Did resilience fix it?

Can I haz new article?

Yes, Master Hare. The last couple of days a Warrior friend of mine and I kept theorycrafting how good resilience really is. The mere fact that not very many top players switched out their PvE gear, didn’t convince us just yet. With the new soft cap at 33% crit damage reduction (1414,5 resilience) and damage reduction being doubled, there is potentially a lot of PvP items to be stacked.

It mildly amused me how self-proclaimed developers still didn’t understand that since 3.2, the damage reduction and crit damage reduction double dip. With the buff to resilience in 3.3.2, the stat is still incredibly rewarding when stacked. Before I annoy you with my math, here are some pictures. For the PvP theorycrafting cracks, this might not look very professional (for various reasons) but I feel that you’re a minority of our reader base. Bear with it and do your own math.

This is a shatter combo on a 0 resilience Warrior in battlestance (Torment the Weak in effect, no other buffs).

This is on the same Warrior with 857 resilience under the same conditions.

This is when he wore 1252 resilience. As you can see the crit damage is almost halfed.

Now unless you are studying math and more specifically the topic “Game theory” you can’t reliably say what amount of resilience is necessary for you. Individually depending on your comp, your class, even playstyle of your team and the meta game on your battleground, the gear you should pick is different. If you have access to both good PvP and PvE gear, the decision what you will wear in arena is probably one of the hardest decision you have to make when choosing pre-game strategy in WoW Arena at the moment. Funny enough, not many people seemed to have grasped that and are either “abusing” PvE gear because “PvE gear is gud” / “ARP ARP ARP“, or quite simply copy top players even though their gear setup doesn’t even work for them. As much as the following lines will look like common sense to you, I assure you while striving through many (top) players armory pages, it’s not. These are the factors you have to consider when deciding if you want to go for PvP gear or a PvE-PvP gear mix (this is 3s brainstorming only):

• Depending on your class, your chances of being the target of enemy focus fire changes drastically. While a Warlock is almost always the main target of pretty much everything (especially UA locks), Mages most of the time aren’t. That said, this might be entirely different on your BG if for example you have many enemy Hunter teams in your rating region. For most of us, there is nothing more than “feeling” what is right and of course trial and error.

• Your comp is also massively important when making a decision for your gear. I still see many heavy PvE geared Warriors on Cyclone playing WLD with 600 resilience. Because of the nature of Druid heals, these PvE-Champs are always a viable target to switch on. This does either get them killed or force them into playing defensive, which makes them lose damage as well. Again this is of course also very dependent on the metagame on your BG. Two WLDs who successfully wear more resilience than they used to are RNG Party & A new Chop. That said, these teams constantly change their gear as well depending on the line ups they face (predicting which teams you will face gets much easier at the top). If you have many melee Cleave teams on your BG in your rating region for example, the chances for them sitting on the Warlock the entire time are fairly high. On the other hand if you are a Warrior in a Paladin TSG, you probably want to stack PvE gear because you want to kill targets in the first 45 secs because of the nature of Holypaladins (they have their defensive CDs in that time and can just spam heal you).

• If your class/line up is about burst, you may want to continue stacking PvE-gear. I mentioned one example for this above, but the best that comes to my mind are probably Rogues. For example, if you are an ambitious Rogue wanting to make it to the top of your ladder and you play RLD, you probably don’t want to go the armory page and type “Kali… *backspace* Kalímist. Character not found? Kali`… *BACKSPACE* Was it even on the first i? Kalimìst. Not found… *SMASH KEYBOARD* DAMN SAMURAININJA ROGUE” To help you out noob, it’s “Kalimist“. That said, the presented information will not help you. He’s playing a different type of comp and the duration of his games are most likely much shorter than yours. Even if you search for a Rogue that does play RLD and is on your battleground, his gear might still not suit you because your team does play differently or you are meeting different teams. There are rating layers with a higher amount of certain comps and you have to adjust unless you either outgear or outskill them heavily.

• Another important factor is to ask yourself if your class loses damage while going defensive. For example, the damage a Warrior deals while being in sword and board and defensive stance is pretty gimped. Technically a Rogues damage doesn’t change too much when blowing Cloak and evasion despite the lost globals. I know that because of the squishiness of Rogues, you are likely to kite in situation where you are under pressure.  Almost every class loses damage and pressure when being pressured themselves, making resilience in these situation very valuable as you allow yourself to stay offensive longer. Wrath of the Lich King has mostly been about momentum and getting back on track when on the defensive proves challenging.

• Rarely does constant damage score kills, most of the time burst (read:crits) does.

• While PvP items are still 4 stat items (resil, stamina + Arp/AP, SP/Haste, SP/Spirit etc.) and therefore slightly inferior itemization-wise because of diminishing returns on stats than 5 stats PvE-gear, the season 8 gear is still ilevel264 at least. Most people underestimate the damage they still deal in PvP gear.

• Because of the incredible new PvP trinket with 153 resilience unless you have access to absolute top notch PvE gear and you get away with this hefty lack of resilience, the Human racial [Every man for himself] is now probably not the best racial for Alliance anymore. In my insignificant noob opinion (, unless you play double healer and have Solace or [Silver of Pure Ice]) for example Priests don’t want to go Human anymore. There is no other trinket in the game with that amount of resilience on it and the next closest is the [Platinum Disk of Sorcery] which is a whooping 51 ilvls under the new Insignia. Several top notch people in my guild considered wearing the trinket just for the resilience even though they are Human.

Your ability to recognize trends in your battleground and on your rating bracket regarding the meta game is part of a WoW players skillset. Even if you are the better players but still rank lower than a worse team that does their homework, you failed at a  fundamental part of WoW. Blizzard has succeeded to make gear choices interesting in PvP already as there are currently no real cookie cutter gear builds. Let me know what you think in the comment section. Will you still wear your PvE gear for the high crits nice ti…nvm. To answer the topics question; Resilience – if stacked – definitely helps getting rid of those ridiculously annoying one shots that we all hated about WotLK Arena.