Resilience - how important is it to casual ProtPVP?

Thanks to this forum, I feel I have a very good grasp of what matters for ProtPVE gear but I am pretty clueless about PVP and in particular the resilience stat. If I play in battlegrounds casually, how much more "squishy" - if at all - I am in emblem of triumph Prot gear (a mix of ilevel 200 to 245 depending on slot) than if I were in PVP (Ret) gear? Can anyone help me quantify how much getting resilience would help me?

I understand that getting ret PVP gear would help even a Prot spec paladin do more damage (thanks to strength), but at the moment I am just thinking about the defensive side. I fall alarmingly quickly in most PVP fights and am wondering how much proper PvP gear would help. It doesn't really bother me, as I am just messing about, but I am thinking down the line of using accumulated honour and may be even some emblems to get PvP gear and wondering how much it will help.

As a BS, I made all the starter PVP gear but from I've read, I'd be better off in my emblem PVE gear - is that correct? The honour price tag on gladiator stuff is a little steep for a very occasional PVPer like myself, but ironically, could be quite affordable from PVE thanks to emblems. What level of resilience should one aim for? Are there any rough benchmarks - like "X resilience will increase survivability by Y%"?

I have no intention of doing arenas, but would just like to understand PvP gear as well as I understand PvE. Resilience is essentially a defensive stat like armour, stamina and ... erm ... defence, so in principle, one should be able to quantify their relative benefits. However, I have no idea whether giving up a PvE piece with X effective health is worth it to gain Y resilience. Anyone done the maths?

econ21 wrote:Thanks to this forum, I feel I have a very good grasp of what matters for ProtPVE gear but I am pretty clueless about PVP and in particular the resilience stat. If I play in battlegrounds casually, how much more "squishy" - if at all - I am in emblem of triumph Prot gear (a mix of ilevel 200 to 245 depending on slot) than if I were in PVP (Ret) gear? Can anyone help me quantify how much getting resilience would help me?

I understand that getting ret PVP gear would help even a Prot spec paladin do more damage (thanks to strength), but at the moment I am just thinking about the defensive side. I fall alarmingly quickly in most PVP fights and am wondering how much proper PvP gear would help. It doesn't really bother me, as I am just messing about, but I am thinking down the line of using accumulated honour and may be even some emblems to get PvP gear and wondering how much it will help.

As a BS, I made all the starter PVP gear but from I've read, I'd be better off in my emblem PVE gear - is that correct? The honour price tag on gladiator stuff is a little steep for a very occasional PVPer like myself, but ironically, could be quite affordable from PVE thanks to emblems. What level of resilience should one aim for? Are there any rough benchmarks - like "X resilience will increase survivability by Y%"?

I have no intention of doing arenas, but would just like to understand PvP gear as well as I understand PvE. Resilience is essentially a defensive stat like armour, stamina and ... erm ... defence, so in principle, one should be able to quantify their relative benefits. However, I have no idea whether giving up a PvE piece with X effective health is worth it to gain Y resilience. Anyone done the maths?

Anywhere from 800-1000 for any non healer is about right for current arena gear, which is somewhere in the range of 18-24% reduced chance to crit and 8-10% less damage taken (which will be doubling soon) For casual pvp, wear your prot set for now and pick up the furious gear with triumph badges as you can. As a decently gear prot you'll be fine against most melee, but a good caster will rip you apart.

At work and can't do any legit numbers with it (plus I'm probably not the strongest person here with numbers)

I feel decently solid with 794 resilience. You won't need as much resilience as most other classes because of the passive damage reduction we get from talents.
The fastest way to get the gear is to run heroics and buy the furious gear. Use the agil/crit damage meta and gem strength except for either a nightmare tear or 2 hybrid strength gems in a socket that gives strength.

I can't quantify how squishy you are without resilience, but I routinely chase down and kill prot pallies in their pve gear with 40k+ health. I purposely hunt down any prot pally in a bg or wg wearing pve gear. They hit like a kitten.

Last season, I ran around with 600 resillience as Protpvp if it helps I wasn;t at all squishy, Even felt i could lose some more Resillience for High Strength/BV peices.

For casual ProtPVP I'd load up on resilience. To me, casual implies BGs, wintergrasp, etc. In higher level arena, you often see some classes such as Prot paladins, holy paladins, Warriors, and Mages use a lot of PvE pieces instead of resilience. This is because arena is functionally different. You have a preset amount of enemies, no fear of respawns, usually have a healer, and in general you can more reliably tell what your teammates will do. These factors, combined with class skills, allow some people to drop survival stats in favor of utility/damage stats. For example, Holy paladin / Disc Priest / Warrior. In this set up, the warrior can wear a lot of PvE gear because he knows he'll get healed pretty reliably if necessary. Now, if this was Ret Paladin / Resto Druid / Warrior, the warrior would be inclined to wear a lot more resilience.

That said, Prot is a very forgiving spec. I would wear as much resilience as naturally occurs on gear in casual PvP simply because you're not looking to acquire the skills or setting where non-survival issues take place.

Now, don't ignore item level. Stamina is important, resilience is important, but if you have 100000 stamina and 200 attack power you'll still get owned - and it wouldn't be any fun.

Thanks for the replies. Trying to take the numbers a bit further, I guess it depends on how often you are subject to critical hits.

From the wiki:

"1% Resilience will:
Reduce chance to be crit by 1%
Reduce damage from all crits by 2.2%
Reduce all player-caused damage by an additional 1%
Reduce mana drained by 2.2%"

I guess the hotfix changed the "additional 1%" to an additional 2%.

So to work out the damage reduction from resilience, we need to know the typical chance your opponent has of critting you. I guess that may be lower for us than some other class/specs due to our defence. What would be a reasonable ballpark figure? 30%? I pick that as Ghostcrawler used it in a recent post on resilience mechanics.

If we take 30% as the base chance to be critted, I calculate 1% resilience equates to 3.7% damage reduction[1]. And 10% resilience to just short of a third damage reduction (32%).


[1] Without resilience, 30% crit chance does 1.3 base damage.
With 1% resilience, 29% of the time you will be hit for 0.98 base damage and 71% of the time for 2*0.98*0.978 base damage, for a total of 1.252 base damage. Damage reduction is thus 1-[1.252/1.3].

Has anyone a feel for whether a 30% crit chance is high, low or about right for the benchmark? For prot spec in PvE ret gear? For ret spec in PvE ret gear? I guess I should not be concerned about prot gear, as the consensus seems to be to use ret gear even if prot specced in order to kill stuff.

Stack resilience... a lot... combined with talents you survive SOOOO long in BG's and casual scenarios. I'm almost at 1100 resilience and it definitely shows.

Try to reach at least 800-900 resil rating.

It helps a lot and you will still do the job.

Spam Bot whose post is soon to be deleted wrote:You could wear neat jeans with an smart-ish shirt un-tucked, and I'm sure that won't be frowned upon. Wear them with a sport coat or something.

I do not think those items offer enough resilience.

And there are far, far better items available for the coat slot.