Many people complain about resilience not affecting DoTs and other non-crit damage. Some argue that resilience is just to stop spike damage in the form of crits, while others argue it's supposed to slow down PvP combat in general.

I think a very real solution to the "problem" is just to rework resilience to be equal to the paladin talent Blessed Life (which is a 10% chance to reduce damage taken by 50%).

Converted it could look like this:
Old: 1% reduced chance to be crit, 2% reduced damage from crits.
New: 1% chance to take 48% damage from an attack. (That covers both aspects, the increased mitigation when it occurs and the proc rate/occurence).

Old: 5% reduced chance to be crit, 10% reduced damage from crits.
New: 5% chance to take 40% damage from an attack.

Old: 10% reduced chance to be crit, 20% reduced damage from crits.
New: 10% chance to take 30% damage from an attack.

In regards to DoTs it could perform the check per tick of the DoT (I believe resistance works like this currently for partial resists). If the check was done at the start of the DoT and persisted through it, the DoT class could simply recast the DoT as soon as they saw it was a reduced damage DoT. Performing the check on each tick means that this wouldn't occur.

Also the effect could be calculated after all other modifiers, so if an attack would have crit, and this new resilience went into effect, it would effectively cancel out the previous crit plus a little extra.

What are other thoughts/opinions?

As one of the 'resilience is for spike damage' proponents, I'd completely disagree with that form of it. It'd reopen the possibilities of getting two shot by certain combos, since there is a potential for 0% reduction on heavy crits, rather than the current guarantee.

Part of the major attraction of resilience is it's consistency. The % reduction to being crit isn't nearly as important as the passive reduction to crit damage. The current system dramatically reduces "lucky" spike damage. By not only reducing your chance to be crit, but if you are crit you will always take x% less damage from that crit.

The system you are suggesting would leave room for "luck" in the form of crits getting through completely unmitigated and thus 1 or 2 shotting someone even with 10k health.

Initially I was going to post with it having the chance to take half damage (Similar to canceling out a crit, but would also work on non-crit attacks) and having the permanent crit reduction bonus, however I felt that this would still give the people who feel that it's imbalanced against DoT's another footing to stand on in their complaints about DoT inequality.

Although, it could be:
10% chance to take half damage, 20% damage reduced from all attacks.

Although that seems sorta over powered.

Resilience imbalance is very real and the people who think this is an unintended consequence of the system are fooling themselves. It must be intended that resilience impact certain classes more than others, as it was obvious from day one what spells/classes this stat would affect most, that's why they aren't really scaling it up further in season 2. Ice mages and rogues, without the presence of resilience to significantly impact those classes, are brutally overpowered. Resilience has reached a point of balance, what's left is the potential for individual class re-balancing and tweaking. What sucks is that pve-ers without resilience gear are getting a less balanced version of the game than top-geared players are, but if given the option I'd prefer balancing for the high end rather than the low end, which we seem to have pretty close at the moment.

Thinking about the difficulty of reducing DOT damage as well as spike damage with resilience I believe you can see why Blizzard opted to go for flattening spike damage instead of covering all damage with resilience.

If you were to change the stat to somehow mitigate non-crit damage you run the risk of unbalancing PVE encounters. Right now your guilds MT can become uncrittable, but raids are designed around that being the case, so the non-crit damage the boss deals is sufficiently high to still give a sense of urgency for healing etc. If you had another stat that significantly reduced the normal damage dealt to a player, tanks could now stack that stat instead of dodge / parry and end up with a much more manageable steady stream of damage which very likely would trivialize many end game encounters.

I'm fine with the current form of resilience minus the DoT issues, would rather see them make it either ineffective to stack to 350+, or make it so in order to reach the higher numbers, you have to actually lose something in the process.

Making it a percentage chance to reduce damage or making it only work after X damage within Y seconds would be a rather silly change, all you'd end up with is classes that purposely delay damage for the effect to wear off, or you get unlucky and it doesn't proc 5 times in a row.

Vontre, let me clarify your argument in more general terms. You're saying that since burst-damage is more overpowered in PvP than elsewhere, that a stat, resilience, was introduced specifically to artificially reduce the power of classes that have high burst damage (e.g. rogues, mages, warriors.) You're arguing that resilience not mitigating DoTs and so on is 100% intended and a good design choice, since resilience is designed to balance out the inherent advantage that a burst-damage class has over a non-burst damage class in PvP. Right?

I'm pretty sure that's correct.

Anyways, the point of my post is to illustrate one possible solution, but also point out that it's a little bit ridiculous to state "I'm fine with resilience, except it's effects on DoTs". Resilience either needs to affect non-crit damage, or it doesn't need to, however it does not need to specifically affect DoTs, since DoTs are no different than other sustained non-crit damage.

Warlocks and shadow priests have always been powerful PvP contenders, well before resilience, in fact DoT scaling was already reduced once as a result.

There is no other sustained non-crit damage in the game though.

Unless you count poisons and bleed effects.

You can't compare sustained non-crit damage to DoTs, one can be prevented through CC/LoS the other cannot, curing isn't a very good solution since they can be reapplied and you have to worry about spells like UA along with actually healing the person so they don't die from nukes.

Consistancy, good.

Getting !@#$ed over by bad luck, bad.

What about if resilience did what it currently did, but in addition it reduced DoT (all DoTs) length by x%?

Pretty sure that tristantio is implying that not even classes that crit are required to go for stats/talents that improve crit in order to do damage. Take this with a grain of salt since I don't PvP competitively, but it seems to me that if resilience affects burst damage in an over-the-top way, that the manner to compensate would be to stack straight +damage or AP instead, meaning that one would have a higher, more consistent stream of non-crit damage output (similar to DoTs in that way) and thus be less adversely affected by resilience. Obviously that negates a lot of burst damage ability...but maybe that's the point, after all.

How about, each time you are affected by a DoT, the next DoT has its effect reduced by 10%?

Or, make them all 1.5 second casts.

Then make it only take effect in PvP. Separate PvE and PvP mechanics are pretty desperately needed when you get to this point in attempting to balance

That's correct, "sustained non-crit damage" implies just your standard melee hits that didn't crit, as well as spells that didn't crit. (I didn't say, "sustained non-crittable damage")

If warlocks stacked up spell crit at the expense of +damage/stam/resilience, you would see much smaller DoT damage numbers, however warlocks choose to be non-reliant on crit (even though we get a 20% damage bonus to shadow spells for shadow bolt crits, which is as good a bonus as flurry is to warrior DPS since many warriors never have more than 3/5 flurry for the 15% bonus).

Warriors/rogues/hunters could forego +crit entirely and focus primarily on +attack power, just like mages can drop +crit on their armor and go for constant damage.

Not really, Mutilate Rogues can't drop crit because SF becomes rather useless if you only crit 10% of the time.

Was just about to post something along these lines. Any change to resilience that makes it affect general damage will suddenly make it an extremely attractive stat for PVE whereas at present it acts as a nice distinction between PVP and PVE gear, something Blizzard seem quite keen to maintain. Reduced crit damage and chance works so well because any serious tank will have minimised their crit chance anyway, normally through defence and so its PVE impact is limited to the occasional fill in piece or presence in an OT set.

Simply imposing a different ruleset for PVP than PVE is admittedly an option, it's something Blizzard have so far avoided, I'm assuming quite deliberately for reasons of consistency and clarity.

Lightning shield, thorns, etc.

DoTs already incur the cost of taking a long time to do their dmg and are easily removed (heck, there are 4 class skills that remove UA off themselves w/o any negative effects, 3 of which remove entire DoT stacks instantly). The ability to remove DoTs already reduces their effectiveness by a huge amount (e.g. removing Corruption after 15-17.5s = -16% dmg, and removing a DoT w/in 3s = -100% dmg). Direct Damage, of course, does not face these limitations. Moreover, DoT damage is the slowest, most consistent dmg and, if not removed, can be completely anticipated -- thus, the polar opposite of the unanticipated (e.g. burst) dmg that relisience mitigates. People also frequently fail to mention HoTs, comparable in cast time to DoTs and essentially counter at least 1 DoT per Hot.

The strength of DoTs + LoS in 2v2 and 3v3 is a byproduct of map design and imho a poor reason to nerf DoTs in the majority of PvP (e.g. imagine if Nagrand pillars were squares instead). And the strength of "DoT + run" in BGs is a byproduct of disorganized PvP. Should PvP be balanced around organized PvP or balanced according to the assumption that one is always PvPing completely solo and in addition nerfing skills according to the terrain that benefits them most?