ArP in WotLK

[Xyriin]

As promised some info on armor and ArP in WotLK.

It turns out that boss armor is even higher than the original 11900ish value. Boss armor has been confirmed to be 13083 on every boss for all current content. Previously Blizzard adjusted boss armor to tweak encounters. The current theory as to this change is that Blizzard is trying to prevent physical/magic dps class stacking.

Only two possible armor debuffs can be on a boss due to the raid wide buff changes. The first is the major armor debuff which is supplied by Sunder Armor (Warrior), Expose Armor (Rogue), or Acid Spit (Worm Pet) and is 3925 armor. The second is the minor armor debuff which is supplied by Faerie Fire (Druid), Curse of Recklessness (Warlock), or Sting (Wasp Pet) and is 1260 armor. These two debuffs provide a combined 5185 armor reduction. Which brings a boss down to 7898 armor.

It should probably be hashed out as to which class is the best choice to supply said debuffs. But back to the original purpose of the topic...the remaining 7898 armor is mitigating 34.1% of physical damage.

Due to the change from armor ignore to armor penetration the % armor reduction will always be the same no matter what. Under the old system you'd see a larger effective gain on a lower armored target since you were ignoring a numerical armor value. Post 3.0 you're ignoring a certain % of armor so the ArP rating is a little more static from target to target. Similar to pre-3.0, stacking ArP will make it more effective.

[phewl]

i hear the best arrrr peee is at the purple parlor now.

[CaptainBrownBone-Jiijii]

I'm going to assume that the armor % would be after and not before sunders/faerie fire from ArP.

[Aurorawind]

An article by Airman Howell (aka Big Red Kitty) has a good explanation of it. http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/12/27/bigredkitty-armor-penetration-stinks/

Yes it is after warrior sunder or rogue expose armor, so the effective value of ArP is severely diminished beyond the nerfing from X armor to X % of armor.

[Assault]

Good gracious. I understand where this guy is coming from..sort of. One point of ArPen is worse for a rogue than any other stat (other than strength which isn't on rogue gear anyway). However, it's almost like he's implying that sunder or ArPen rating is a bad thing. He realizes that he gains dps when the warrior throws up a stack of sunder, right?

And his argument that sunder is better because it does a set value while ArPen rating does a percentage of acting armor is kind of silly too! I mean, he's right, but I don't see how that's constructive. That's like me saying "Attack Power sucks because it gets thrown into all the formulas as AP/14 when it should be AP/7 then it would be a lot better, I hate Battle Shout."

[Xyriin]

There are a lot of ways to look at it. Yes, the view of warriors are screwing us is stupid because as Assault pointed out it is still a dps gain. One thing he totally glossed over was the amount of damage reduced at different armor levels. As everyone is aware armor scales the amount of damage mitigated. In other words the 5k armor from 0-5000 for example mitigates more damage per armor point than another 5000 armor from 5000-10000.

So the warrior throwing Sunder up makes the the actual armor ignored smaller, but at the same time it makes the actual armor ignored more effective.

Some quick math for bosses...
Damage Reduction % = Armor / (Armor + (467.5 * AttackerLevel - 22167.5))
Or simplified for level 80 attackers: Armor / (Armor + 15232.5)
No armor debuffs, 13083 armor. (46.2% reduction)
No armor debuffs, 10% ArP for a reduction of 1308 armor, 11775 armor. (43.6% reduction)
Both raid armor debuffs, 7898 armor. (34.1% reduction)
Both raid armor debuffs, 10% ArP for a reduction of 790 armor, 7108 armor. (31.8% reduction)

So the 10% ArP on a boss with no armor debuffs results in 2.6% less damage mitigation. Using the same ArP on a boss with full armor debuffs results in 2.3% less damage mitigation. So while there is a slight decline in effectiveness of ArP with full armor debuffs it really is just that...slight (0.3% at 10% ArP). The new system was devised to make ArP scale in a more linear fashion. In the old system your ArP would wildly vary in effectiveness based upon what other classes were present. With the new system if you're missing that raid armor debuff in say a 10 man the effectiveness of ArP against the boss will go up slightly to compensate and help balance the encounter dps-wise for your given raid makeup.

Since in a raid setting we'll be seeing a fully debuffed boss I ran 5%, 10%, and 20% comparisons to check the effectiveness of stacking ArP. 5% ArP resulted in 1.1% less mitigation, 10% ArP was 2.3% less mitigation, and 20% was 4.8% less mitigation. These numbers show that stacking increasing amounts of ArP does increase the effectiveness of the ArP just like in BC, just in a more linear fashion. Basically each time you double your ArP you gain a 0.2% increase in ArP effectiveness.

[Nortibiry]

There are a lot of ways to look at it. Yes, the view of warriors are screwing us is stupid because as Assault pointed out it is still a dps gain. One thing he totally glossed over was the amount of damage reduced at different armor levels. As everyone is aware armor scales the amount of damage mitigated. In other words the 5k armor from 0-5000 for example mitigates more damage per armor point than another 5000 armor from 5000-10000.

I noticed that too... thanks for sorting it out so that I didn't have to think about it anymore :)

[Aurorawind]

Hokay, so you're taking away something completely different from that than I did, and apparently missing the end when he's talking about how he's not calling it a bad stat.

I interpreted that as Armor Pen gives X DPS increase, but with a warrior or rogue it gives a noticeably reduced DPS increase. Or you can get the Y DPS increase you get from choosing another stat (+ Crit in this case)

When you compare Y value (with crit) to a frequently depreciated X value (with ArP), the Y value is higher and therefore more useful.

Going off what Xyriin said about the increasing effectiveness of ArP, I'd say he reinforces the point. Hunter itemization has very few ArP pieces, relative to the entire loot pool, so getting quite a bit build up is extremely difficult (less than a dozen items for 5 slots) and trying to get to that increasing effectiveness is almost more effort that it's worth.

So if you have the 1 or 2 items with ArP that drop, and you compare them to other stats, the other stats are more valuable since you probably won't get your ArP up very high for it's synergy to really shine.

[Assault]

See, I think this system is better because you DO NOT have to stack armor penetration to make it effective. Under the old system having say, only 300 ArPen compared to stacking 1800 ArPen was much less than 1/6th as effective. This way is much better in my opinion because say, 20 ArPen rating is very close to 1/6th as good as having 120 ArPen rating.

And maybe I just dislike the guy's writing style. I understand he's saying that other stats are better, and he's correct. However, I think it would be a more helpful piece if he showed the other side of the coin as well. I don't know anything about hunter itemization, but for rogues at least, an item can very easily be best in slot even though it has ArPen rating on it, despite the fact that ArPen rating is point-for-point worse than every other stat for us. Just because an item has ArPen rating does not mean it's garbage.

[Aurorawind]

I agree with you that it's not garbage, and I think the author did as well in his closing


Armor Penetration is not a bad stat, it's just the least-effective one we hunters have when we factor our party members interfering with our Armor Pen's efficiency. Adding Armor Penetration rating isn't a terrible thing, just remember to never sacrifice Agility or Ranged Attack Power or Crit to take Armor Pen.


To me that's "an upgrade is an upgrade. But if you have 1 with ArP and a 2nd with other stats, get the other stats."

And he does have a unique writing style, he enjoys saying what he thinks is right specifically to provoke the other side of opinions on his blog. I would highly recommend the military stories though on his website, especially taking Tabasco sauce up to 70,000 feet for a U-2 recon mission.

[Xyriin]

I was just rather taken back by the few blatantly wrong statements he made...

The bigger the warrior's Sunder Armor, the less effective our Armor Penetration is. The squishier the enemy -- i.e. the less armor he has -- the less armor-reduction-efficiency our Armor Penetration returns. Basically, the more Armor Penetration rating we hunters stack, the less value we get for our efforts. Stinkin' warriors...
This assumption is only true if you ignore the scaling property of armor. If you take into account real game mechanics it is completely false.

Armor Pen can, and will, have its effectiveness immediately nerfed due to the warrior in the party throwing Sunder Armor. The squishier the mob, the less effective our Armor Penetration will be.
Sure, ArP will be a couple tenths of a percent less effective, but without Sunder Armor hunter dps goes down. The less armor a mob has the more affect ArP has. Not to mention every boss in WotLK so far has the same exact armor.

What should our buddy tell the hunter with the gear-question? He should tell him to take the Crit-chest, every time.
This is also very wrong for hunters, no single stat is an always win over another. It depends too much on your current itemization and how much the item offers of a particular stat. In addition, the stat strengths vary greatly on your overall gear level as well. Some examples are 2 ap > 1 agi at current gear levels and this really won't change until later gear levels where the crit scaling of the agility will begin to take over. Likewise, ArP and crit will become stronger stats as gear level changes since they scale the best of all the hunter stats (probably more so with incoming pet nerfs which weigh heavily on AP).

Armor Penetration is not a bad stat, it's just the least-effective one we hunters have when we factor our party members interfering with our Armor Pen's efficiency. Adding Armor Penetration rating isn't a terrible thing, just remember to never sacrifice Agility or Ranged Attack Power or Crit to take Armor Pen.
Math shows that the properties of ArP provide a rather overall static scaling for the stat that is for all practical purposes not affected by other buffs/debuffs. The best blue trinket in game for hunters is also an ArP use trinket unless you need a ton of hit. In his thinking he'd skip this best in game dungeon trinket for AP/crit trinkets.

And now you know why you should always look at your warriors with a crooked glance; they're in ur party, stealin' ur stats...
Without a warrior in the group hunter dps will always drop unless you have the other multiple classes to cover the missing buffs.

The real summary is that ArP has changed mechanics from BC. It now has very linear properties across varying amounts of ArP and delivers virtually the same amount of damage no matter what buffs/debuffs are up. I would have replied to the post with the correct math but a few comments on down the line pretty much said he was dead wrong so hopefully too many ppl won't get misled.

[Assault]

Armor Penetration is not a bad stat, it's just the least-effective one we hunters have when we factor our party members interfering with our Armor Pen's efficiency. Adding Armor Penetration rating isn't a terrible thing, just remember to never sacrifice Agility or Ranged Attack Power or Crit to take Armor Pen.

I guess this is what I mean when I say I don't like his writing style and/or failure/unwillingness to show the other side of the coin. It's not rhetorically effective to say "Armor Penetration sucks because of X, Y and Z....In conclusion, armor penetration doesn't suck."

[Aurorawind]

Not to comment on previous points, but I found this blue post interesting as a look into Blizzard's mindset.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14132373550&pageNo=1&sid=1#5


Couple of things:

1) If your gear didn't have haste, it would probably have armor pen instead. If you are imagining your gear having Str or Stam instead of the haste, you are probably picturing Ulduar or season 6 gear. :)
2) We aren't offering the best itemized gear now because we want to have something left for you to work up to. We don't want the next tier of gear to look exactly like this one, but with +2 more of each stat.
3) We do think haste and armor pen might be a little low in what you get per rating point (at least for melee). That is something we're looking at.


This seems to read to me that haste and armor pen (modifier stats) are viewed by Blizzard as "inferior" to at least some degree when compared to raw stats, such as crit rating or +attributes.

It will be interesting to see if, and by how much, the proliferation of those modifier style stats are noticeably phased out in Uldaur/Season 6.