No more spell resistance and spell penetration. Casters no longer need to track an extra stat, but the days of resisted roots will come to an end. What will happen with resistance and spell penetration items? Racial resistances? Spell penetration is currently a must-have cloak enchantment for most casters in the middle and upper brackets, and several consumables affect spell resistance. Will the stat just drop off the gear, enchantments, and consumables, or will it get replaced by another stat?
This is a good change for twinks in general because now we can close the gap that was created between casters and melee. No one wants to be resisted on their spells because of a racial ability + resistance enchants in an environment where there just isn't enough spell pen readily available to completely negate resistances. It's a good change and it really can't come soon enough.
From what I can tell, they will be going through and modifying any spell resistance/spell pen gear/items to have a different stat. This could mean a re design of many things that only fill the niche of 'I need resistances or spell pen,' potentially increasing the pool of toys we have to play with. More conventional options are always good.
Expertise gains importance. Expertise now doubles as spell hit gear, making expertise desirable for casters. Yes, you read that right. Players can dodge ranged attacks in MoP, so hunters will want expertise as well. Numbers and weights overall will change slightly -- read the article for details if that interests you.
While I tend to agree that hit rating gaining a benefit from expertise is a good change, it's not really a change that will affect low-mid range twinking brackets, all that much, unless they start adding expertise to low level gear (which I don't see them doing). There just isn't enough expertise gear in existence atm for this change to really impact say 19s. Foreman's Gloves, orc racial (with axes), and the 3pc Fang set bonus are about all I can think of that would be affected by this. Typically, using any of those things results in a stat loss in exchange for something you can easily gain just by positioning yourself better while attacking.
Players cannot dodge/parry from behind, so for most classes, you don't need expertise.
Everyone gets baseline 30% resilience. Resilience will be called something new, probably PvP Defense. PvP gear will let you stack additional PvP Defense, as well as a new stat called (possibly) PvP Power, that increases damage and healing. Both PvP stats will have no PvE application.
This change is going to be huge for low level pvp, and again, I am pretty excited to see damage slowed down a bit for us tinkers going into the next expansion. They are already tuning the damage of abilities that use attack power to be less powerful, adding 30% base reduction to everyone in pvp will be amazing.
Again, this is all preliminary, with plenty of time for changes to happen. But, we can now build some expectations around what Blizzard intends to do with the game. So how will this affect twinkers?
30% baseline resilience is huge. At first glance, it sounds like a miracle to help against the high damage of many brackets. But 30% will also exacerbate the problem of unkillable healers in the same brackets (and introduce the problem in other brackets). Unless running out of mana becomes a larger threat, healers could get too powerful.
I can't think of a single bracket where healers are 'unkillable' except for 70s, and maybe 80s. The consensus is that Blizzard will be shifting the amount of resilience that you get from gear into the baseline stat at higher levels. An example of this would be a player in full Cata t2 gear is sitting at roughly 5k resilience which gives them roughly 47% damage reduction from players. If we applied the same value in MoP, that player would still retain that 47% reduction, but 30% of that number would come from their base resilience (additively), and 17% would come from their gear. To offset the loss of so much resilence on gear, they would then be adding 'PVP Power' so that the damage/healing output of pvp gear in pvp remains higher than that of pve gear.
If Blizzard adds PvP Power to older PvP gear, gear variation will significantly dwindle in the upper brackets, as PvP gear will gain a significant advantage. Players who worked hard to get some of their PvE gear may miss having it as BiS, but transmogrification will let them still show off their work, other than legendaries (ouch!).
I am still not sure how this will affect BoA gear that has resilience on it, but it's probably safe to say that they would just convert the resilience stat into a tiny amount of 'Pvp Power' which would still keep the JP BoA gear competitive. As far as say, the 70 bracket goes, it will be nice that gear intended for pvp (Brutal) will have an advantage over SWP gear. People are going to be kinda upset about it, but hey, that's life. You shouldn't be raiding to be competitive in pvp, much less required to do so, as it is now. It completely voids the purpose of having pvp gear when that gear is not the best gear you can get for pvp.
If there will be a new "PvP Power" stat, will there be gems and enchantments for it? Will Blizzard add "PvP Power" to previous gear, or wait to introduce it to level 90 gear? Does Blizzard still plan to do an item level squish? While many good questions remain, the 30% damage nerf will by far make the most significant impact on XP-off battlegrounds and arenas. The wisdom of such a change remains up for debate.
I am pretty sure that Blizzard will modify any instances of resilience to account for the changes to pvp power and defense. However, they aren't planning on doing an ilvl squish for MoP. They had everything ready to go, had all the math worked out and they even had it functional in game, but then they realized that it just didn't feel right to be hitting 200s on attacks and spells.
Logically, these changes are the best changes they've ever made for pvp in general.
The resilience is a base stat.
Base stats go up every level.
Thirk is level 85.
No way you start with 30 percent.
Yes, base stats go up in value as you level. However, the benefits gained from base stats scale with level when they impact secondary stats. As an example, players gain melee crit rating from agility. 10 agility at level 1 gives you the same AP as it does at level 85. However, the amount of crit you get from 10 agility at level 1 changes as you level. It scales down so that it takes more agility to get the same crit benefit as you increase in level.
Now imagine that yes, you do gain a couple points of pvp defense with each level you gain, but Blizzard designs the scaling of the value to translate into 30% damage reduction from players, no matter how much 'pvp defense' you have or which level you are at.
It might look something like this:
Level 19
Attributes:
Strength - 40 (increases attack power by 30)
Agility - 230 (increases attack power by 440)
Stamina - 126 (increases health by 1080)
Intellect - 30
Spirit - 29
Pvp Defense - 30 (gives 30% damage reduction from from players and their pets)
Level 39
Attributes:
Strength - 65 (increases attack power by 55)
Agility - 351 (increases attack power by 682)
Stamina - 251 (increases health by 2330)
Intellect - 30
Spirit - 46
Pvp Defense - 50 (gives 30% damage reduction from from players and their pets)
Pvp Defense values are made up for this, but you get the idea.
. I have a feeling that no one will report anything about the 49 bracket because its so small. I would and I should be able to because I'm an annual pass holder but I still have not revived my beta test invite. I am pretty bummed about that and I don't even feel like fooling around with the reason I have not been invited to beta after I paid Blizz for a whole year in advance.