tankadin.com

Normally, Resilience is considered a PvP stat and not something you'd want on PvE gear. However, if you're sporting gear like a PvP mace for the spell damage, or the PvP shoulders as a placeholder until you get High King Maulgar to cough up the T4 shoulder token, that resilience actually reduces your crit chance, and you no longer need 490 defense to be raid uncrittable. The question now is: How much defense DO you need?

Normally, you need 490 to be uncrittable against raid bosses.  However, googling WowWiki on Resilience, we see that one percent of Resilience has the following effects:

• Chance to be critically hit reduced by 1%.
• Damage taken from crits that do land have their critical strike damage component reduced by 2%
• Damage taken from DoTs reduced by 1%.
• Amount of mana drained or burned by mana draining effects is reduced by 2%. (added in Patch 2.4)

Now, I'm not a math wizard, so if you want to know all the dirty details, check out the WowWiki page since they cover it very well.  However, for the purposes of melee critical strikes from a PvE raid boss, we are mostly interested in the first resilence effect: Chance to be critically hit reduced by 1%.

Switching gears for a moment, 2.4 defense rating (on your gear) = 1 defense skill (in your paper doll character screen). It takes 25 defense skill to reduce your chance to be critically hit by 1%.

So, at level 70:

• 39.4 Resilience Rating = 1% Resilience = 1% less chance of being critically hit.
• 60 Defense Rating = 25 Defense Skill = 1% less chance of being critically hit.

So what does this all mean?  Well it means that on your gear, you can substitute 39.4 resilience rating for 60 defense rating.  So if you're sporting some resilience from your PvP mace or shoulders, you can drop some defense. So back to our original question... HOW MUCH?

Well, here's an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to figure it out.  Just plug in your resilience and defense, and it will tell you how much more resilience or defense you still need to reach uncrittable. My thanks to Cowofdoom over on Tankspot for creating the original google spreadsheet that mine is based on.

Just a warning to people out there who think that you can tank in PvP gear.  Resilience is best used sparingly.  While it provides a faster path to reaching uncrittable than defense rating, you miss out on the other benefits of defense rating, namely dodge/parry/block/miss.  Remember that you need dodge% + parry% + block% + miss% = 102.4% to be uncrushable.

Discuss: http://www.tankadin.com/forum/gear/416-resilience-vs-defense-and-the-uncrittable-tank/

Here we are again with techical details from under the hood at Tankadin.com.

A while back, I ran into a problem when I attempted to add wowhead tooltips to this site.

I simply added a single line javascript include to the head section of my template as explained here...

http://www.wowhead.com/?powered

It worked perfectly with the Firefox browser, but Internet Explorer 6 refused to load at all, giving me an "Operation aborted" popup when browsing the site...

After some experimentation, I discovered that if I added the javascript line to my template AFTER mosShowHead(), the problem went away.  With further experimentation, I narrowed the problem down to the <BASE> tag that is turned on because I'm using SEF URLs. As long as the script was included after that tag, IE6 would not load.  Not knowing how to actually fix the problem, I just left my include BEFORE mosShowHead().

Then today, while researching an unrelated problem, I came across this page...

http://blog.dotsmart.net/2008/04/21/ie-6-bug-causes-jquery-globaleval-error/

IE 6 seems to get totally confused as to the structure of the document HEAD when there's a self-closing or unclosed BASE tag.

So it turns out that the problem is an obscure bug in IE6 regarding the <BASE> tag.

The solution is to modify the way the code for the BASE tag is generated because IE can't be trusted to close it properly itself ...

Just change this line in frontend.php ...

echo "<base href=\"$mosConfig_live_site/\" />\r\n";

...to this...

echo "<base href=\"$mosConfig_live_site/\"></base>\r\n";

Problem solved!

I've been doing a little behind-the-scenes work on the site, which has resulted in performance problems and site accessability issues with the forums in the past few days, but hopefully, the worst of it is over and things will be back to normal.

I wanted to make a post here regarding a specific issue that I recently resolved that might come in handy for other web admins using the same content management components.

The issue I was having was with the Joomlahacks SMF bridge.  When users tried to use the forgotten password link to reset their password, the site generated an SQL error something like this...

JSMF CB Plugin error::Failed to update password to SMF:: Table XXXXXX.members doesn't exist 

Here is the solution...

Open up this file... \administrator\components\com_smf\admin.smf.class.php

Find the function called "updatePass" and add the following line after "global $database;"...

global $jsmfConfig;

Then change the query code from "Where id" to "WHERE ID_MEMBER" 

Voila!  Problem solved.

Wowinsider has posted a copy of the Wrath of the Lich King beta patch notes along with an analysis of the Paladin changes...

Wrath Beta patch notes: Paladin part I
Wrath Beta patch notes: Paladin part II
Wrath Beta patch notes: Paladin part III - the Holy tree
Wrath Beta patch notes: Paladin part IV - the Protection tree
Wrath Beta patch notes: Paladin part V - The Retribution tree

Check it out, then discuss the changes in the tankadin.com forums...

Wrath of the Lich King Beta Patch Notes