Arp and it's meaning for Hunters in PvP
Hello :)
This guide for all those people out there who seemingly don’t fully understand arp for hunters in PvP. I gotta admit though it’s one of the more complicated topics out there and has to be handled with care. There are several misconceptions about the nature of arp which i hope to eradicate with this thread.
Let’s start with the basics. What is arp? Arp reduces the target's armour. 14 arp grants you 1% arp. Thus, 1400 arp gets you to 100% arp aka the hard cap of the stat. Every added arp beyond this point is completely wasted. You often hear quotes like „the more arp you have the better!“ but what does that mean exactly? It has nothing to do with arp itself yet the formula behind armour. It basically results in armour becoming less valuable the more you have of it. That explains why a priest with 5880 armour has a physical damage reduction of 27,85% while a hpala with around 26000 armour has only 63,06% despite having more than 4 times the armour of the priest. On the flipside arp becomes more valuable the more you have of it because the more armour you reduce the more physical damage reduction you lessen. In contrast there is a certain Arp hardcap not just for the 100% arp you can obtain yet how much armour you can ignore at max arp. If that cap didn’t exist you would hit a hpala for just as hard with aimed shot as a disc priest.
So while it is indeed true that the value of arp rises exponentially it is often by no means as effective in PvP as it is in PvE. All bosses in wotlk have 10643 armour. As seen, the armour values vary vastly from class to class. While you are nearly able to fully ignore the armour of a boss by involving 5 stacks of sunder armour and faerie fire this can not be said about every encounter in PvP. Given that the most immortal enemies a hunter has in arena are war/pala who both wear plate, let’s focus on that a bit more.
I have all the formulas and entries listed and calculated in an excel sheet found for download at the bottom of the page. You can alter the entries to toy around with different experimental values if you wish.
So far so good.
Theory is fun and all but how does it look like in arena? First of all we have to take into consideration that the shares of physical and magical damage of hunter damage are differently distributed in pvp compared to pve. In pve you usually do around 20% magic damage. On contrast it’s 40% in pvp (these differ from class to class that you hit). On top of that we are no way near the desired arp hard cap in pvp. To finish it all off, a warr in shield or a hpala have enourmous amounts of armour. I personally have around 52% arp with my 2s gear. With the whole 52% arp I have I only deal nearly 8% more physical damage vs warriors and paladins with shield compared to having 0% arp. So instead of 63% physical damage reduction against me they have now „only“ 55%. By involving the 60% physical damage share (vs plate possibly even less) we get a damage increasement of 4,8% for 52% arp. In contrast 52% arp in pve would grant us a damage increasement of 11,86% compared to having no arp at all. And in pve you are supposed to gem and gear for arp only if you are capable of reaching around 1050 arp. Up until then agility stays ahead.
Another example. Recently I had a discussion with my main disc in 2s about the introduction of Inner Fire glyph to increase our chances vs war pala in arena. This glyph increases the armour received by inner fire by 50%. Increasing the total armour from 5880 to 7649. This means a physical damage reduction increasement from 27,85% to 33,43%. In total 5,58%. Not bad! Yet he argued that by including the arp of the warrior the benefit of the glyph would be lessened since the warr now ignored more armour than before relatively speaking. Yet when assuming the warrior has 50% arp the difference between using and not using the glyph results in 6,69%.
This should give you a rough estimation about the usage of arp in pvp as a hunter. It’s sadly garbage vs heavy armoured targets and becomes better the fewer armour the target has.
The excel sheet:
http://www.stepload.de/uploads/m8HKs...EK-NIFOYRBieV/
