Resilience Scaling in Warcraft Patch 4.0.6 and You

So on my most recent post about optimizing your gear for PvP, Nadilli left a comment saying:

Resil works in a way different to most stats. The more you have, the better your next point of resiliance works (the ammount increases exponentially). Ie. a character gains more of an effect from resilliance if they have 3400 points of resil than if they have 0.

I disagreed with that comment, because I’m an idiot who doesn’t always think things through, and have reading comprehension fail syndrome, just like the rest of the internet. My response was correct in that the scaling provided by Resilience is linear – which is correct – but I’m completely, totally wrong in that the effect of it is linear – because it’s not.

That’s confusing. Let me explain.

Resilience is funky. Let’s just start with that. Resilience has always been funky, will probably always be funky, and claims that Resilience Will Fix It ignore the fact that Resilience is a funky stat.

This post on the forums helps describe the problem. Each point of Resilience will grant the same amount of damage reduction to you, which makes sense – at level 85, every 100 points of Resilience grants you a little more than 1% reduction of incoming player damage. That’s the linear part. It’s increasing player survivability where Resilience becomes exponential.

Here’s the example used:

• The attacker is trying to do 100k damage with an attack that does 10k damage. If the defender has 0% Resilience, the attacker needs 10 attacks to kill the defender.
• If the defender has 10% Resilience, a 10k hit now hits for 9k, which means the attacker will need to do 11.11 attacks to kill the defender. Resilience saved the defender from 1.11 attacks.
• If the defender has 20% Resilience, a 10k hit now hits for 8k, which requires 12.5 attacks. Resilience saved the defender from 2.5 attacks.
• At 40% Resilience, the attacks are now hitting for 6k, which means the attacker needs 16.66 of them, which means that the defender is saved from 6.66 attacks.

Each 10% is providing a flat increase to the amount of damage reduced, which is logical and linear. But player survivability increases exponentially with Resilience, which is where confusion sets in. Linear application with exponential effect.

This is changing in 4.1, according to the PTR notes:

Resilience scaling has been modified for linear returns, as opposed to increasing returns. Under the new formula, going from 30 resilience to 40 resilience gives players the same increase to survivability as going from 0 to 10. Resilience now scales in the same way armor and magic resistances do. A player with 32.5% damage reduction from resilience in 4.0.6 should see their damage reduction unchanged in 4.1. Those with less than 32.5% will gain slightly. Those with more will lose some damage reduction, increasingly so as their resilience climbs.

We’ll have to see how the math on this shakes out – I’ve seen some reports that the new scaling on the PTR is buggy and not working as intended, so it’s hard to say how the curve will look.

I think it’s safe to say that player survivability will go down a bit with this change in the higher PvP brackets, and that while gemming and enchanting for Resilience will still be viable, it will be less viable than it is now past about 3.1k.

Thanks to Nadilli and Xylotism for setting me straight on this.