Natural Imperfection vs. Blessed Resilience

Note: With the changes to Natural Perfection in Patch 2.3, the analysis and comparison contained in this article is no longer relevant.

Natural Perfection is one of the Restoration talents that was made available to Druids just before the release of the Burning Crusade:

While Natural Perfection includes a bonus to spell crit percentage, it is more obviously a PvP-oriented talent, providing protection in a similar manner to the core game stat, Resilience. But while Resilience reduces your chance to be crit while increasing the damage reduction of all critical hits (melee, ranged, and spell), Natural Perfection only reduces the damage from melee and ranged critical strikes.

A 10% reduction of damage from critical strikes (even if only from melee and ranged) sounds great. Unfortunately, the reduction of damage from critical strikes maxxes out at 25%. This means that most players cap out at 493 Resilience (39.4 * (25/2)), and any additional Resilience past this number will no longer reduce damage from critical strikes, only the chance to be crit. For a Druid with 3/3 points in Natural Perfection, however, our Resilience is “soft” capped at 296 (39.4 * ((25-10)/2)). Any additional Resilience past this number will only reduce damage from spell critical strikes and the chance to be crit. A Druid with Natural Resilience essentially has the value of the last 197 points of Resilience cut in half., a privilege for which we pay 3 Tier 7 talent points.

One benefit of this unfortunate circumstance is a decreased reliance upon Resilience relative to other classes, making it easier for a Restoration Druid to gear up for PvP and allowing a heavier emphasis on Stamina and PvP-oriented healing and survivability stats (+Healing, Intellect, MP5, and even Armor). In some ways, this flaw might be considered a perk … that is, until it’s contrasted against the Priest Talent, Blessed Resilience.

Natural Perfection vs. Blessed Resilience

Like Natural Perfection, Blessed Resilience is a 3-point, PvP-oriented Tier 7 talent:

While the Druid experiences the “soft cap” phenomenon when it comes to Resilience, Priests experience something not entirely dissimilar. Because while the crit chance reduction is 100% whenever Blessed Resilience ability has procced, Priests essentially get no benefit from Resilience during that time. But although Resilience reduces a Priest’s chance to be crit, it doesn’t reduce the chance to proc Blessed Resilience. In other words, crits that are prevented through Resilience will still proc BR 60% of the time.

To make a fair comparison of these two abilities, we need them to speak the same language. To accomplish this, we will convert the values of Spiritual Resilience and Natural Perfection into the equivalent values of total damage reduction (while keeping in mind that SP affects all types of damage, not only melee and ranged). To perform this conversion, we have to make some basic assumptions about various opponents. I will be finding this value for a Rogue and a Warrior, each of whom have different assumed “attack rates” (number of seconds between each attack and thus chance to proc) and “critical chance”. These assumptions are obviously not completely realistic due to the nature of range/line of sight issues in PvP, but they are necessary to create a feasible model.

To begin the process of converting Blessed Resilience to crit damage reduction, we need to determine what percentage of the time it will be up. To do this, we can use the following formulas:

Avg. Time (sec) until BR procs = (1/crit chance) * attack rate Avg. Time (sec) BR is “up” = 6/(6 + avg time until BR procs)

We can then determine the average amount of damage taken when Blessed Resilience is up and when BR is not and weight them accordingly. For the sake of simplication, 1 is assigned to the damage value of 1 attack. As an example of how this is calculated in simplest terms and with a Resilience rating of 0, if the crit rating of the assailant were 30%, and Blessed Resilience were up 50% of the time, the total damage taken by the Priest would be calculated as:

((1 + crit rating) * percent time BR not up) + ((1 + crit rating) * % time BR up) OR ((1 + 0.3) * 0.5) + (1 * 0.5) = 1.15.

We can determine these values at varying levels of Resilience, allowing us to determine the benefit of Blessed Resilience versus our hypothetical Warrior and Rogue assailants at different levels of gear.

The calculations for the benefits of Natural Perfection are based upon the following assumptions:

• If the Druid’s Resilience is less than 295, Natural Perfection provides 10% damage reduction.
• If the Druid’s Resilience is greater than 493, Natural Perfection provides 0% damage reduction.
• Otherwise, the benefit provided can be expressed as:

0.1 – (Resilience – 295.5)/(19.70 * 100)

Because they are so complicated, I’ve included the formulas for determining the equivalent expected damage reductions for each of these talents in the spreadsheet made available for download at the bottom of this article (gracious thanks to my statistician of a husband for determining them). These formulas were used to generate a graph of the percent damage reduction provided by Blessed Resilience and Natural Perfection at 0 to 550 Resilience versus our hypothetical Rogue and Warrior:

From this graph, we can note the following:

• While both Natural Perfection and Blessed Resilience suffer diminished returns as Resilience increases, the value of Blessed Resilience always provides at least 4x the amount of damage reduction as Natural Perfection.
• Further, Blessed Resilience is more valuable post-493 Resilience than Natural Perfection ever is, despite the fact that NP has 0 value post-493 Resilience.
• While the benefits of Natural Perfection apply only to melee and ranged damage, the benefits of Spiritual Resilience extend to spell crits as well.

In conclusion … WTT Natural Perfection for Blessed Resilience!

But Natural Perfection gives me spell crit!

Unfortunately, spell crit is of negligible benefit to a healing Druid, particularly one deeply specced Restoration. Such a build significantly bolsters our heals over time, spells that cannot critically heal. While the initial heal of Regrowth does benefit from the 3% to crit, 5/5 Improved Regrowth (50% to crit) makes this 3% nominal. The direct heal portion of Lifebloom can also crit, but — at least in PvE — should rarely be allowed to bloom.

Download the Spreadsheet used to calculate these values.

Related Posts

• Natural Perfection Revamped
• Patch 2.4.2: Natural Perfection "Fixed"
• Natural Perfection No Longer Triggers from Crits while Sitting