PvP resilience is the stat that provides damage reduction against all damage done by players and their pets or minions. At the start of MoP this was a stat on gear that increased tankiness of players as they got more/higher ilvl PvP gear. In patch 5.3 it was determined that damage was too high if you didn’t have PvP gear. PvP resilience was removed from gear and changed to a baseline % value starting at 65% to go along with that season of PvP counterpart PvP power. PvP power is the stat on all PvP gear that increases damage and healing by a percentage.
As the seasons continued and new levels of PvP power were reached, the baseline stat of PvP Resilience had to be increased to keep the game from being too bursty. We saw Season 13 at 65% resil, Season 14 at 72% resil, and Season 15 at 77% resil. If we go into Season 12 levels of PvP power and Season 15 levels of PvP resil, games will be very slow and damage overall will feel bad.
On the other side of this coin is Battle Fatigue. Introduced in 5.1 this acts as a healing received reduction similar to the mortal strike effect. This had a similar path as PvP resilience being buffed every patch to keep up with the growing amounts up PvP power so that healing didn’t get out of control. Starting out at 15% it was shortly hotfixed to 30% and buffed in 5.3 to 45%, 5.4 to 55%, and finally 5.47 to 60%. It is currently set to 60% in the beta This will make healing overall feel very underwhelming and this affects all classes as it affects passive healing, shields, etc.
Well if damage and healing are both nerfed, why is this important? How long it takes to kill someone is the key. Many comps are dependent on smaller windows for the kill. We don’t want instant burst kill windows like we do in Cata with triple DPS killing people in under 2 seconds, but we want game play that goes beyond who can do the most damage and eventually win the game. If damage is too low long CC chains are impacted negatively, equally high burst damage comps generally burst during a short cooldown window and once the cooldowns are over their odds of winning decrease significantly. There is a healthy balance of how much damage and healing is required based on the size of health pools to help promote diversity in the viable arena compositions.
This all being said, for improved competition in arena and PvP, we will want to update these stats every season. We have historical data for what these values should be in S13, S14, and S15. Season 12 had the introduction of battle fatigue at 15 and buffed to 30% but did PvP resilience via gear and would need a new value determined.
5/21 Beta Updates:
Baseline Resilience Removed, Resilience on is currently on PvP Gear
Battle Fatigue reduced to 30%.
5/22 Beta Update:
PvP Resilience now has a baseline of 35%