Spell Hit

[Vicarious]

I think spell hit might still be off somehow, or spell penetration is, I have 4.2% spell hit and 60 spell pen but warriors are still resisting my fire spells. Only Sub Rogues, Balance druids, and Ret paladins should be resisting me at the moment.

[Cube]

No matter if the system is broken or not, everyone will always be able to resist your spells. That's just how hit works in tbc.

[Pyrendora]

Also, spell penetration to my knowledge does not decrease the chance to resist, but simply negates your targets spell resistance. Resistance acts as "spell armor" only lowering damage taken but not increasing the chance to resist, saying that, the effects of spell penetration/spell resistance were never conclusively tested to my knowledge, if anyone could find documentation to prove otherwise, that would be quite helpful.

[Cube]

Also, spell penetration to my knowledge does not decrease the chance to resist, but simply negates your targets spell resistance. Resistance acts as "spell armor" only lowering damage taken but not increasing the chance to resist, saying that, the effects of spell penetration/spell resistance were never conclusively tested to my knowledge, if anyone could find documentation to prove otherwise, that would be quite helpful.

That's wrong. Spell resistance increases chance to resist spells, as well as decreasing damage done by them.

[Vicarious]

No matter if the system is broken or not, everyone will always be able to resist your spells. That's just how hit works in tbc.

Yeah but the resist chance should be 1% (against all but three classes) with my stats as they are, yet I see several resists every single battleground. Of course I don't expect fears and Shadowfuries to land on Feral druids or Orc warriors, I'm talking specifically damage spells that simply shouldn't be resisted that often.

[Cube]

Yeah but the resist chance should be 1% (against all but three classes) with my stats as they are, yet I see several resists every single battleground. Of course I don't expect fears and Shadowfuries to land on Feral druids or Orc warriors, I'm talking specifically damage spells that simply shouldn't be resisted that often.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. At times, spell hit does seem rather weird.

[Vicarious]

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. At times, spell hit does seem rather weird.

Definitely and I doubt it'll be solved but figured I'd keep it relevant with a new post. Anyways I guess we should just switch our main classes, rogue or warrior?

[Vicarious]

So I decided to test this out best I could, and started by rolling 7% (soft cap is 3% but Subtlety, Balance, and Retribution have talents reducing their chance to be hit by spells by 4%, making the hardcap 7) hit and 66 spell penetration and just playing lots of BGs and dueling plenty like I normally do.

Hit seems to be working, in fact I tend to land spells through cloak of shadows sometimes, and I almost never see resists in 1v1. Yet I was still seeing resists on Incinerates and immolates and other damage spells, but then I realized it was more at the beginning of the BG when everybody has buffs from the whole team, and I figured since shadow resist can get pretty and since druids have 25-35ish for everybody it had to be resistance or spell pen.

So I was dueling Apu many times in his like 240 resist gear, and got the very opposite of what I expected, my spell penetration didn't even matter, he barely resisted any of my spells, but simply resisted portions of the damage, even when I took off all my spell pen gear. But if I recall, BC works like this, every spell is a chance to be full damage, 3/4 damage, 1/2 damage, 1/4 damage, or a full resist. The higher your resistance, the higher chance you have of fully resisting the spell, thus in his 250 and up shadow resist gear against my 50 spell penetration he should have been fully resisting very often, yet he almost never did, maybe once per 30 shadowbolts/corruptions. Any input here or anybody else seeing these problems?

In Wrath, Blizz changed things so they resistance just reduced spell damage taking rather than working the old resist rolling, so I'm wondering if somebody was confused about this and got Hen to change to this system in the past?

[Cube]

In Wrath, Blizz changed things so they resistance just reduced spell damage taking rather than working the old resist rolling, so I'm wondering if somebody was confused about this and got Hen to change to this system in the past?

No, they didn't.

[Exsurgo]

I thought I would chime in on this one. We changed the spell resistance system about 10 months ago.

Now all spells are either Binary or non-binary spells.

Binary spells are spells that do more than one effect on a target, or spells that cause no damage.

• Frostbolt is a binary spell (it does damage and applies a slow)
  Wound Poison is a binary spell (it does damage and applies a healing debuff)
  Immolate is binary (applies damage and a dot)
  Shadowbolt is non-binary (only applies damage, and talent triggered effects are not counted)
  Counterspell is a binary spell

Binary spells can only ever hit for 100% of their effect, or not at all.
Non-binary spells can have a complete 100% resist or a 75% to ~0% damage resist. (This is determined by a sliding formula based upon spell penetration and spell resistance)

This is a reason why binary spells (frost nova/fear/mind flay) subjectively feel like they resist more.
Players notice the 5 in a 100 full spell resist, but the multiple partial resists that non-binary spells produce tend to be hidden in the combat log.