Resilience mitigating 1.67 times 'intended' crit dmg reduction
 

I am trying to bring attention to this issue, so I am cross-posting it on a few forums.

Summary: Resilience is affecting skills that add additional damage on crits more than would seem intended, such as +100% critical strike damage for all frost spells in the case of a frost mage. As an ap/frost mage, 433 resilience was found to reduce my crits by a factor of 35% during brief testing (37% in calculations provided by Werdner) instead of the 22% reduction indicated by the 433 resilience tool tip. Other classes will not see the 167% increase in reduction, but a 150% increase is very common in other classes/builds -- see Werdner's post for details.

Here are the relevant threads:

My original post:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...616839&sid=1#0

Werdner's excellent elaboration of the "bug" on the bug reports forum:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...630017&sid=1#0

Some additional discussion:
http://www.worldofming.com/forums/vi...er=asc&start=0

After doing a few Arenas today, I noticed the crit damage reduction part of Resilience working more than the advertised ~15% (I have 310 resilience), it was more like 30%.

I'm pretty sure that resilience mitigates prior to talents that increase a crit's damage, so that the increased damage from the talent is applied after the base resilience modifies the value.

Example:

Lets assume the target has 394 resilience, giving him 10% less chance to be crit and 20% less damage taken from crits.

Using a warlock and shadowbolt as an example, assume the warlock's shadowbolt hits for 1000 damage non-crit. Without ruin a crit will do 1500 damage. With ruin the crit will do 2000 damage.

A crit shadowbolt without ruin will therefore do: 1200 damage after resilience.

If the resilience was applied after the ruin bonus:
A crit shadowbolt with ruin would do 1600 damage (2000 base and 20% less from resilience).

What you are seeing is that with resilience applied prior to the ruin bonus, that shadowbolt is doing 1500 damage then reduced to 1200 damage. The crit bonus is only 200 points now, and it is then doubled with ruin, boosting the shadowbolt up to 1400 damage.

1400 / 2000 = 70%, or resilience removing 30% of the damage done.

I need to do in game tests to verify this, but according to your sample size it explains it completely accurately and the 30% value matches.

Edit: Well, your example used 22% reduction, but to see how this compares, take the tool-tip reduction value and multiply it by 150%.

20% tool-tip resilience becomes 30% active resilience when there is a talent that doubles crit damage.

22% tool-tip resilience becomes 33% active resilience when there is a talent that doubles crit damage.

Second Edit: On re-reading your post, I don't think I'm really stating anything you didn't already know, I'm just math crafting with easier numbers to show that your statement matches up. Also I think 150% resilience increase will be much more common than 167% which was the case as an ice mage.

Yep, Werdner posted the formula for how the resilience is currently working. As resilience increases among all classes, ap/frost mages will get weaker much more rapidly than say...an affliction warlock, warrior, or rogue.

But we have Impale! LOL

They do need to do something for dots at some point.

Added resilience and stamina makes DoTs disproportionately powerful. It's a bit sad for me that as gear gets better, I become less and less effective at pvp (my gear is improving directly proportionately to everyone else's).

While resilience doesn't affect DoTs I believe the intended purpose of resilience is to slow down burst damage so it is healable and PvP fights are able to be drawn out, thus becoming matches of endurance, more than just quick burst fights.

By reducing crits it is serving that purpose.

Also it actually does indirectly lower the typical damage output of DoT classes because when a DoT user is subbing out +spell damage gear for stamina/resilience gear it means that their DoTs are significantly weaker. In full spell damage gear a DoT user could easily achiever 1200+ damage to their shadow spells, however in resilience gear this number seems to be closer to ~600 unbuffed.

It's very difficult to find a comfortable medium where dot damage and burst damage are balanced against each other. That point is past at least 200 resilience, possibly more. What's unsettling is how the balance is very forcibly changing itself as better gear becomes the standard. Essentially, rogues and ice mages are either very overpowered in pve gear, or underpowered in resilience gear. I'm leaning torwards the former, to be fair, but they can't just scale up resilience indefinitely.

I would argue, however, that the inflated stamina numbers already take care of this to a large extent. As classes stack more stamina to survive the bursts of crit damage, thier spell power goes down. Adding in the levels of resilience that people are routinely getting now makes arenas increasingly punishing to classes the rely healvily on crits, while boosting the power of classes that are capable of dealing high-sustained damage.

As a rogue, I'm not sure exactly what to do against opponents with 200+ resilience and 10k+ hp (any warlock out there). My damage has already been shot by the lack of AP on pvp gear, and my crit is very quickly eaten by resilience.

I completely understand Bliz's reasons for wanting to extend the matches in pvp, but their method--simply removing spikes from the damage curves--leaves classes with moderate constant damage and high spike damage in a bad place.

My solution would be to re-value stamina to a higher cost. As a rogue I really shouldn't be sitting on 10-11k hp in my pvp gear.

Not really, you're missing the point of both stats.

Stamina gives you a larger buffer of health before dying and also increases your danger area of around 20%-30% so instead of only having to burn through 1,000-2,000 health you have to burn through 2,000-3,500+.

Resilience increases how long it takes you to reach that point, and also gives your healers a longer period of time to catch up to healing, you could have 15,000 health and only 20 resilience and you'll still die because everyones critting you.

Nobody says you have to get 10,000 health, go put DPS gems and enchants on instead of Stars of Elune and such, of course, you probably don't want to die when you have 7,000 health then. ;)

Yes, DoT users are losing damage by acquiring sta/res. However, other classes are doing the same. Arguably, warriors and paladins do not need as much resilience as other classes. But, I digress. This is a bit off topic.

I am trying to focus on how resilience's current formula is disproportionately scaling different classes and talent builds. A warrior or rogue's crit damage is reduced by 22-23% while is ap/frost mage's is reduced by 37% when facing 433 resilience. Yes, classes that rely on crits will be affected by resilience more, but I am trying to focus on the fact that classes and builds that rely on crit dmg bonus talents are becoming disproportionately weaker as resilience levels increase.

My concern is that the balance points at 0 resil, 200 resil, and 400 resil are far apart due to how resilience is calculated. At what resilience level is Blizzard balancing he game?

At all levels. If you ran into someone with BT gear you'd better hope to fucking god you have a lot of resilience because if you don't that guy is going to crit your face off. As PVE gear gets substatially stronger in terms of 'Damage per Spell/Attack' and Crit chance the PVP gear will need to scale enough to reduce the gap in defensive/offensive ability that each set of gear has. This is what they're trying to achieve with resilience.

It feels like they've got a good balance going between arena teams. After getting 200+ resilience I no longer felt like a liability. In fact, all of last night I didn't get touched. In 10 games the other teams never focussed on me. I think my armoury profile gets scanned a lot.

However, since raiding gear is few and far between right now the balance is totally out of whack. Guys wearing even the best PVE gear from the toughest bosses which have been downed can't match up to the high stamina/resilience of a top arena gladiator. I don't expect we'll see a significant buff to another tier of arena gear until Hyjal is on farm status by the average raiding guild.

To me that is not out of whack at all. I don't want to be forced to PvE to PvP. The best PvP gear should come exclusively from PvP. As someone with limited time on their hands I cannot be good at both PvP and PvE. Being able to focus on one aspect of the game is a good thing for me. Imagine if downing Illidan required gear you could only get if you had a 2200 arena rating. People would be pissed. The reverse, however, was the norm until BC. That was out of whack.

The point that I was making was that with the current resilience formula, the balance point cannot be the same at all levels, as balance between classes shifts as resilience values change. You could almost say that resilience is "weighted" to weaken non-DoT casters as resilience increases.

this seriously can t be intended, resilience being up to 1.67 more effective against an spellpower/iceshards mage than against a deep fire mage...
resilience needs to be applied after modifiers, it s bad enough as it is that certain classes are barely affected by this stat...