Resilience

When I first started doing battlegrounds at level 70, I topped the charts all the time. On deaths. I was so awesome. At dying. I had more deaths in a battleground than the 2 other top diers (is that a word?) combined. I remember finishing a battleground, sorting by damage (aw man, third to last again? At least I beat out that guy … oh wait, he was that afker), then sorting by healing (middle of the pack there, well, priests and holy pallys are just OP! QQ), and then sorting by deaths (ZOMG I’m on the top!!! ….. wait. What am I sorting by? Awww maaan….. /leave battleground). Granted, I had no idea how to PvP at the time. I had just finished leveling and was far too used to just hitting a stand-still mob (what do you mean, the horde run around? Come back! Why is he running away? Oh. Wait, now he’s pew pewing the crap out of me and - aw man, I just died). Plus, any time I got ganked while leveling, I just kind of stood there and took it. I figured the faster they kill me, the faster I can get back to my body, and the faster I can keep on leveling. I avoided world PvP like the plague.

So now that I’m fairly well geared, have practiced in some 2v2 arenas, and have Led2usebarkskin, I’m not as afraid of the PvP aspect anymore. In fact, battlegrounds are, dare I say, fun! And I’m not too bad at it! (All those people out there who suck at PvP? It’s ok. I was there once, too. You CAN L2play! Have faith!)

And what makes PvP MUCH easier, is resilience. Now that I’m starting to build up a PvP gear set, I’m realizing how wonderful resil really is. I used to overlook it in favor of stam, or int, but damn, resil is an AWESOME stat.

Let’s turn to Wowwiki.com to help us out here. According to the site (which is an awesome website, btw, and you all should check it out for your world of warcraft questions), 1% of resilience does this:

-chance to be critted on is reduced by 1%.

-damage from crits that DO hit is reduced by 2.2%.

-damage from any and all DoTs is reduced by 1%.

-amount of mana that’s drained by debuffs or spells is reduced by 2%.

Another good thing to know: 1% resilience = 39.4 resilience rating. So take this for example: I have 150 resil in my PvP gear. That’s almost 4% resilience. So an enemy’s chance to crit on me is reduced by 4%, damage from crits that do hit is reduced by 8.8%, damage from DoTs is reduced by 4%, and amount of mana drained is reduced by 8%.

Sweet stuff, huh.

I just acquired this new PvP gear with more resil last night, and my resil rating jumped from 60 to 150. So I’ve only done a few battlegrounds with it, but already I can totally notice it. I just die less. A pally and a rogue can be wailing on me, and instead of lifeblooming and rejuving the hell out of myself and staying alive for 9 seconds, I lifebloom and rejuv the hell out of me and stay alive for 13 seconds. And sometimes those extra few seconds are enough for dps to burn down whoever is on me. Which means I stay alive more. Which means I can heal more people. Which means less people die, which means more damage is put out, which means we usually win more.

Yay.

Moral of the story: don’t overlook resilience.

Obviously, one could make this argument for any stat: More stam, for instance = less dying = more heals on people = more dps staying alive = more win. Or, perhaps, more spell power = better heals = more dps staying alive = more win.

However, my point is that the increase in my resilience showed a noticeable change.

Think about it this way. My 150 resil mitigates: 8.8% of a 4,000 damage crit (which is 350 damage), and 4% of a DoT that does, say, 1500 damage over time (so that’s 60 damage). So 150 resilience mitigates exactly 410 damage just in this situation. Sure, +41 stam would mitigate the same amount. But resil is far easier to get, mitigates mana drained, AND gives me a chance to not have these crits land in the first place.

Seems pretty sweet, right?

Sidenote: One thing that’s good to know is that resilience scales with your level. So to get the same amount of crit and DoT damage reduction that my 150 resil rating gives me at level 70, I would have to have a 300 resil rating at level 80. (At level 70, 39.4 resil rating = 1% resil; at level 80, 82.0 resil rating = 1% resil. At level 60, 25.0 resil rating = 1% resil. Make sense?)