I've been thinking about resilience vs defense a lot over the past few days, as it relates to tanking. As a druid, I've always had a bit of a disdain for +defense as a lot of it is wasted on us (the parry and block).

However, what I realized is that +defense is a far better stat for PvE tanking. The reason being is that it is possible to completely eliminate crits from boss mobs if you can get 5.6% (I think it's 5.6%) crit reduction. Once you've eliminated crits altogether, half of the benefit of resilience is wasted (i.e. the crit damage reduction component). On the other hand, +defense still gets you the dodge and miss chance (for a druid) and additionally parry and block (for a warrior/paladin)

For PvP, my feeling is that resilience costs too much in terms of its item budget to have a notable impact.

Has anyone determined if numbers like 4.5% crit reduction from defense, and 0.5% crit reduction from resilience would stack additively to 5.0%?

While resilience may be a stat that needs a bit more help to scale well, I think blizz did a very interesting thing in how they implemented resilience to make sure its always useful.

If you fight someone with a low crit chance, resilience takes away a large percentage of their total ability to crit. On the other hand, if you fight someone who crits you all the time, the reduction of incoming crit damage starts becoming more useful. I don't know about you guys, but solutions things like this that allow abilities to maintain usefulness over many different situations gets my motor running :P. Just my thoughts on resilience.

Resilience can lower the chance to be crit by magic damage while defense cannot. At least for a druid who has poor magic mitigation ability, Resilience, resistances, and Stamina is all that there is.

However, Resistances are far, far better than resilience per item point to mitigate magic damage as well, so....

Within the context Monsanto was talking about though, tanking, you're never going to encounter enemy spell crits (unless Blizzard have changed this mechanic recently and I've missed reports of it) so resilience is actually completely useless to mitigate magic damage.

Resists as you say would end up being better anyway though at least with resilience if crits were an issue you'd be getting mitigation against all schools of magic from one set of gear.

Where is this documented? I've seen lots of people say this but have never seen any tests or proof?

Rescillience is what will make pvpers feel that they have a chance against Tier-lololol epics pvers.

A pvp player with 200 resilience will reduce his pve geared opponent with 5% crit and 10% crit damage. this will help battle grouds be more of pvp and less farm epics...

Well, I did observe an Eye for an Eye proc while grinding ogres in Nagrand. E4E is a paladin talent that returns 30% of the damage done to you by a critical spell to its original caster. A PvP talent, since mob spells don't crit.


"Knowing" that mob spells can't crit, I checked the combat log, and found a regular spell hit from the mob for 500 damage, followed by E4E damage return of 150 (30~% of the spell's normal damage), followed by a 250~ physical crit from the mob. The spell didn't crit, but it seems that the physical crit occurring at the same time as the spell's damage made the game/server think that I was crit by a spell, and thus trigger E4E on the mob.


Just a strange thing that happened to me today. Really regret not screenshotting it.

Resilience, to me, is more of a PvP stat and secondary a tanking stat. Yes you can get more health, but crits often are what cause overkill in organised PvP.

If 3 well geared DPSers are focus firing you, stacking an extra 4k health will be useful, but if they are organised and time their damaging skills well, it won't save you. Resilience gives you that "chance" to survive what is otherwise a sure death. Thats its appeal. i.e.

Mage sheeps your other healer. Pyro's your remaining healer, just as the pyro hits the rogue uses imp KS, then the mage fire blasts and pom pyros, the rogue uses a coldblood eviscerate. Thats going to be a sizeable chunk of damage. If they all crit, you can kiss your self goodbye. 6k health or 10k health would still die if the enemy get a lucky crit streak, so really only resilience is going to save you. Of course, resilience is valuable only when you have high health. You need both.

What everyone seems to forget is itemization balance.

You take Gladiator sets, they all have the "best" stamina for that slot, now if blizzard had used the pointvalues from resilience to add agility, ap, +dmg/healing etc on them then those items would be far superior to pve epics.
However if they had simply added more stamina for those points, people with gladiator sets would be looking at huge healthpools, while people in pve gear would be still facing 8-9k max.
Hence they created resilience making the gladiator set even better for pvp, while maintaining a balanced state where a pve player can still go out to pvp from time to time and have a chance to win against the pvp players while not simple get outlasted by the sheer amount of stamina that the people with those gladiator sets would have.

As a rogue I have two sets of gear, pve dps and pvp dps. While my pvp dps is somewhat gimped on ap and hit, it actualy has more crit than my pve set. I also happen to have around 2k more health. In the 3v3 arenas I've never felt that we would've lost a game because I didn't have enough dps, it would've happened if I didn't have 12 stamina from my boot enchant or perhaps a bit less resilience. Balance is the key to everything ofcourse, you don't want to max out on "of stamina" items since that'd be as counterproductive as pvp'ing in full dps gear.

Remember, those who do not embrace the change are washed away in it's currents.
Embrace Resilience.

- Grunge

I have about 137 or so resilience myself atm. -3.5% chance to get crit and -7% crit damage.

I know I can get it up to around 300+ with arena/honor gear.

As a Warrior, being able to reduce crits by close to 10% and their damage 20% is pretty major for me. Wearing plate and reducing crits vs physical attacks, and finally having some defense against magical attacks is something I won't turn my nose up at

Resilience is to stop the PvP of old, that being who can spec crit who first for all their hp..

Someone in my guild pointed this out a while back when they patched just for the arena scoreboard fix.

Blizzard are looking to get some competitive gameplay that is not only balanced but prolonged enough tobe fit for spectators, they want a slice of the success guild wars PvP has had and they seem to have a large team dedicated to arenas completely seperate from their PvE people.

The reason resilience seems overpriced is due to thinking of pvp without healing. In any tank you need both a hp pool big enough to be healable and damage reduction to make healing more efficient and less spikey. One could argue which damage reduction stat is more efficient but of all the ones available resilience is the one that affects most types of damage which ofcourse makes it more expensive than more efficient but specialised stats like ac or dodge or resistance items.

For me as warrior every pvp item ive upgrades so far has resilience and high stamina. So usually they go hand in hand. I reckon 12stam is indeed a far better, and probably cheaper gem unless you server has halaa action all day (we sure dont). Overal I found it hard to actually feel the difference in incoming damage by having 0 compared to 100 resilience. But overall im guessing once you get focussed by warrior/warrior/rogue and shaving there lethality/cruelty talent off is pretty sweet.

oh and also a pretty common misstake when thinking about resilience.

Say I got -5% chance to get a crit against me (~198 resilience)
a evil fire mage got
20% chance to crit me

that will reduce my chance to get a critted by 25%, NOT 5%. And 100% of those will do ~10% less damage. That's significant as you stack it up.

(numbers favored more for easy math than realistic values)

If +crit was a cheap stat that was easy to stack then resilience would be a bad stat but turns out crit is pretty expensive aswell!

Oh, thread necromancy. That explains my confusion ...

No it can't. There's been too many cases of an employee of Blizzard being wrong (either through lack of knowledge, or a bug) when it comes to game mechanics to believe them. I still vividly remember arguing with a GM over the fact that Onyxia had been made immune to Mind-Numbing poison, while he claimed that though previously the debuff landed on her it never actually had any effect. Right, that's why I could mess with the healers' timings at will.

If a developer says something can't happen, I'll mostly believe it until I see it. Anyone else and I'll remain a skeptic.

If you were to hypothetically fight a fire mage with 20% crit with zero resilience versus enough resilience to reduce his crit by 5%, on average you would see him getting 25% less criticals with the latter setup.

5% is a quarter of that mage's crit rate

e:

Or for example, if you had -5% to crit and I was meleeing you - and I have like 4% melee crit - you'd never get crit by me therefore you've reduced my crit rate by 100%. Makes sense?

Although I don't think this is the right way to think about it - people who rely heavily on crits will naturally have higher crit rates and won't be affected by resilience all that much. In my example - even if you did decrease my crit chance by 100% is it really going to make such a difference? I think not.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I'm still on my first cup of coffee for the day. :S

All this means is that resilience usefullness is entirely dependent on your opponents. It is possible that in certain situations it will be almost useless for you.

Unless stacked in massive amounts it will have little effect on those opponents with high crit rates. Like you pointed out, I imagine it will have the largest blow against classes with low crit rates that hit for large amounts (mages, destruction warlocks, etc.)


Again, resilience is best used in conjunction with healing. In all, I would still rather have more stamina, crit, or spell damage... unless they bumped its value by around 25-50%.

Resilience is mitigation, and mitigation is key for healing throughput. I really appreciate -10% damage to every cb->evisc, shatter proc, or crit backstab. Even if it's really visible with the "naked eye" it still makes a huge difference.

I think a lot more math needs to be done to really understand the true value of resilience, as a stat in competative arena. Math that I'm certainly not capable of doing. But healing needs to be taken into account, because when I'm tanking an arena I'll get spammed with tens of thousands of points of healing over the course of a game.

Theres two ways arena matches between two good teams end up going, from what I've seen.

One team crits a bunch of things at once, and someone gets bursted down while healers still have mana.

One target gets spammed with heals until the healers are all out of mana at which point people start dieing.

How effective is resilience at preventing damage spikes? I don't know. But stamina only helps when you're fully topped off. This is probably pretty hard to model or do math for. But, critting many things in a few seconds is a pretty unlikely occurance and -7% crit makes it even more unlikely. The less likely you are to get instantly double windfuried down the better able you are to survive till your healers run out of mana.

How effective is resilience at reducing the amount of damage you take, thus saving your healers mana thus making them run out of mana slower over the course of a game? No clue. But it's certainly better than stamina for this, since it actually lowers the damage you take rather than just giving your healers a bigger cushion.

Not sure if you get enough benefit per point or not. But it has significant effects that stamina does not, when you consider how much healing the tank will take in a 5 minute arena game. Looking at it in a 1v1 context isn't really looking at it's purpose.