Greedy Goblin

Friday, December 19, 2008

Elemental resistance

!!Tree line, do not cross!!!
This is not a regular GreedyGoblin post, it has nothing to do with making money. This post is not considered "real" and just like "fun" posts, do not count into the post counter. If you received it via a feeder, I'm sorry to interrupt your blogreading. The real post for today is the one below this one.

As a healer, damage reduction always bothered me. While standard melee resistances (avoidance and armor reduction) is well covered by tanks, the elemental resistances are usually ignored. Elemental damage is usually AoE, hitting DPS-ers, whose attitude towards damage mitigation is usually "I don't give a f@#$, heal it". So no one really bothered looking into elemental resistance formulas. In TBC for Illidan flame tanks it was researched that damage reduction is resistance/(casterlevel*5), capped at 0.75.

Since a WotLK boss is lvl83, 415 is the new resist cap. So "capped" I went to Sapphiron, to notice that I resist around half of his frost aura. After noticing that only by having the new crafted frost resist items and paladin aura, one has 484 frost resistance, I was sure that the elemental resistance formula has changed. Since found no data on EJ, I made my own research, with the help of the Wintergrasp elementals (goblinish note: and was shocked by the wast amount of peons farming them):
The red dots are average damage taken/(taken+resisted) for more than 100 hits from lvl 80 elementals on lvl80 myself. As you can see it's far from the old, linear formula, and fits to the damage = 440/(440+resistance) line.

The pink and blue dots are same data from lvl69 and 64 enemies. They fit to the damage = 165/(165+resistance) line. It seems that the number depends on level difference and it's capped somewhere around 10 level difference. However I could not determine the level function since I found not a single elemental in the 71-79 range who would attack with elemental damage instead of physical.

So: there is no such thing as "resist cap" anymore. Every point of resistance decrease damage taken, but by diminishing returns.

I've also made some brief PvP analysis, with the help of my girlfriend. We dueled and I simply stood in her immolation trap with different fire resist gear. The average mitigation was very low, at 307 fire resist, I resisted a bit less than 10% of her fire damage.

6 comments:

Kinzlayer said...

ummm, I see no charts of any kind on this particular post. Where are them red/blue dots???

Gevlon said...

It's there, checked on another computer. Are you sure you have no paranoid adblock that blocks that image?

BTW the image source is http://lh6.ggpht.com/_TkQUof6Z5gM/SUtZQiGcLsI/AAAAAAAAAXg/RmzF5n5gWdg/s800/element.gif

Kinzlayer said...

garrr, firefox and work filter... don't even know when something is blocked. /sigh

Kalon said...

I think that the 'dueling with your girlfriend' test is a bit misleading; I don't believe that player resists and mob resists work the same way. With about 280 FR I mitigated 38% of all fire damage on a Sartharion try. Needless to say that's not what you'd expect from the prior model, but it's much higher than the 10% you'd predict from yours.

Anonymous said...

Kalon,
You have to read the whole post, not just jump down to the last paragraph and assume that was the overall conclusion.

Anonymous said...

I've found roughly the same thing. Sapphiron just didn't sit right with me, so I did the same tests, using a warlock spamming searing pain. I also looked at different resist levels on sapphiron fights. I made a similar post here at tankspot:
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/44338-resistance-mechanics-have-changed.html

I haven't had time to go back and get better stats, but I'd like to get down to around a 1% error margin at 415, 130, and maybe in the 250-300 range to get a decent curve to fit to.