couldn't stop laughing when I saw that on the vendor. I linked it in guild chat and mentioned the cost, someone said "well... maybe they left out a zero?"

Well that one's a bit of an honest mistake... It's certainly exhausting to reach exalted with most factions. So, the hybridization of those 2 words is quite descriptive. :-)

But on a much more serious note, and staying somewhat on topic, has anyone done measurement of resilience on mobs? Anecdotal evidence (my own and others) definitely points to the presence of some resilience on certain mobs, especially some of the warrior/rogue style mobs in some of the humanoid camps in Terokkar.

More interestingly, has anyone noticed the effects of resilience on bosses? It'd be great to put together a list of bosses that potentially have resilience on them and then actually test it out. Considering that it's possible to stack crit rating pretty obscenely now, I'd expect Blizzard to start mitigating this by adding resilience. (If I did the calculations right, it's possible to build a set that's at about 45% crit for a mage. I can link to my post on the subcreation forums that lays this out.)

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=9163

And keep in mind that you may be seeing: high defense, high resilience, high "anti-crit" (ie, no corresponding crit damage reduction), or something else. It wouldn't be easy to test.

EDIT: nevermind, it's easy enough to prove that it isn't resilience

Shouldn't it be rather trivial to find out whether a mob has resilience by hitting it with a static damage spell until it crits?

For warriors it's trivial, BT them until you have a crit, if it's less than 200% ... and that was never the case for me.

Increasing the chance a heal has to crit on you by ~8% (at 316 resilience) is a far cry different than a warrior being able to gear himself up in +1000healing. Yes it still effects ALL incoming heals but is hardly game-breaking.

Putting a tree druid with appropriate +spi gear in the warrior group accomplishes something very similar to what they considered overpowered and removed from beta.


As for it having more of a PvE impact I disagree. Relying on crits in PvE is asking for disaster. In PvP it can mean the difference between getting that second heal off which ultimately wins the battle because the other teams burst damage failed, and not being able to get off a second heal because the burst damage killed the intended target.

Arena matches won't be endurance fights. Burst healing is favorable to sustainability (in most cases). An exception being fighting a stacked paladin group which would obviously be a battle of attrition.

Problem is that thread is over 2 months old, and who knows what changed since early-mid beta to currrent release. Plus, from my cursory read of the thread, it's all suppostion and kvetching about whether people need to carry resilience gear. Not incredibly useful information.

As far as I know defense doesn't affect magic damage crits. I could be wrong, but I thought defense was purely a melee stat. As far as I know, there aren't many passive or activatable abilities that exclusively reduce critical strike damage. Resilience's mechanism seems pretty distinctive.

Well, all I have is anecdotal information. Some of the blood elf mobs in NE Terokkar seemed to take as much as 100-200 or so less damage from frostbolt
crits, which could just be a low roll, but it seemed unusual. But frostbolt doesn't have very static damage and is a poor choice for this sort of thing.

I suppose Arcane Missiles would be a pretty good test, but you'd probably want the improved version so you could nuke the mobs without worrying about interruption. At some point maybe I'll respec and grab a healbot and run a few thousand casts of arcane missiles on some mobs I suspect of having resilience and see what comes out. I'd probably need to do a few thousand casts against mobs that I know do not have resilience (probably old-world elites would be a good choice...) to find out what my base crit rate and damage are for the spell.

If/when I get any results, I'll be sure to share. Can't promise anything though, got some grinding to do. (4 more levels to go!)