I had a very nice reader question mailed in that I thought was very relevant considering yesterdays’ mammoth bear tank gear post.

Sköll of Aerie Peak wrote in; 

I want to thank you for the awesome post “Gearing your bear tank from
70 to Karazhan!”

I downloaded Rawr and made a few customizations to my gear and bearing in mind the defense cap, here are the stats I came up with

Defense Rating: 136
Resilience: 18
Dodge: 37.6434%
Miss: 6.666667%
Mitigation: 72.53479%
Dodge + Miss: 44.31007%
Total Mitigation: 82.77659%
Damage Taken: 17.22341%
Chance to be Crit: -0.123253%

with both Glyph of the Defender and exalted Scryers inscription.

As you can see the report says I’m uncrittable by raid bosses (mouseover shows 7 Defense Rating or 4 Resilience over the crit cap)

After making the calculation manually (136*0.423)+350=407/415.

I know there is some Resilience, but I don’t think it will make me crit immune together with the Defense Rating.

Best Regards!

Thanks for your email, Sköll, I appreciate it. And it is a very timely comment to make.

If you want to compute your actual Defense from Defense Rating manually, then you are correct, you can use the formula;

(DR*0.423)+350= Defense

But what you need to do to be completely accurate, is to add in the equivalent value of Resilience to the Defense Rating in that formula.

Now, we’ve covered this in other places before, but let’s go over the basics.

While Resilience and Defense also do other things, we are ONLY concerned with their function to remove the chance to be critically hit. And with 3/3 talented in Survival of the Fittest, you need 415 Defense in order to be uncrittable to level 73 raid bosses.

With that firmly in mind,

59 Defense Rating = -1% Crit.
39.4 Resilience = -1% Crit.

Therefore, 59 DR = 39.4 Resilience.

So 1 Resilience = 1.497~ Defense Rating.

Remember, we need whole numbers. So round down when actually doing the math.

In your example above, you would have 136 Defense Rating, and 18 Resilience.

18 Resilience is equal to 26~ Defense Rating. Round it down to 26.

136+26 = an equivalency of 162 Defense Rating.

(162*0.423)+350 = 418 Defense. 3 Defense over the cap.

And as a cross check against Rawr, 3 Defense = 7.092 Defense Rating.

See?

I am very glad that people are not blindly assuming that Rawr is correct, and that you are doing your own math to determine the truth. That kicks ass.

I just hope that this will help to show you that the Resilience really does make that big of a difference, and help you in doing your own math so you can figure this out on your own, assuming you are crazy, OR are unable to run Windows .NET applications.

Oh, and can I just mention again how tired I am of needing to do math, even simple math like this, just to make sure I can correctly perform my role in raids?

Well, I guess only us min/maxers that want to optimize our builds need to do this. I should shut up and just enjoy having the tools to get our job done.

Have a great day folks!

PS: What I really need to do is contact Astrylian, and interview him on what level of genius it took to make Rawr in the first place. Hmm, idea for a future WoW Insider article. Cool.

I am so sick of the same stuff, different year.

True story, conversation I had with a guy at work yesterday on the production line. Young guy, into cars mostly, racing and stuff for reals (you should see his ‘road car’, it’s pretty sweet) but during the winter months he playes video games, WoW, etc.

And we’re talking about the Rock Band announcements for the Wii (no downloadable content), and he tells me, “Oh, I’m a huge Nintendo fanboi. I’ve always bought everything they make. But I sold my Wii a few months after I bought it. It’s awesome they have held their value so well, I really got my money out of it. Nintendo really lost me with the way they handled this one.”

 And I know what he meant.

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