The in-game information in this article is kept purely for historical purposes and may not need to remain under any other categories.
Resilience is a character attribute that reduces all damage taken from players and their pets or minions. This is the bread and butter PvP stat. The reduction has no effect on the damage taken from mobs. It was replaced by PvP Resilience in the Mists of Pandaria expansion.
Characters have no innate resilience. It can only be gained through external sources, e.g. equipment, elixirs, enchantments, and gems. Many items and recipes that grant resilience rating are PvP rewards.
Resilience was introduced with World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade as part of the new combat rating system. Previously, no such resilience mechanic existed — as a result, resilience rating only appears on items available to players over level 60, with some rare exceptions. Formerly, resilience reduced the damage taken from critical strikes and spell critical strikes, reduced the chance of suffering a critical strike, and reduced the effect of mana drain spells. Each point of resilience would give a player about 1% less chance to be critically struck.
Just before the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Patch 4.0.1 made a dramatic change to resilience. Resilience no longer reduced the chance to receive a critical strike. Each point of resilience provides about 0.01% damage reduction against all damage done by players and their pets or minions.
Formula
This section concerns content that is out-of-date. Reason: Probably needs a update.
The resilience formula was changed in Patch 4.1. Resilience was made not linear and no longer offered increasing returns.
And the formula for Patch 4.1 was:
y = 1 - 0.99 ^ ( x / 79.12785 )
Prior to Patch 4.1, Resilience followed a linear return. Where y represented the damage reduction percentage, and x represented the amount of resilience, the linear formulas was as followed:
y = 0.01050120510299x + 0.000605956904
For example, damage was reduced by 15.75% when 1500 resilience was equipped:
This section concerns content that is out-of-date.
The resilience cap was 9523. Equipping 9523 resilience would provide 100% damage reduction. Having more than 9523 resilience equipped was overkill and provided absolutely no benefit. However, equipping this amount of resilience was impossible. In Patch 4.1.0, diminishing returns on resilience would provide an effective resilience cap.
Enhancements
This section concerns content that is out-of-date.
Leg Slot
[Earthen Leg Armor]: Permanently adds 28 stamina and 40 resilience rating to a leg slot item.
Patch 4.1.0 (26-Apr-2011): Resilience formula made non-linear.
/Patch 4.0.1 (12-Oct-2010): Resilience no longer reduces the chance a player will be critically hit by an opponent.
Hotfix (2010-01-20): Resilience damage reduction doubled. So depending on their current amount of resilience, characters might experience a 10 to 20% decrease in damage taken from other players.
Patch 3.2.0 (04-Aug-2009): No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. In addition, the amount of resilience needed to reduce critical strike chance, critical strike damage and overall damage has been increased by 15%.
Patch 3.0.3 (04-Nov-2008): The damage reduction component of resilience has been increased from 2 times the critical strike chance reduction to 2.2 times the critical strike chance reduction. In addition, the maximum damage reduction to a critical strike from resilience has been increased from 30% to 33%.
Patch 2.4.0 (25-Mar-2008): Now reduces the magnitude of mana draining effects by the same amount that it reduces critical strike damage. The Tooltip has been revised to reflect this.