Resilience requires additional alterations.

#0 - Jan. 20, 2010, 8 p.m.

So, we're seeing another step in the right direction towards how resilience should affect PvP; personally, I'm elated at the news.

However, with this change it is now time to drastically lessen or remove the bias resilience holds towards critical strike. I'm going to take a moment to re-post some results of data I gathered when 3.3 was still on the PTR, regarding fire mage damage in PvP.

Key: (times the spell is cast) damage before resilience - damage after resilience

Minimum Free-Casting DPS with the New Glyph of Scorch

Living Bomb: (2) 11126 - 10013
Scorch: (14) 27846 - 25061
Crits: 0 - 0

Overall damage before resilience: 38972
DPS before resilience: 1623
Overall damage after resilience: 35074
DPS after resilience: 1461

Maximum Free-Casting DPS with the New Glyph of Scorch

Living Bomb: (2) 21118 - 14077
Scorch: (10) 37820 - 25237
Pyroblast: (4) 35216 - 23483
Pyroblast (DoT): (4) 1044 - 939
Ignite: 37661 - 22606
Crits: 24 - 24

Overall damage before resilience: 132859
DPS before resilience: 5535
Overall damage after resilience: 86342
DPS after resilience: 3597

Average Free-Casting DPS with the New Glyph of Scorch

Living Bomb: (2) 5282 - 3984
Living Bomb (DoT): (8) 9803 - 7428
Scorch: (13) 36751 - 27261
Pyroblast: (1) 6246 - 4713
Pyroblast (DoT): (3) 783 - 702
Ignite: 14562 - 7217
Crits: 12 - 9

Overall damage before resilience: 73391
DPS before resilience: 3057
Overall damage after resilience: 51305
DPS after resilience: 2137

The above results were based on a 24-second period of damage, using an optimal free-casting rotation. The glyph has gone live, so these results are relevant. The target was considered to have 10% damage and critical strike chance reduction and 23% reduction to critical strike damage, while the mage was considered to have 2570 spell power and 38.91% fire critical strike chance. All Ignite damage was considered done during the 24-second cycle, which isn't really true, so the actual damage and DPS is lower.

As you can see, resilience causes an almost 30% reduction in the damage of a fire mage. This is on top of lowering the chance to proc Hot Streak by varying amounts, which not only causes an additional reduction in average damage over the course of a match, but reduces the reliability of the fire burst talent. At my gear levels, which is pretty much top of the line for fire PvP, and while engaged in an arena match, resilience can reduce the chance I have to proc Hot Streak by anywhere from 11-14% per set of 2 casts. The true damage reduction against a well-geared target is more than 30%, and In season 8, I can easily see resilience reducing my damage by upwards of 50% if things stay as they are.

Though, while fire magi are affected by resilience more than any other spec in the game, I'm using my spec to illustrate a universal truth about the statistic. Resilience affects those specs that favor, or rely on, critical strike over another secondary statistic, far too greatly relative to those that do not.

Resilience absolutey must drop it's bias, or those classes that are already suffering are going to be decimated come season 8.

There are two ways to handle this:

I realize that there is also a readied healing-reduction, but I am extremely suspect of it's relative effect, compared to the resilience buff. More importantly, this is an issue regardless of the planned buff, and there is no reasoning that I can see to delay the removal of such a drastic bias at a time when you're already planning for a wave of potential relative damage balance issues.

In a game-reality where critical strike rating is already an almost universally inferior damage-boosting statistic, when pitted against competitors, in addition to providing casters with none of the multitudes of periphery benefits that haste does, there is no reason the specs that are unfortunately tied to it need to suffer anymore than they already do.

Ghostcrawler

#22 - Jan. 20, 2010, 9:16 p.m.

We think crits need to be proportionately weaker in PvP than in PvE. I'll explain why in a minute, but first let me reiterate that the buff we are making to resilience just affects damage. The relative value of crit in PvP won't change at all with this hotfix. You won't be critting less or doing less proportional damage when you crit. If you hit now for 3000 and crit 30% of the time for 6000 then after this change you might hit for 2700 and crit 30% of the time for 5400. Crit damage will be lower, but crit damage relative to normal damage will not. We don't want to get to the point where a crit is actually mitigated lower than an actual hit. That would be bizarre and do bad things for a lot of talent trees.

As to why we think resilience needs to reduce crits, it's because you're playing against another human and not an AI-controlled creature. Creatures generally don't heal or blow defensive cooldowns, or at least not very well. The ability to pack a lot of damage into a small time window is much more important in PvP just because the opposing player or team have so much control over the size of that window. If you whittle them down to 10% of their health but can't "close the deal" then they may be back up at 50% or 100% in no time. This kind of mechanic happens in PvE too, but much more rarely. The ability to crit in PvE is important largely because it buffs your damage or keys into talents. But the burst portion of crits themselves (high damage in a short amount of time) is much more important in PvP. Thus, we think the value and role of crit would be too high in PvP without a way to mitigate that through stacking resilience.

Ghostcrawler

#118 - Jan. 21, 2010, 9:36 p.m.

We don't want resilience per se to bring with it the "kiss / curse" of also nerfing your own healing output or heals received. We want players to like resilience on PvP gear. It shouldn't be a hard decision. We'd prefer a model where resilience improves your survivability without any real downside.

If we implement a healing change, it would be temporary because health pools will be larger in Cataclysm, proportionate to healing, so we don't think that will be a problem. Burst damage may be less of a problem too for the same reason, but we're less confident of that. If it isn't a problem, then we can change the resilience scaling again.

Ghostcrawler

#120 - Jan. 21, 2010, 9:40 p.m.

It doesn't surprise me that different players come to different conclusions that e.g. this is a big buff for melee or a big nerf for melee or that this means PvE gear will be more or less attractive. What surprises me is the strength everyone seems to have in their own convictions ("It will absolutely be this way..."), despite evidence that plenty of players don't agree with them. :)

Ghostcrawler

#161 - Jan. 22, 2010, 6:47 p.m.

Q u o t e:
If you want this to change you're simply gonna have to share some numbers, or tell us how to quantify things, or tell us how we should analyze changes in a way that can be viewed objectively.

I'm just saying when you make a post that says something like "This clearly means DKs are dead because all they bring is burst while mage control will dominate" right below a post that says "It is obvious to everyone that this means mages are dead because they can run out of mana, while melee have built-in longevity," then one of you is probably wrong.

The thread will feel more like a conversation if you address each other's points instead of just trying to shout above the noise to get your own voice heard. We're only really interested in the conversations -- the back and forth. If we just wanted to hear your individual contributions, we'd just have an email address you could send feedback to and dispense with the whole forum thing. But we actually like the debate. We like to see when someone can counter someone else's supposition. Yes, it's the internet and stubborn people will never admit when they're wrong, and as I say all the time, we're not looking for a consensus. We are looking for a debate, and posts that are "I'm right and lalala I can't hear anything else" aren't that.

Ghostcrawler

#162 - Jan. 22, 2010, 6:53 p.m.

Q u o t e:
If you decide that "PvP" means in a BG or Arena, then you have forgotten about, and then destroyed world PVP.

Most of time when I am talking about PvP, it's Arena, Battlegrounds or Wintergrasp. Yes, world PvP exists, but it is much, much harder to balance. We don't generally control the level at which you can participate, we don't give you objectives to discourage say ganking or camping, we don't balance around one vs. one encounters, and yet we also don't put in much protection to discourage three vs. one encounters. This might be a problem if world PvP was a huge balance concern for a lot of players, but it generally isn't because the other PvP forums I mentioned carry much better rewards and offer a more organized play experience in general.

Even if you do care a lot about world PvP, I'm hard pressed to imagine changing resilience levels at all would have any effect upon you, and that's assuming you run around in PvP gear most of the time, which you probably don't.

Ghostcrawler

#163 - Jan. 22, 2010, 6:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler i think you missed the point of this post.
Resilience specifically reducing crit damage and chance to crit never made any sense to me.
Why specifically mitigate damage from specs and classes that have chosen to gem/gear/talent for crit ?
If a caster Gems and Gears for haste his damage will not be reduced specifically by his targets resil.

I don't *think* I missed the point, and I'll restate my point again. PvP excessively rewards focusing on crits because kills, not damage, are generally what win those fights for you. We think if resilience didn't affect crits than those specs that focus on crits would have an extra advantage in PvP situations as well as the value of crit in general being more useful. Nobody is really preventing crits even with max resilience. Crits will still hit for more than hits even with max resilience. In fact, most of the complaints people have about dying too quickly come from the big crits they suffered.

Ghostcrawler

#189 - Jan. 22, 2010, 9 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Resilience reduces critical strike chance. This is the primary issue, because it directly hurts talents that proc based off of critical strikes. This issue is then further exacerbated with talents that rely excessively on critical strike, such as Hot Streak, and to a lesser extent, Eclipse.

Getting a crit is valuable for every damage spec and getting crits is more valuable in PvP than in PvE. Some talent trees have mechanics that benefit from getting crits, but the fact is that you still want crit and you still want to crit more in Arena. It doesn't ever become a bad or problematic stat for you. Maybe your damage goes down a little, but I really don't think the problems Fire and Balance have in Arenas is because of their lower crit chances. We could see perhaps in a Catclysm setting of allowing offensive "on crit" mechanics to work the same way defensive ones do today even if resilience changed that crit into a hit. It would be a good quality of life change, but I still think the impact this has in actual games is being overstated.

Ghostcrawler

#190 - Jan. 22, 2010, 9:03 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I also don't think it's any coincidence that many of the specs that are currently very successful in PvP are the ones that can either inflate their critical chance dramatically (to neutralize res) and on demand, or just bypass the need to crit entirely.

Having on demand burst is very important for PvP. I think your argument gets more tenuous when you say that Hot Streak is your on demand burst and Hot Streak is less effective against opponents in resilience, so therefore resilience is what is keeping you out of Arenas.

Ghostcrawler

#212 - Jan. 22, 2010, 9:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
What the posters are trying to say is that certain specs which are balanced around having a high uptime of procs such as Eclipse, Flurry and Hot Streak feel significantly weaker in arenas than specs whose talents boost their damage passively, unless they already have an abnormally high crit rate from talents, such as Mutilate Rogues. You dismiss the issue as if the players were trying to claim that those specs never crit and therefore cannot use their talents, but it's not that black and white.

When you say "balanced around having a high uptime of procs" you are talking about PvE balance. Balancing sustained damage output for PvP is almost meaningless because that's not what wins matches. In fact, one of the first tools we go too when something is out of whack is to nerf the burst damage for PvP and buff the sustained damage for PvE (and rarely vice versa).