Crit, Hit and its new brother Resilience

It looks like the Burning Crusade expansion will be introducing at least one new statistic for players to add to their number crunching add-ons. Now keep in mind this is from a leaked alpha test so it could just be unfounded rumors but it seems as if this new stat will reduce the critical strike chance an opponent will have against you. Critical strikes play a big part in producing burst damage which is needed to kill opponents in a player vs. player environment. A steady damage output without any spikes makes it easy for your opponent to recognize trouble and use either healing or crowd control.

That's why this new stat called resilience could have such an impact on the game. It doesn't directly effect your character but instead effects your targets. Already the +hit stat does much the same thing by either reducing a target's defense or spell resistance. But the +hit stat only indirectly affects the critical strike chance against an opponent by slightly raising the chance your attacks will land. Resilience will directly affect an opponents stats and thus be unknowable by them. This makes number crunching much harder to do and introduces a larger unknown factor.

Perhaps in a move to make all this number crunching a bit easier for its customers several new commands are being included in the WoW scripting language: GetCritChance(), GetRangedCritChance(), and GetSpellCritChance(school). These new commands are useful for calculating your own critical strike chances but don't give you any information on your target's resilience or resistances. Thus you could have a range critical strike chance of 25% but if your opponent has +5% resilience then your critical chance is actually only 20% against them.

This is both a good and bad thing. On one side casters have had to deal with not knowing the resistances of their targets since the beginning of the game and this stat just evens the playing field between them and melees. On the other side since there are no "schools" of physical attacks like magic the stat has the potential to be overpowered. For example just look at the classes that have low crit chances like druids and paladins. Both have very little in the way of burst damage and are not known for getting killing blows. Anyone who managed to equip themselves in high resilience gear would find most of their opponents physically hitting them like a paladin or druid bear.

A high dps class equipped in such a manner with a good weapon could become the bane of the pvp game. Blizzard will either have to make resilience a rare stat or increase the amount of +crit and +hit itemization proportionally. If resilience is a rare stat then Blizzard will have to make sure to include it in both PvP and PvE. If not then we could easily have the same situation we have today where if you want to pvp competitively you have to raid.