Another Saturday, another mostly internal document, but just like the rules, it might be interesting to others as well.
This post is both a discussion starter for the ganking guild about gearing, and also an economic post. While it's obvious that the best PvP gear is the full wrathful set, it would be extremely long to gather it. We are new characters with no previous gear, so reaching high enough arena ratings to gain arena points would be a very long process. The key is proper gear-time ratio. The gear doesn't have to be perfect, it can be upgraded later. Also, we are going to gank and not do arenas, so our talent and gear choices will be different from arena players.
The key PvP stat is resilience. It has been changed a lot to decrease overall damage from players. I used the formulas calculated from the in-game tooltip. 1 resilience rating decrease enemy crit chance by 0.01061%. Well it is not much, but hey, resilience rarely comes in points of one. It also decrease enemy crit damage by 0.02333% and also decreases all damage done by 0.02121%. So if we assume that the enemy has 3000 non-crit DPS and 30% crit chance, his effective DPS is:
Since ganking is usually a quick, unbalanced fight, the priority is not to make huge DPS, but to not die. With less DPS, you still kill the enemy. Since PvE gear does not have resilience on it, PvP gear with resilience is desired. (Miracle! PvP gear is good for PvP!). While many arena matches last until the healer run OOM (actually, it's not intended for a DPS to kill a healer with mana 1v1), I've yet to see a single WG battle when a healer had no mana left (except defender at the gate). So the point is to survive the (maybe focused) fire of the enemy for 10-20 seconds until they are burned down. Stamina also helps a lot here. We have healers, but at the beginning of a 10 vs 10 like battle, there will be lot of damage flying around, so your resilience and stamina can make the difference between living and dieing. Also, as we run with high (-20 kills) death penalty, DPS should be sacrificed for survivability.
PvP gear also have higher stamina than PvE, except tanking pieces. In the example below, I compare mage chests purchasable from badges and honor. The "survivability" is measured in seconds, how long you live under the fire of the enemy introduced in the chart. I assume you already have 18K HP and 800 resilience. That gives you 18000/2827 = 6.37 seconds. In case of PvP gear, there is a 100 resi 2p set bonus. Since I assume that you will wear 4 pieces, I give every PvP gear 25 resi.
The first line represents the "random stuff you get during questing or instancing". If you replace it with the best PvE item, you get 0.2 sec more time. The cheapest PvP item gives 0.5 secs over the random. The next levels of PvP gear give further 0.15-0.15 secs.
The economic question is: does the stat difference worth the extra farming? Don't forget that during playing, aka ganking, you get honor points from the kills, and lot of honor from WG to upgrade your gear. Do you really want to farm HC Nexus 10 times for 0.15 secs? I don't, that's for sure. I'll grab some tolerable starting gear with minimal farming, and go out to gank. The upgrades will come as a by-product.
PS: you might noticed that stam gems are better than resi gems. Remember, it's not arena where the healer mana will be limiting. The healer attention and the luck will be limiting factors.
This post is both a discussion starter for the ganking guild about gearing, and also an economic post. While it's obvious that the best PvP gear is the full wrathful set, it would be extremely long to gather it. We are new characters with no previous gear, so reaching high enough arena ratings to gain arena points would be a very long process. The key is proper gear-time ratio. The gear doesn't have to be perfect, it can be upgraded later. Also, we are going to gank and not do arenas, so our talent and gear choices will be different from arena players.
The key PvP stat is resilience. It has been changed a lot to decrease overall damage from players. I used the formulas calculated from the in-game tooltip. 1 resilience rating decrease enemy crit chance by 0.01061%. Well it is not much, but hey, resilience rarely comes in points of one. It also decrease enemy crit damage by 0.02333% and also decreases all damage done by 0.02121%. So if we assume that the enemy has 3000 non-crit DPS and 30% crit chance, his effective DPS is:
Since ganking is usually a quick, unbalanced fight, the priority is not to make huge DPS, but to not die. With less DPS, you still kill the enemy. Since PvE gear does not have resilience on it, PvP gear with resilience is desired. (Miracle! PvP gear is good for PvP!). While many arena matches last until the healer run OOM (actually, it's not intended for a DPS to kill a healer with mana 1v1), I've yet to see a single WG battle when a healer had no mana left (except defender at the gate). So the point is to survive the (maybe focused) fire of the enemy for 10-20 seconds until they are burned down. Stamina also helps a lot here. We have healers, but at the beginning of a 10 vs 10 like battle, there will be lot of damage flying around, so your resilience and stamina can make the difference between living and dieing. Also, as we run with high (-20 kills) death penalty, DPS should be sacrificed for survivability.
PvP gear also have higher stamina than PvE, except tanking pieces. In the example below, I compare mage chests purchasable from badges and honor. The "survivability" is measured in seconds, how long you live under the fire of the enemy introduced in the chart. I assume you already have 18K HP and 800 resilience. That gives you 18000/2827 = 6.37 seconds. In case of PvP gear, there is a 100 resi 2p set bonus. Since I assume that you will wear 4 pieces, I give every PvP gear 25 resi.
| Gear | Resilience | Stamina | Time gained | Price |
| Drakewing Raiments + 2xstam gem | 0 | 109 | 0.385 | random stuff |
| Bloodmage robe + 2xresi gem | 40 | 109 | 0.501 | 95 frost |
| Bloodmage robe + 2xstam gem | 0 | 169 | 0.597 | 95 frost |
| Relentless gladiator + 2 resi gem | 161 | 164 | 1.087 | 95 frost |
| Relentless gladiator + 2 stam gem | 121 | 224 | 1.178 | 95 frost |
| Furious gladiator + 2 stam gem | 105 | 198 | 1.028 | 75 triumph |
| Deadly gladiator + 2 stam gem | 91 | 175 | 0.898 | 58 conquest |
The first line represents the "random stuff you get during questing or instancing". If you replace it with the best PvE item, you get 0.2 sec more time. The cheapest PvP item gives 0.5 secs over the random. The next levels of PvP gear give further 0.15-0.15 secs.
The economic question is: does the stat difference worth the extra farming? Don't forget that during playing, aka ganking, you get honor points from the kills, and lot of honor from WG to upgrade your gear. Do you really want to farm HC Nexus 10 times for 0.15 secs? I don't, that's for sure. I'll grab some tolerable starting gear with minimal farming, and go out to gank. The upgrades will come as a by-product.
PS: you might noticed that stam gems are better than resi gems. Remember, it's not arena where the healer mana will be limiting. The healer attention and the luck will be limiting factors.
25 comments:
You really don't realize how amazing resil gear is. First of all, nobody ever does 4k dps in pvp. Vs someone with 1000 resil, getting 1k (especially sustained) is practically impossible.
Also, winning by mana drain is a very alternate win strat, rarely happens =)
What you basically say, Gevlon, is that we need skilled people. I am not pessimistic but i don't think we are full of people who did arena in WOTK at 1500+ rating.
P.S.: I am not a social(ist) to believe that people will automatically learn it -_-
Eluzis, 33 Druid
You're making a HUGE mistake in the end of your post.
What killed people in Wrath in the start of WOTLK was not SUSTAINED damage, but burst.
Burst comes as a combination of 3 factors.
DoT covered by a successful string of high crit moves.
Let's take paladins. While they have no instant covering DOTs, their DpS over the course of ONE rotation closes to somewhere around 9000 DPS with all guns loaded against 0 res. (Wings+DpS Trinket. God save you if they proc Berzeking and the libram at the same time.)
While your assesment is correct, what resilience does (much akin to avoidance for tanks for hits) is lessen the probability of a crit string on you.
Let's take a person with 30% crit facing one with 0 and one with 1000 resilience. (effective ~ 20% againt him.)
Taking an average of 3 hits, the probability for all 3 to be crits for 30% is 0.3^3 or 2.7%, while for the person with 20% is a measly 0.8% or three times lower.
Resilience intervenes in reducing the overall damage too. Not only those crit stings will be rarer, they also do up to 22% less damage (for a 1000 res guy).
If damage would be flat and liner, your post would be absolutely correct. In PvP, damage is anything BUT flat and linear and its utterly WRONG to calculate survavibility on average DpS.
In fact, it looks that you could benefit from applying the TTL calculations of tanks. (Worst case scenarios.)
You'll find out that resilience affects worst case scenarios a LOT heavier than either stamina, or stamina gemmed PvE gear.
"and the luck"
There is no luck. There is statistics. High crit strings are not a result of luck, they are a result of insufficiently understood statistical difference between stamina and resilience.
If you'd get a tank who is not Def capped in your instance and blame his death on 'luck' would you kick him? After all, with 0 extra defense, the average damage taken per second by the tank is only 6.2% higher! Why would he need to farm heroic nexus for 10 times when he can just go to ICC and get upgrades along the way?
If you would kick him (which you rightly should, tanks don't believe in luck), what makes a PvP'er different?
Burst is burst is burst.
just reactivated my account recently. jumped on my 80 sham in ulduar hard mode gear. did some wsg, pretty much dying to anything (esp rog/lock/mage) inside a global cooldown. not uncommon for a 17k arc blast or 10k chaos bolt followed by 9k conflag. as resto i have 2500 heal power, which is still quite competitive.
so for my "zero-effort" of reactivation and logging in, i was killed in a global. i think as a newly dinged 80, it would be similar. i spent 200g buying the lvl78 set with resil on it, gets you about 500 resil. lasted a bit longer!
also in uld gear, couldn't get passed 1400 arena rating and this is with a full relentless dk with t2 weap carrying me - would just die in a global. with the blue gear we've managed 1800.
@Kaaterina: Tanks CAN and should be crit-immune. However one CANNOT be crit-immune against PvP. Simply, resilience caps at 33% and most classes have higher crit chance. An arcane-fire mage popping PoM-Pyro will crit around 60%. In full resi, it's still 27%.
That's luck factor. However higher stamina can make the difference of being 3-shotted and 4 shotted. In PvP, that's huge.
It's also luck that in a larger battle who get attacked by multiple targets. While it can be modified by strategy (sending a prot pally, prot warri or bear to charge them and stupid people attack the closest), one can still be multi-targeted. Stam makes the difference between heals arrive and not
I think that the posters are on to something Gevlon, have you looked at, for instance, how long a ret pally's rotation is, and compared that to how long they're just auto attacking?
As a stamina stacking tank, I can't say you're totally wrong in how you view stamina vs. resilience. However, I know that we tanks are stacking stamina because we're going to get up in front of big ugly and take the best he can dish out for 3 - 10 minutes. In that time, we will get an unlucky string at some point.
That being said, the likelihood of unlucky strings goes way down when you shrink the timeframe. So it seems like your calculations might be weighted the wrong way.
I'll put some thought into it and if I come up with good math I'll share it.
Is there any variations by class? IIRC, prior to resilence getting buffed, some rogues were using PvE gear. I.e., the best defense is to kill them first before all the cheap shot, blind, dismantle, kick stuns wore off. And with the high burst, resil was not going to add too much time to a ret pally unloading.
I am sure that you know much more about PvP than I, and that res gear is the right answer after the buff, but one thing your chart does not show is that res gear causes you to live longer, but it also causes your opponent to live longer as well since it reduces your outgoing DPS.
I assume that world PvP hks are relatively irrelevant to getting gear? Getting 0.5 hk/sec (1800/hr) is currently not unreasonable; more once you can trade in marks for hk and they buff the BG welfare epic faucet.
Since the daily BG awards a few arena points, you will eventually get Relentless without running any PvE.
It's more about the real encounter than about the raw numbers. The question is not "can you survive x dps?" it's "can you survive to the end of this stun?" Very different questions.
Reducing your chance to be crit is absolutely huge in that equation - many classes rely on crits pretty heavily.
you could also consider the PVP craftables blues
http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=cr=79:86;crs=1:11;crv=0:0;gb=1#hands:0-2+1
Gevlon, I've already experimented with this at 80. Having the craftable BLUE pvp gear is better for doing pvp, than even ilvl 200-213 purples.
I know this is only anecdotal evidence, but it's what I've seen. Also, did you look at wintergrasp gear?
If you are ganking, wouldn't it make sense to go for the highest dps gear? You can generally expect to have the element of surprise on your side, which can often mean 2-5 seconds of free dps against an unprepared opponent. Under those conditions, wouldn't it be best to maximize dps and not worry about survivability, especially when working as part of a group?
@Anonymous: 1 death = 20 kill. So I'd better be safe than sorry. While high DPS PvE gear would work when we jump a daily questing spellpower hunter, if we do some more serious thing (like blocking some quest objective for a longer time) we can expect hordies to team up.
Have you considered running 10 5v5 a week? You earn 344 arena point even losing, at the end of the second week you have earned 1038 points ((344*2)+(25*14)), that's enough to buy relentless shoulders+gloves.
PvP is all about Burst, DPS don't matter.
Two or tree crits in a row can be very deadly, even at 30k Life.
I am not sure if the craftable blues are the way to go ^_^
Since you can get good Setgear with Emblems and most of the offsetgear with honour, you should think about guild in run bgs and such~
264epics > 200blues and its not very hard to roll in a bg with determined people :)
But this isn't about BG's (sure they might want to do some) but this project is about ganking. World pvp doesnt matter how determined you are because there are no predefined limits i.e 10vs10, 15vs15 etc.
In a realm where horde outnumbers them up to 10:1 they will pretty much always be outnumbered when the calvary arrives. But they don't want to be out-stated (not gearscored, i'm talking pvp stats) too.
Also try to get as much healers as you can get. Maybe 50% Healer 50% DPS are ideal if you only care about surviving.
Also remember the craftable epic frost resist gear that has a ton of stam on it. Socket those pieces with resilience gems/enchants and you have a bunch of survivability in a few pieces to offset any pve gear you choose to wear.
Also like Anon said above me, pvp is about burst, resilience kills burst. The amount of damage reduction on crits will allow you to survive the burst better than stam in every case.
Well obviously but the craftable blue set is pretty worthless, iirc its less then 400 resil and less then 20k health with enchants if all your wearing is the pvp blues. Back in the first season of arena in Wotlk it was common to see people wearing pve gear because the amount of resil and stamina on the craftable blue and deadly sets were and still are pretty much useless. Especially for where burst is taken into consideration. Yes PVP gear is going to be essential but i think grinding the relentless gear in bg's or heroics even if it takes a while is going to be much much more beneficial then to try to go ganking in the blue pvp gear.
How has no one pointed out that you can't grind heroics for RELENTLESS gear? They cost FROST emblems.
Gevlon, I think it might be worth reconsidering the +1/-20 points system. Depending on how you use the score, I can see a few different ways that it could create perverse incentives (or even be abused):
1) In pvp, healers are important. As a result, they are both critical to your success as a group and also one of the first things targeted by opposing players. With the heavy penalty on deaths, there is a strong negative individual incentive for healing despite the pressing group need for healers.
2) Players receive HKs simply for participating in a fight (or being nearby, in some cases). Actual performance in a fight is, as far as I can tell, not factored in. This encourages players to remain close to a fight (to get the benefit) but to hang around on the outskirts of a fight rather than charging into the middle (to minimize the risk of getting -20). As an example, pressuring the opposing healer may be a bad idea because you are more likely to die while the group succeeds. In other words, what is good for the group may be bad for one individual.
3) If members of your guild are in competition with each other for points, it may be easier to get ahead by killing fellow guild members than by killing members of the opposing faction. Imagine: your healer intentionally stops healing you during the fight to run away! They would gain 20 points relative to your own score.
Situations similar to those that I mention above could be very interesting because they pit the good of the individual against the good of the group. There doesn't seem to be a mechanic here for enlightened self-interest. An especially ardent goblin would seek to maximize his own success, perhaps in ways contrary to Gevlon's (stated) goals for this project.
Also, more generally, the 1:20 ratio appears to have been arbitrarily chosen. Why not 5, 10 or some other number? Just as prices are based on what happens in the economy, so should points be based on the realities of pvp combat.
"However one CANNOT be crit-immune against PvP."
You won't always be fighting Fire mages in full raid buffs. Spellcasters in PvP gear have less then a 20% chance to crit. Resilience can eat all of it.
You also can't discount getting killed through healing. As a healer in BGs, I don't even bother healing the baddies wearing PvE gear. It doesn't matter if they have 15K health, or 28K health - both are equally unhealable. The only difference between the two is that the 15K health huntard will die before my spellcast finishes, while the 28K health warrior will die after one of my spellcasts finishes.
I'd much rather heal someone with 15K health and 1000 resilience, then someone with 30K health and 0.
Gev, Most people you will be ganking will not be running around in there full PvP gear, I do quite a bit of ganking and VERY rarley run across anyone in PvP gear.
Im doing 2's(Hunter(Me) and resto drood, and/or resto shammy) right now and, @1150 resil, I average 1k DPS for the night in 2's, thats for about 50 matches. We are only at 1200 right now but moving up.
Its amazing how quick you can tell when someone is wearing PvE or PvP gear. You can burn/surviv though 3 or 4 people that are in there PvE gear with out a prob.
I would reconsider not doing arena. 10 games takes around 45 mins- an hour tops. Even if you lose every match you will still gain arena points and full relentless can be bought without any rating at all. Think the most expensive piece is like 700 arena points and 11k honor or something along those lines. If you do 10 games every week and do the daily bg's you could have a full set of relentless in around 8 weeks without ever having to touch a heroic or have a high rating.
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