Defense Theory III: PvP Defense

In PvP, the situation is quite different.

As mentionned in the Attack Table post, the attack table in PvP has neither Crushing Blows nor glancing blows:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Critical Strike
Normal Hit

Contrary to what happens against PvE bosses, however, the Critical Strike range isn’t a fixed range, oh no. Through gear and talents, an enemy has the means to increase the base 5% chance against an equal-level opponents by several orders of magnitudes. For instance, with the proper talent build, a rogue can get 65% crit chance on Ambush before even factoring in bonuses from his gear.
PvP fights are mainly a mobility affair. A normal opponent will usually not stand around waiting for his foe to beat him up, so decreasing Normal Hit range is often pretty moot. As for ranged attacks, you cannot dodge, parry or block them.

Due to these factors inherent to PvP, improving your Defense Rating becomes pretty useless in the sense that the only practical benefit lies in broadening your chance to be missed by a small percentage - getting out of range, CC, breaking a caster’s Line of Sight (LoS) are other means to achieve the same results. In terms of gearing, your focus will also be different, mainly a mix of staying power (health) and offensive power (or healing power).

That’s where Resilience fits in. Resilience not only narrows an opponent’s Critical Strike window, thus diminishing the chance your health gets suddenly bursted down by a sizeable chunk (most DPS classes also have talents which boost their crit damage significantly, another reason to focus on getting critted less often), it also diminishes the amount of damage a crit will inflict to you. In the next patch, Resilience will even mitigate part of the damage generated from DoTs (which is a bit counterintuitive in terms of what Resilience was normally meant to do - reduce your exposure to burst damage- but come on, would you really have wanted that Blizzard introduce yet another Combat Rating to address DoTs? Let’s not go there please).

As a conclusion to this series of posts about Defense Theory, we can break Defense Ratings down as follows:

• In PvE (mainly for tanking), Defense Rating first, then Dodge, Parry and Block rating are what you should be after. Resilience is essentially pointless (with the caveat on T5+ Druid tanks due to itemization issues) because its focus is way too narrow.
• In PvP, however, Defense Rating falls short in preventing the kind of damage which can fell you within a mere couple of seconds, Critical Hits. This is where Resilience shines because it is the gaming mechanism put in place to address that precise problem.

Whee. Finished at last, after a long RL hiatus. There you go.

On Similar Matters

• Defense Theory: Introduction (0)
• Defense Theory II: PvE Defense for Tanks (2)
• Defense Theory I: The Attack Table and You (4)
• The new 2.3 GCD and Stopcasting on Live (1)
• The Losing AV gives Zero Honour Fallacy (4)

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