Resilience affects Holy damage
Yesterday I looked at some Holy damage myths, including the rumor that Holy damage bypasses Resilience. This is not the case in Wrath of the Lich King. I went ahead and beat the ever-loving crap out of Elowyn in his uber Resilience gear and his uber PvE gear did some personal tests and came up with the following results:
PvE gear results
Non-crit Smite: ~2471
Crit Smite: ~3579
Crit chance: 40%
I did this in my healing gear–lackluster Critical and lower spellpower in exchange for Spirit and Haste–so the numbers are a bit fudgy, but they still illustrate well enough what my healing gear would pew as in a PvE situation. Now we look at the same target in his PvP gear…
1000+ Resilience results
Non-crit Smite: ~2213
Crit Smite: ~2533
Crit chance: 9%
Huge difference, especially in the Crit chance! It might have increased a little with a larger sampling of Smite casts, but it wasn’t going to come close to the numbers derived from the same target without the Resilience.
This means that Smite priests suffer an extraordinary setback in PvP situations; not so much in the reduction of damage, but in the lowered Crit chance, translating into less Surge of Light procs. Lower damage is always a minus, but if you take away Critical strike, you’ve taken away the bread-and-butter of smite spec; Penance does more damage than Smite when Surge of Light and other Holy DPS talents are yanked from the picture.
But don’t despair! Even if the damage is thwarted significantly, a PvP smite spec still has the advantage of Blessed Resilience. Read more about how to PvP with smite spec, whether Resilience is thwarting you or not!–or check out a deeper Holy tree PvP build!
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