1. Introduction
2. General concepts
3. FAQ
- 3.1. Is resilience affected by diminishing returns?
- 3.2. Is there a resilience cap?
- 3.3. Is there a resilience soft cap (or magic number above which resilience becomes less useful)?
- 3.4. Resilience or stamina?
- 3.5. Can I do PvP competitively without PvP gear?
4. Formulas and curves
1. Introduction
If there's one thing in WoW that has caused lots of confusion over these years, that's resilience. The effect of resilience in the game has changed many times since its appearance in TBC, and I would go as far as to say it has never been fully understood by the majority of players.
Currently we have a relatively simple "resilience" that, instead of affecting damage over time, mana drains, critical hit chance... just reduces all damage coming from players and their pets. That should be easy enough, but the way resilience scales with gear is still a common topic of debate because it's not intuitive to most people, and trying to find the optimal balance of offensive and defensive stats has never been trivial, exactly. I keep finding posts from people asking or showing misconceptions, so I decided to write this guide to make things more understandable.
It is similar to the one written by Eldacar - Boulderfist US in US forums ( http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3229086381 ), but I decided to write it in a different way especially since the formulas were slightly off back then (he did a great job obtaining them and they were very accurate, but the real ones seem to be true exponentials, as he admitted later).
I'm almost sure everything I say is facts (well, there's a pinch of opinion in 3.5 ;D), but if anyone has corrections or comments to make, please go ahead!
2. Concepts
To avoid misunderstandings I'll use some words in a very specific way (they're found in different contexts in the game).
Mitigation: Damage reduction by resilience. When you go to your character sheet and move your mouse over "Resilience", saying "Provides X% damage reduction against all damage done by players...", that's what I'm talking about.
Resilience: When I say "resilience" I always mean "resilience rating". Resilience rating is the stats value shown by gear. A given amount of resilience is turned into a certain mitigation.
Effective health: Effective health is the health someone with zero resilience should have to show the same survivability. Simple example: if you have 150k health and 50% mitigation, your effective health is 300k hp because someone has to deal 300k damage (before resilience is applied) to kill you.
