Re: durability

There are three "normal" ways to take durability damage:
1) Your equipped items have a small chance to take durability damage every second you are in combat. This includes all forms of combat, even target dummies.
The remaining two ways apply only to PvE and not PvP:
2) Every time you get hit by an NPC all your equipped gear has a small chance to take durability damage.
3) Every time an NPC or the environment deals a death blow you lose 10% durability on equipped items- 10% of the total durability rating, not 10% of the remaining durability points.
There are of course other ways to lose durability, most notably spirit rezzing which reduces the durability of ALL the items in your bags (not just equipped) by 25%.

Random durability trivia:
-Durability is one of the two major "gold sinks" in the game, ways Blizzard takes money out of the game to fight gold inflation. The other major gold sink is, of course, the auction house cut/deposit.
-As you can see PvE combat is more "expensive", to make up for the fact that there are significantly less monetary rewards in PvP. Also, it should be evident that tanks have larger repair bills, so be nice to them =)
-It used to be that as you scaled up in armor type (cloth-leather-mail-plate) items would have more total durability points, for example plate gloves would have 100+ points of durability while cloth gloves would only have around 50. Since durability damage on death is dealt as a percentage of the total durability, and repair costs are flat across armor types per point of durability loss, this meant that plate items would cost a LOT more to repair; a holydin could spend hundreds of gold a night on repairs while your healing priest would have a total repair bill of maybe twenty gold. This was normalized in Cata with the lower durability items being adjusted upwards.
-If you want to add insult to injury, when PvPing try to make sure the death blow is dealt by a guard or the environment (falling damage). You still get your honor, the enemy player has to make a spirit walk, but he also loses a small chunk of gold too =) Note that this does not apply to battlegrounds; you will not take durability damage no matter how many times you get t-stormed off lumber mill.

The more you know! (tm)

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