Resistance is (not) Futile
Resistance Overhaul and New Resistance Calculations
Heroes!
Resistance is one of those vanilla features that’s strangely esoteric. Is it good to have? Absolutely! How good is it to have? Well, it helps you resist spells! Okay, but what exactly does that mean?
Here are the basics:
Resistance as a mechanic is capable of two things: for spells that only deal damage (like Fireball or Shadowbolt), resistance can help you partially resist the spell, negating a portion of the damage it deals. For spells that have a debuff (like Frost Nova or Slow), they can be resisted entirely or not at all (these are called ‘binary’ resists).
It’s no surprise then that stacking Resistance can be immensely powerful--in PvP to fully resist spells like Death Coil, Shadowfury, and Dragon’s Breath, and in PvE to partially resist high-damage boss spells or AoE. However, just how powerful it can be is a matter of quirky random chance. Although players could stack resistance to get a sort of damage reduction out of it, the method by which the game calculated the effectiveness of their resistance, and the amount of damage resisted,was a strange jumble of damage thresholds and random rolls. If you didn’t understand anything in that last sentence, don’t worry--we’re changing it anyway!
Resistances have been overhauled to rely on a new formula, which makes partial resists more reliable, obvious, and consistent. From now on, Resistances will grant flat damage reduction.
This change is being applied only to partial resists--binary resists will remain unchanged.
This new system makes the damage reduction granted by resistance a lot simpler. Essentially, resistances function similarly to armor now, granting % damage reduction based on how much of a given resistance you have. So, if you switch on Shadow Protection Aura and find yourself with exactly 60 Shadow Resistance, you can rest happily knowing you’ll be taking exactly 12.587% less shadow damage from all sources.
We hope this new system will allow players to more accurately predict how much resistance they’ll need for things like elemental raid mechanics (fire damage in Molten Core, and Frost effects in Naxxramas), and how much damage their own elemental spells will deal. Although the mitigation resists apply is lower in the beginning--so that players will have to do more than just switch on their paladin auras--resistance is now set up so that the more of a given resistance you have, the more effective each point of it becomes. Additionally, we hope the change makes resistances more predictable in PvP--players looking to overcome certain spell schools can stack resistance to that school, and casters of that school will be able to rely more on spell penetration and effects such as Curse of Elements to guarantee more damage.
To summarize, the RNG nature of resistances is being substituted for a system that is predictable, consistent, and measurable!
Good luck out there, heroes!
