I assume they meant as the spell is being cast or before it cast. Just as shifting to humanoid as a hunter is casting scare beast will give an "invalid target" message.

I'm not sure if this was a reply to my post or not but will answer it anyways. Resilience is unequivocally the pvp stat, Blizzard introduced the stat to make pvp more balanced. To say the game should be balanced without this stat means that the game shouldn't need resilience at all. This simply isn't true tho. This game without resilience is not even remotely balanced and the dev's seem to be content with designing pvp balance around the fact that people should be rolling in resilience gear. Basically you disagree with that fundamentally but that doesn't change that resilience is a key stat that blizzard uses to balance classes. I agree with you that "if you're wearing what is literally next to no resilience, complaining about burst is stupid." That is my whole point about people in 400 resilience complaining about burst is, 400 resil =/ half the resil cap. In fact its barely over 1/3 the cap. Its like someone with 150 resil in s3-4 complaining about being hit too hard. Well yeah, of course your gonna take hard hits, you don't have enough gear to begin effectively mitigating burst yet. Point being someone in full pvp gear now should have at least 6-700 resilience and possibly more with gemming/enchants/WG trinkets/Weapons. At 700 resil, if what I asked in my previous post is accurate, crits will be reduced by a lil over 18%. Once you start getting the gear levels that approach resil cap that number gets closer to 33% which is a huge hit to burst damage.

I was referring to a situation more along the lines of this:

Priest casts psychic scream, Death Knight uses Lichborne to break it.
Priest begins to cast Shackle Undead, Death Knight cancels the Lichborne buff so that the effect cannot be applied.

Not quite. Your numbers are essentially correct, but this isn't talking about someone in intro-gear complaining about being bursted down by a late-season geared foe. This is an intro PvP gear being effectively meaningless: it's a toss up whether you should even wear it over PvE gear, which defeats the purpose of HAVING intro/crafted PvP gear. In fact, it was the whole complaint about the arena tournament where mixing [or worse, just wearing PvE gear with the cooldown trinkets] was the best option for various classes/specs. As far as being level 80 is concerned, Season 5 IS Season 1, with comprable gear that can be considered S5.1 and S5.25, so comparing to TBC arena / level 70 is not even S2 gear. Assuming just crafted gear, applying basic PvP enchants, and a mix of old-season jewlery, you can attain closer to 500 resilience [closer to half the cap, but still not quite there?]. And the complaint isn't that EVERY class or spec is bursting everyone down, it's that specific specs are significantly above par in the burst category, making resilience, even close to half the cap, effectively a meaningless stat against those setups, EVEN when worn by specs focused on survival instead of DPS. This makes them disproportionately powerful before being fully decked in S5, and still gives them a signficant edge in that level of gear [I would imagine season 6 and truely being fully enchanted Hateful would be the balancing threshold].

A more specific example: Frost-mage on frost-mage action [this has happened to me regularly just in Wintergrasp], the one of us actually wearing PvP gear is much more likely to win, things like the element of surprise and intelligent play directly affect the outcome. Change this to an Arcane Mage or a Ret Paladin: regardless of their gear, the fully decked-out mage (warlock, warrior, shaman, w/e) stands effectively no chance because they are not one of the specific class/spec combinations with similar burst, regardless of control. That poor priest over there died from even getting looked at, but hey, I at least made them have to kill me, right? How about the restoration druid? The point is that for a fair distribution of spec matchups incidental to PvP zones and Battlegrounds, the PvP gear does still make a difference / grant an edge like its supposed to, but is not a gurantee to victory. i.e. it's balanced under most of the ways we define such as players. But when 'serious arena' is introduced, or you run across one of those players in world/BG PvP, that balance is essetnially non-existant assuming your foe is any sort of competent or you are some kind of diabolical genius. You may as well not be wearing the gear you're 'supposed' to be wearing against a similarly or even under-geared foe, with the CC-break Medallion and/or battle-master's trinket having a meaningful impact on your survival time or retaliation ability.

No one really expects 100 resilience on top of none to make much of a difference, but to not be a bad idea. But the talent points of a variety of class makeups crossing the line from 'making a difference' to 'your chances are closely approximating zero', before taking your opponents gear or skill into account while simultaneously making yours meaningless? This is not a balanced point to start-from. If you (at least effectively) ONLY faced such in battles where both sides have the gear that 'solves the problem', it would be fine. You face these pretty ubiquitously regardless of PvP method or gear levels, so yes, it IS a problem, and making gear the solution is akin to rigging fights, since the outcome is the same.

We've already seen what happens to the burst with capped resilience. It was called 3.0 and the burst was just as laughable as it is now. Okay the effectiveness is capped higher now, but we can't actually reach that level of effectiveness this season so it's somewhat moot unless people think writing off an entire season is a good thing. Anyway, back in 3.0 it was said "wait for 80", and we did because we had no choice. And now we see "wait for 80" didn't really do much more than up the damage even further. So now you're saying that resilience will fix it this time, even though it didn't help last time. Call me cynical, but the "it will be all better when..." argument seems a bit hollow to my ears unless the end is "... blizzards nerfs damage."

Let's look at what is stacked up against the "it will get better when..." argument:

- We've already heard it as "ret/mutilate bugs are fixed", "it's live", "we are level 80" and none of them fixed anything.
- We've already seen it when we had high resilience and damage was even lower than now, and it was still bursty.
- The damage is so high even zero crits will be seeing people go down fast and furiously. How will resilience fix that?
- Players already played with full deadly at 80 and it was still bursty.
- You have no data. No math. Nothing but wild conjecture. I have nothing better to show you but I'm not trying to prove that the status quo will change.

So tell me, exactly, why you think resilience will fix everything beyond a blind faith that it will.

I'd just like to add an easy sample number here.

Max resilience would be minus 33% damage on all crits. A good Frost Strike with Betrayer in Blood Presence hits for anywhere from 5 to 6 thousand damage unbuffed. 33% less of that is 3350 to 4020. Not bad you say. Except that is max, that's the best it is ever going to be, and that is a goal absolutely unattainable in current gear. Damn straight Resilience makes a difference, but it cannot make enough of a difference to help control or mitigate the pain train right now, which is why people are angry about it.

Here is a screenshot from one of my arena matches last week, in which my partner was wearing just under 250 resilience (a ~6% crit damage reduction if I'm not mistaken). He took 21249 damage in 3 seconds from an arcane mage. If he had been resilience capped, he would've taken 15016 damage in that 3 seconds. (I have hundreds of screenshots from arena, featuring varying classes putting out comparable damage. I have screenshots of obliterate hitting me for over 8000 that I'm searching through my folder for atm. :p)

Also, keep in mind that the resilience cap is far from attainable as it stands now, so we're essentially ignoring the first 1-2 seasons of the expansion when looking at this. Also, once itemization allows us to reach the resilience cap, it will also allow for more damage output as well, especially when Uludar is released, so these numbers aren't even going to realistically represent what we'll see in the future.

I honestly cant say that resilience will fix everything once people start stacking it closer to cap. What I can say is that resilience plays a huge role in diminishing burst. Need an example? I got 2 I can think of off the top of my head. Ret paladins and pom pyro mages in 2.0-2.4 were burst specs. What was their representation during that time and how effective were they? Most people considered them either too weak to bring on a competitive team or used them for gimmick combos that were easily countered the 2nd and 3rd time a team faced them. So what I am cautioning against is a knee jerk over reaction to burst simply because when you have low hp and low resilience you die fast. Lets see how things factor out when people are running around with 800-1000 resilience and over 25k hps.

As to your final bullet point. No need to be obtuse and rude. You have a difference of opinion. You have a complaint. I have a different point of view and your marginalizing/mocking it doesn't make it any less valid. I also want you to understand that I am not condoning burst domination in pvp. All I'm saying is that you cant make DRASTIC changes as you seem to want without having full data on the problem, which is what would be happening if they chose to make the changes right now. I also believe that any changes they do make will be tied into resilience somehow, as opposed to straight damage nerfs to classes which would disrupt the pve aspect of the game. Too be honest from the way things look that is the most likely path they will go, making resilience an even more important stat for pvp.

We're in the first week of S1 here. People with 200 resil at 70 weren't getting bursted down by people in heroic blues and a bit of Kara stuff (when it was iLvl 100, not 115) at the beginning of S1. PVE gear is going to increase in DPS too, you know.

If the cap is 33% not, 25%, that means crits will do 89% of what they would have done with a 25% cap. That's only a 10% maximum difference, and ONLY if your resil is above the "25% cap" but below a "33% cap." There are other sacrifices that you make for that kind of resil too.

The only reason Ret pallies weren't used in 2.0-2.1 PVP is because they were extremely BAD, not bursty. They got buffed to reasonable levels, and you started seeing them in Warr/Ret/Sham teams, which did very well. Windfury totem was not a "gimmick."

PoM Pyro mages were a whole different story. That was simply the desire for people to continue 1-2 shotting people as they were used to in Vanilla. Pom/Pyro was never "good" in S1, it was just there, and it disappeared completely before the first season was even over. You only had 1 burst every 3 minutes, and no ice block.

Ice specs on the other hand, had 2 ice blocks (with no Hypothermia), and nearly as much burst (with Shatter combo). You also got Ice barrier, the water elemental for a ranged root/damage, the natural snare of using Ice spells, etc etc. One instant cast Pyro every 3 minutes just couldn't compete.

The current "burst" specs/classes are a lot more resilient than that, and can burst a LOT more often than once every 3 minutes.

Or they could just make resilience cheaper and stuff some extra stam on every PVP piece. The problem is too much damage relative to health pools. Healers are doing okay in the hps v dps scale, it's the fact that people just drop too fast that is the main problem. In previous seasons sometimes you could feel yourself slipping behind on the healing. Your target is just taking too much damage for you to keep up with MS/wound on them and something has to change or they're going to die in about 10 seconds. I have never felt that this season. Either my heals hit someone up to full or they die. Just... die.

I still think we'd need to nerf certain specs down before we achieved a decent balance, but we don't need huge global changes to get damage in general under control.

Definitely, a global reduction to damage would bring the overpowered burst classes into line but would be another nail in the coffin for those specs which are under performing. Changes will have to be class specific.

The same applies to jacking resilience up any more.

I agree with this point, although tend to view the new resilience cap differently then you. Basically if someone is resilience capped at 33% a casters crits, without damage modifiers, will be doing no more damage then their non crits. 150% damage minus 150% * 33% puts you back at 100% damage. Thats my whole point with the new resilience cap being a dramatic hit to burst. If you dont think turning crits into basically non-crit equivalent damage then I dont know what to say.

As far as the rest of your post I just used those 2 class/specs to show that being burst dependent just didn't work. Ret paladins weren't brought to war/sham/ret teams because of their burst but because of freedom for the warrior and BoP for the shaman. Their damage was good with windfury but that was only half the reason they were on the team at best. I still want to hold a wait and see attitude and think that the previous poster a couple above this one pointed out the problem best, its not that their isn't enough healing to keep up with the damage its that the damage comes in too big a bunches right now for the healers to be able to stay on top of things. Once someone is resil capped and is essentially eliminating a large chunk of crit damage (melee crits will be doing a bonus ~34% damage over non crits as example) this will shift a bit. Its at that point that we need to evaluate things. My biggest caution over all this is that we dont nerf burst damage so hard that those classes are essentially useless in the coming seasons. I'm all for making changes to balance the burst to more reasonable levels once we have a more accurate idea of what reasonable is in a resilience flooded warcraft.

The classes that are worried about a significant overall damage nerf in pvp are classes like deathknights, enhance shamans and ret paladins who are viable only as long as they can burst down healers. Without MS they are at an almost insurmountable disadvantage in situations against rogues and warriors who bring MS to a long fight.

Boosting the effectiveness of resilience, coupled with adding in a permanent global MS effect for pvp (as they have previously discussed) would go a long way to balancing out all of the various DPS classes as well as getting us back to a point where arenas have some strategy again. Why do they make everythng so difficult on themselves?

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you on your point of the resi cap helping the problem with crit burst etherealsilk. The problem is, that getting to the resi cap in order to see how much it will help, unless you are a class with a lot of burst, will be extremely challenging. These are problems at 400-500 entry level resilience, and still problems which people had on the beta realms with 800+ resilience. .
I understand that it would be better to have addressed this when everyone was on a level playing field closer to the resilience cap, but that time is not now and is not likely to be any time soon.
Hence I feel that as soon as possible would be a far better time for changes to be made to the certain spiky nature of certain specs damage, OR to the current pointlessness of gearing for resilience.

I concede all those points and agree for the most part. The one thing I dont agree with is that 4-500 resilience is entry level. Any pvp'er that spends the time, rather thru arena or bg's to get the unrated gear can easily reach a min of 600 resil and should be surpassing 700 most of the times. Just for kicks I checked what a priest could achieve with non-rating required gear + gemming and enchanting and even at this point its approaching 900+. Sure it requires alot of honor for the non-set pieces and you sacrifice stats for pure resilience but it is achievable. Basically achieving 800 resil is achievable for most any class and for the best players with the 2030+ ratings they can achieve upwards of 1100 almost. That is with current gear, the problem is time. Which is all that I'm saying we need to do is give it more time.

The main reason I am so adamant about not doing any dramatic changes now is because I've seen countless times in the past where the devs have nerfed early and said if the nerfs were too harsh with future gear they would revert them, only to not revert them and leave a class neutered instead. That is what I dont want to happen and why I want people to gear up before they cry wolf.

Mages and elemental shaman were burst classes in TBC and they did fine in the right brackets with just that while still not being insane. Burst isn't the problem itself, the problem is the burst is too high, too easy to execute, and too hard to stop without immunities. And if those classes aren't viable if burst is nerfed then they need to give them something else other than unhealable burst to boost them.

I assume you meant this:
"If you dont think turning crits into basically non-crit equivalent damage makes burst classes balanced then I dont know what to say."
Because you didn't really finish that sentence.

The only class that's going to be casting 150% crits is a non-Destro Warlock. And those are so dangerous at the moment.

And my point wasn't that going from 150% to 100% does nothing, it's that we're talking differences of 100% and 112% crits, not 150%->100%.

----

It's not like Ret pallies don't have those options anymore. No matter what happens with resilience, they will always have BoF, Bubble, Dispel, etc... So how is that supposed to balance them?

You do know that 3 classes make up 60% of the Top 100 at the moment, right? Paladins are #1, closely followed by DKs.

My issue isn't that these classes should be useless. I think we won't see nearly as much burst once Resilience becomes prominent, but that affects the currently gimped classes too. In a match of attrition, who's going to win, the Warlock doing 100% crits or the melee class doing 134% crits?

Even if you scalle all damage down as it currently stands, all that means is the melee classes will get healer partners instead of running all DPS. Melee + Healer vs. Caster + Healer, all resil capped, the caster will take a lot more damage overall, running his healer oom first, and thus losing.

The problem with your suggestion is that the classes that have MS would be absolute jokes without it, including rogues, who by far would come out "the best" from it. Also Blizzard has stated, time and time again, that they don't want "global" rule modifications, they don't want your class to feel different between two aspects of the same game. I don't blame them, drastically different rule modifications in most games result in fairly large failures (EQ, UO, AC ect.). Small changes, like CC duration, though, are fine, they don't really have an impact on the feel of your character, rather, its more on the "pace" of the game, but even that kind of change has to be done with care.

All in all, I think most people are underestimating the huge amount of utility hybrids bring now. Shamans might need some work with being able to survive, but a lot of the reasons people didn't bring ret paladins was fixed in 3.0. DKs, also, are extraordinarily complimentary in any team. Granted, if the choice is "MS" or "DK", the team will probably choose MS, but that is one slot on a team and the thing about MS classes is people tend to *not* stack them, so the other slot in 3's and the other multiple slots in 5's will be filled better with non-MS classes, composition depending.

GC's "insight" to blizzards plan was fairly cool, to. It certainly was a problem that I could get to 60% of the resil cap and still wear 4-5 pieces of PvE gear. The problem, however, is that while needing more defense is a good thing, the classes with "on demand" huge burst and "on demand" CC breaks/Immunities will dominate even in a lower damage environment.

I agree with one of the posters above me, some changes just need to be made to classes themselves, to tweak down either their burst or their "tricks" to survive. Or simmilar tricks need to be added to all classes, and not just be on the current 4 who are dominating right now.

I really think you're underestimating caster sustained damage. In general, a caster on target puts out an amazing amount of pressure on a target. A caster being allowed to cast even 2-3 cast time spells (Bolts, mostly) is more dangerous then any melee. The problem is how many defenses against such "volleys" can be used (Pillars, interrupts, stuns, ect.)...Melee have their disruptions to, with snares and roots, but it tends not to be as bad due to instant attacks, ect.

The big thing about longer games though is that opportunities to toss 2-3 cast time spells come up more often. In a very short game, such windows are closed, and it tilts really heavily towards melee. Again, because the windows they need are easier to set up and require a shorter amount of time, but they do, indeed, do less..Almost every game we did at 2100+ last season vs WLD (We were WPS) ended because we made a positioning error and the lock was able to cast a few times, which set us way behind....The same with PMR, the rogue could sit on anyone, forever, but if the mage could lay out a few full bolts, it was game over. (This held true in DPW and WRD for me.)

This is all skewed in 2v2, that bracket is so unbalanced, I'm sure blizzard regrets not getting rid of it in favor of 4v4.

You're only looking at damage reduction on critical strikes, don't forget the actual critical strike reduction, to. Now, before I go on, I'm going to say, I agree some specs just have too many ways to inflate their critical strike too reliably, however...

If you have, say, 800 Resiliance, well, that is close to 10% off critical strike rates. If that mage has a 50% critical strike rate (Lets say he gets lucky with Arcane potency procs) then his odds of scoring a critical strike all 3 times are 12.5%..Now, that isn't as low as it sounds, in fact, it is really high. (Arcane potency is one of those talents I was referring to.)

Now, if someone has 800 resilience though, well, then the odds of all three being critical strikes is 6.4%. That resilience just reduced the chance of seeing that spike by 50%...So, seeing "critical" strike chains is definitely something that is a byproduct of low resilience..The higher resilience goes, the more drastic the "chance" reduction becomes in terms of multiple criticals in a row.

Granted, however, some of these critical strike rate inflation talents are a little silly...So, despite this, I still think some of these talents are going to need to be tweaked to transfer some burst over to long term damage.

Great post.

In particular, the point about 2v2 goes largely unnoticed in many of these "will resilience fix it" debates. 2v2 is an abomination that has never been remotely balanced and never will be, but it is used by virtually everyone trying to argue about balance - hey, ret and DKs are x% of the total teams, or resto druids are on x% of the teams, and so on. It sends such a terrible message to the consumer base when stats are skewed that badly, yet the bracket still gives the best gear in the game and the most prestigious titles to boot. It's really an issue they need to address along with the rest of this debacle.

Your point about casters is also totally missed on most players, I think. Many mages complained constantly about their inability to chain cast on people during TBC because of pillars, but if you let a mage cast multiple bolts, the game is almost assuredly over. I think the better complaint is that this type of design is kind of silly. It forces every team to sit on the mage or other caster because if you don't, you are almost assuredly going to lose, which further makes melee seem dominant because they have more freedom to actually play and not be focused the entire time.

You pretty clearly missed the point I was making. GC has mentioned numerous times that they have/are considering a global "Mortal Strike" effect for the pvp world. Are you claiming that warriors are in such bad shape that they would not get slots on teams right now if mortal strike was no longer needed? Although I would disagree with such an argument, if that was the case then it means that warriors can get buffs in compensation.....perhaps some of the "utility" you hold in such high regard.

Getting rid of MS would only serve to even out the DPS landscape in arenas right now. It would also make class balance easier and allow for utility buffs to warriors or hunters (I would say any MS class but rogues are clearly fine either way). I don't see the downside.

This was the last quote by GC, and that honestly scares me. Other than druids with cyclone and roots - who honestly thought that damage was too low last season and that CC was too powerful?

I have never seen such a complete disconnect with the playerbase by a wow developer - I know nobody at all who arenas seriously and complained that ' damage is too low, games take no skill '. If druids would have been nerfed, none of the double healer comps in 3s could have succeded since they relied on druids providing peel while healing.

Before I thought Arena was in a sad state, but it was due to lack of tuning. Now I find out that GC genuinly wants arenas to be more bursty - that's a huge punch in the gut, because I HATE the stupid burst that's going on now, and finding out that developers genuinly changed arenas in this direction is astonishing.

If you had played a shaman or paladin healer in Season 3 or 4 against warlock/druid teams then you would never have made that statement. There was absolutely NOTHING more frustrating than being the target of the Cyclone, Cyclone, Cyclone, Charge, Bash, Deathcoil, Felhunter silence BULLSHIT FUCKING CC CHAIN (god forbid if the warlock got a fear off somewhere in there because then you were really screwed because cyclone was off DR by the time fear was over). It literally left me screaming at my monitor every time I came up against it, and there was pretty much no way to escape it if the other team was playing properly.

Inescapable CC chains were not fun for the classes who were left on the outside looking in.