Quote from Blizzard staff
Resilience damage reduction doubled (Source Re: Resilience requires additional alteration)
We think crits need to be proportionately weaker in PvP than in PvP. I'll explain why in a minute, but first let me reiterate that the buff we are making to resilience just affects damage. The relative value of crit in PvP won't change at all with this hotfix. You won't be critting less or doing less proportional damage when you crit. If you hit now for 3000 and crit 30% of the time for 6000 then after this change you might hit for 2700 and crit 30% of the time for 5400. Crit damage will be lower, but crit damage relative to normal damage will not. We don't want to get to the point where a crit is actually mitigated lower than an actual hit. That would be bizarre and do bad things for a lot of talent trees.
As to why we think resilience needs to reduce crits, it's because you're playing against another human and not an AI-controlled creature. Creatures generally don't heal or blow defensive cooldowns, or at least not very well. The ability to pack a lot of damage into a small time window is much more important in PvP just because the opposing player or team have so much control over the size of that window. If you whittle them down to 10% of their health but can't "close the deal" then they may be back up at 50% or 100% in no time. This kind of mechanic happens in PvE too, but much more rarely. The ability to crit in PvE is important largely because it buffs your damage or keys into talents. But the burst portion of crits themselves (high damage in a short amount of time) is much more important in PvP. Thus, we think the value and role of crit would be too high in PvP without a way to mitigate that through stacking resilience.
PvE Gear in PvP (Source Re: PvP Resilience Changes)
I think teams may try to focus on PvE gear as a way of blowing up healers on the other team. If that doesn't work (because the healer has resilience), then the PvE-geared guys won't have the survivability to stick around long. If you can't blow people up very quickly, then the glass-cannon thing just doesn't work and longevity becomes more important to everyone. If you can blow up healers too easily (while wearing PvE gear), then we might need to buff resilience even more. If you can blow up dps specs wearing PvE gear easily, well, mission accomplished. If you can never defeat healers (note I said defeat, not blow up in 2 globals) then we will need to nerf healing. Again, the goal is to have slightly longer matches with a little more back and forth. (Emphasis on "little" -- 20 min matches can be as tedious as 20 sec matches are unsatisfying.)
We think crits need to be proportionately weaker in PvP than in PvP. I'll explain why in a minute, but first let me reiterate that the buff we are making to resilience just affects damage. The relative value of crit in PvP won't change at all with this hotfix. You won't be critting less or doing less proportional damage when you crit. If you hit now for 3000 and crit 30% of the time for 6000 then after this change you might hit for 2700 and crit 30% of the time for 5400. Crit damage will be lower, but crit damage relative to normal damage will not. We don't want to get to the point where a crit is actually mitigated lower than an actual hit. That would be bizarre and do bad things for a lot of talent trees.
As to why we think resilience needs to reduce crits, it's because you're playing against another human and not an AI-controlled creature. Creatures generally don't heal or blow defensive cooldowns, or at least not very well. The ability to pack a lot of damage into a small time window is much more important in PvP just because the opposing player or team have so much control over the size of that window. If you whittle them down to 10% of their health but can't "close the deal" then they may be back up at 50% or 100% in no time. This kind of mechanic happens in PvE too, but much more rarely. The ability to crit in PvE is important largely because it buffs your damage or keys into talents. But the burst portion of crits themselves (high damage in a short amount of time) is much more important in PvP. Thus, we think the value and role of crit would be too high in PvP without a way to mitigate that through stacking resilience.
PvE Gear in PvP (Source Re: PvP Resilience Changes)
I think teams may try to focus on PvE gear as a way of blowing up healers on the other team. If that doesn't work (because the healer has resilience), then the PvE-geared guys won't have the survivability to stick around long. If you can't blow people up very quickly, then the glass-cannon thing just doesn't work and longevity becomes more important to everyone. If you can blow up healers too easily (while wearing PvE gear), then we might need to buff resilience even more. If you can blow up dps specs wearing PvE gear easily, well, mission accomplished. If you can never defeat healers (note I said defeat, not blow up in 2 globals) then we will need to nerf healing. Again, the goal is to have slightly longer matches with a little more back and forth. (Emphasis on "little" -- 20 min matches can be as tedious as 20 sec matches are unsatisfying.)
