Mechanics of the old and Resistance fights

World of Warcraft is a substantially different game today than during its original release. Between all the new talents, the new class and races, the new zones, we also witnessed a huge change in the overall philosophy of the game. Many things influenced these changes, including the fact the designers were much inexperienced about MMOs when the game originally went gold.

So dungeons changed, bosses changed, and the internal mechanics changed - a lot. True, the game constantly undergoes minor tweaks to balance the classes (specially after Arena went live), but from time to time huge changes come to fruition. Sometimes to balance things out, but also to keep them up-to-date with the "philosophy" of the game. Some of us have funky memories from the old days when we had spirit in Rogue gear and how terribly itemized things were. Blizzard tries to make sure these mistakes don't happen again, although in a MMORPG of such large scale, perfection may as well be impossible.

It came to my mind recently one of these old traits that never changed much: Resistance. Resistance is a strange attribute. First, it's completely unexplained by the game UI. You can know how much AP is converted into DPS, how much Crit Rating is converted into actual Crit %, etc. Resistance, however, will only show you abstract indicators such as "Fair" and "Bad". While this is not inherently bad by itself (and a lot of Korean games are like this, like Aion), it definitely doesn't go with the actual philosophy of the game, and is vastly different from how everything else works.

Obviously, no power gamer should see that as a problem. You can visit EJ forums or wowwiki and quickly figure out what those numbers mean. However, do you feel like you have to do it? While I cannot speak for all of us (or even most of us), in my experience guildies hated resistance fights and hated having to stack resistance. Why is that?

I think resistance is an attribute that's not really well-integrated in the game. There are few items with resistance and they're very specific. You need to go out of your way to get resistance. In most of these items, resistance spends a lot of the budget too - if I'm not mistaken, about 7/8 of a base attribute (minus stamina) or a rating. So you have to trade attributes you like for something you don't usually care about.

When you go out of your way to get resistance gear, this gear takes a huge toll on whatever feeling of progression you've had. You're back some tiers of gear for something that is not appealing. Armor comes for free in most items. Stamina doesn't come for free, but it's always been there and it's good to have an extra survivability, so it's not a big toll in the player's perception, if any. Resistance is never, ever there. It's not part of the theorycraft "game" most people do, it's not part of most boss fights, it's not required while you're leveling or running dailies or heroics. It's just not there. It used to be, though, back in Vanilla, and the proof Blizzard is aware it's not well integrated is that they're almost exclusively created from crafting. That, and the fact they almost don't make resistance fights anymore.

Then again, it might be possible to make something cool, if you think out of the box. How about a fight in an elemental plane where you assume the element of your resistance? The bigger your resistance, your character's skin would change according to that resistance (Fire would start to glow and have a molten overlay texture, not very hard to do), and you would get an extra damage/healing bonus from your resistance's elements, as well as get additional effects. It would be better if this was somewhat optional, so players would instead of getting hassled by their guild leader (GO GET 400 FR GOGOGO), they would actually look forward the possibility of looking cool and getting some special effects. And knowing Blizzard as we do, there would also be pets. And mounts.

Another option was to ditch resistance as we know right now (they already did that with a lot of attributes) and do something entirely different. Maybe integrate resistance in the armor so it doesn't use the item budget? Maybe cloth could have higher resistance to compensate for the plate's higher armor? Maybe with path of the titans, enable players to customize their items in such way that you could exchange stamina (or other attributes) for resistance. In any of these cases, they would have to do a lot of fine-tuning, so that casters are not nerfed in PVP.

Even without factoring the new possibilities from the expansion, there's a lot of possibilities that would actually make the resistance game fun before even touching the subject of the boss fights themselves. Regardless, I believe it is one of those relics of the old. Just like other strange design decisions (such as shamans have the lowest base health, Taurens having plainsrunning), Resistance seems to have been very experimental in its earliest concepts, and it's strange how it survived up to this day.