Monday, May 14, 2007

Gladiator Gear Changes: Why Resilience is a Problem for Mages

My perspective on this is probably in contrast to a lot of other's but...

I don't like resilience. It's atrocious in 1v1 as we have no means of healing, and although our shields are sort of like 'artificial' heals extending our life beyond our base stamina, it isn't extending it to the point where resilience typically becomes more efficient point for point.

Moreover, we're pretty good at avoiding the big bad crits of the game. We can kite melee and get inside hunter dead zones, we can IB pom pyros, CS or blink through casts. We are rarely in a position where we take extended potential critical blows; we take damage from DoTs, guaranteed crits, or openers with extremely high crit rates anyways.

In 5v5, I find myself rarely the primary focus. And even when the focus, we have great tools for avoiding damage. This isn't to say that the stat is useless, but just that I really don't feel it fits as "THE PVP STAT" for our class. Mages lose wars of attrition, resilience is not the stat to save the day.

If resilience was a generic all damage reduction stat, I could see the stat having greater appeal, but still feel that what used to separate PvE gear from PvP Gear, Stamina, was a far better differentiator. It used to be that you couldn't be realistically healed in PvE gear because you dropped too fast, but now that PvE gear also has huge stamina, it is more of a healing efficiency thing. Making you a better target to spend mana on heals for is nice, but so is doing more damage and having more mana.

I'd rather see the other side of resilience be a CC duration reduction if anything, maybe something like per 40 points of resilience -5% duration on all stuns, snares, CC or something. You'd have to tweak the stat to have a realistic soft cap of 30-35%, but this is the sort of thing that could be greatly appreciated in PvP, yet have no effect whatsoever on PvE gameplay.

5 comments:

Azael - FH said...

First.

Sweetsauce ^^

Odd said...

I question the value of resilience in almost all situations as well. Since I switched from my druid to my paladin I can count the number of games where I got focused (after an early bubble, or even before it) on my left hand. The games, however, where I run oom from constant dps (2 warriors -.-) with MS up on a target are far far more prevalent. In almost all situations it would be better for me to have PvE gear. It's obviously disheartening.

That being said, I am kind of happy with the recent gladiator gear upgrades. Almost every piece got a 3-5 point upgrade for every stat. Season 2 is just around the corner as well, from what it looks like, so the PvP gear will pull further ahead of PvE gear even more.

Raddy said...

Yes! my first flame post!!!

Animastryfe said...

Congratulations on your first flame post Radikal!

Atashi said...

It's worse than you think. Check out my recent post:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=105741358&sid=1&pageNo=1