WotLK [Guide] The in-depth Armor penetration guide for Fury warriors 3.3.5

[Basasjoblu]

Note: If you are not interested in the calculations, there is a TL;DR at the end.

This is an informative guide about the different mechanics of the stat Armor Penetration, especially for Fury warriors. The main focus of the guide is raiding, but most of it applies to PvP too. I will explain Armor Penetration (ArP), the mechanics behind it, its value compared to Strength (STR) and more. I'm making this guide because there seems to be a lot of confusion about ArP and its mechanics. It’s hard to find reliable information about this on the internet, as most players don’t fully understand how it works. Although I can’t guarantee the mechanics work perfectly here, Trinity Core should have most of this working. If you have any questions, remarks or improvements, feel free to email me at: [email protected]






1) CALCULATING ARMOR PENETRATION

Keep in mind the results from calculations are often rounded, but the exact value is used for calculations after that. I didn’t invent these calculations, it’s just the way the server works.

“The more armor penetration you have, the more it’s value increases.”

This is the part that most people have heard. ArP's value compared to other stats increases when you have more ArP. This is a fact. Most warriors also know the ArP cap (1339.6 rating -> 100%), also a fact. Sadly a lot of warriors now draw false conclusions without knowing the mechanics behind it. I will try to explain these mechanics/calculations and draw proper conclusions from those.

I'll start off with the calculations involving ArP that the server does. In WotLK 3.3.5 every raid boss has the exact same amount of armor, 10643. Before any of your personal ArP comes into play, the armor can first be lowered with certain abilities, for example Sunder Armor (-20%) and Faerie Fire (-5%). These debuffs stack multiplicatively. This is also where the reduction from Shattering Throw is applied when it's used.

Armor = Armor * (1-reduction from a debuff)

If we have 2 or more armor reducing debuffs, we fill in the formula twice. During most encounters the
boss will have the 2 main armor reducing buffs on him throughout the entire fight. If we fill in 10643 armor to begin with, and apply a 20% and a 5% debuff, we get 8088.68 armor.

Now a really common misconception is that 100% ArP will remove all of the armor, making the armor reducing debuffs useless. What most people not know is: in most cases not all of the armor is affected by ArP. It is simply because of the calculations behind it. We will call the amount of armor from the boss that will be affected by ArP the ArP cap. It is calculated using the following formula:

ArP cap = (Armor + 15232.5)/3

The 15232.5 is a constant based on your level. As I assume you're always 80, this constant doesn't change. If we fill in the 8088.68 we obtained earlier, we find an ArP cap of 7773.73 This means you’re your ArP can only reduce 7773.73 armor on the boss. Now with the next formula, we can calculate the armor left on the boss. We will use the term EffectiveArmor for the armor that is used to calculate the physical damage mitigation on the boss from your attacks.

EffectiveArmor = Armor – ArP rating / 1399.6 * min{Arp cap, Armor}

The min{} picks the lower value of the 2, and makes sure that the ArP cap doesn't exceed the armor.
If we use Shattering Throw, the ArP cap can exceed the armor on the target. Because armor can't go below 0, this can't be the case. The min{} makes sure the EffectiveArmor is always 0 or higher. ArP rating is your personal Armor Penetration rating, the value you see at your character’s info. This is the combined rating of gear, food and procs (like trinkets or Executioner enchant). We divide this by 1399.6 to get the percentage ArP. Then we multiply this by the Arp Cap (or Armor if that’s higher) to get the amount of Armor you reduce. Now we substract this from the Armor on the boss, and we get the armor that’s left.

I didn’t include it in the formula, but all ArP rating above 1400 is wasted. Also many players seem to think there is a sudden dps increase when you reach the cap. It doesn’t work that way. If you need 5 more rating to the cap, an extra gem is not worth it. You would waste 15 rating from the gem, making it far worse than a STR gem.

With the formulas we have so far, we can already draw some conclusions:
1. If you reached the 1400 ArP rating hard cap (and the boss doesn’t have both Shattering Throw and Sunder Armor/Expose Armor on him) there will still be armor left. You will not deal all of your ‘potential’ damage unless you are hard capped and boss has Shattering throw and Sunder Armor/Expose Armor on him. Don’t ever say: “Debuffs are useless once you are hard capped.”
2. On a raid boss, we can only reach 0 armor (true damage) with Shattering Throw, Sunder Armor and 100% armor penetration. (In this case Faerie Fire would be useless)
3. Never ever say that 80% ArP + Sunder Armor means 100% penetration or something
similar to that reasoning.


We now have the EffectiveArmor, used to calculate the reduction on your attacks. The way the server calculates the reduction armor provides is by the following formula:

DR% = EffectiveArmor / (EffectiveArmor + 15232.5)

Damage reduction (DR%) is the percentage reduction on your damaging attacks. If DR% is 0, you deal full damage, if it's 0.5 you only deal half. If the effective armor is 0, the DR% is also 0. The 15232.5 is again a constant based on your level.

If we want to go from the DR% to Damage Applied (DA%) we use

DA% = 1 – DR%

This one shouldn’t be too hard to follow: if the target’s armor reduces your damage by 0.25, we still have 0.75 left. This means a 5000 damage attack would deal 3750 damage.

We now can go from Armor Penetration rating, to Damage Applied. Feel free to fill in the calculations and find out how much damage you deal on a boss.





2) CONCLUSIONS FROM CALCULATIONS

With our formulas, we now can calculate the % damage you deal by filling in your ArP rating. With some calculations we can find out a lot. First of all, even if you are ArP hard capped, the two main armor debuffs still provide a 10.95% damage increase. This means applying Sunder Armor is almost always worth it. Second, without any ArP or debuffs, your attacks get reduced by 41.13% (or you only deal 58.87% of your 'potential' damage). Then an important conclusion is that on a raid boss, 1400 ArP increases your damage by exactly 50% compared to having no ArP rating. If a target has one million armor, going from 0 rating to the hard cap still increases your damage by exactly 50%. However, because armor can't go below 0, this isn't true for low armor targets. We can calculate the point where the ArP cap doesn’t exceed the target’s Armor. We set Armor = Arp cap and find 7616.25 armor. Later we will see this point is really interesting. For now, if the target has more armor than 7616.25, 0-100% ArP increases your damage by 50%. If below that armor, it will be less than 50%. Later we will see that even though the 50% increase doesn't change between a 10k armor and a 30k armor target, ArP's value still decreases.

I will show this with some graphs:

Spoiler: Show

Spoiler: Show

Both graphs used the same calculations, except that for the second graph, 3 armor reducing debuffs were applied. We can clearly see that the graphs are increasing faster when you have more ArP, which proves this unique trait of the stat. Although for every ArP rating the second graph gives us a higher damage multiplier than the first graph, the ArP value is actually lower. I will show that with 2 new graphs:

Spoiler: Show

Spoiler: Show

We see that both graphs start at (0,1) because comparing 0 rating to having no ArP gives 1. More interesting is the 1.5 in the left graph at 1400 rating. As I said earlier, 1400 rating gives a 50% damage increase compared to no rating on targets who have more than 7616.25 armor. The right graph is for a boss with the 3 armor debuffs, which brings his armor below that. Because of that, the value of ArP decreases We see 100% ArP only gives around 1.43 times the damage compared to 0 ArP. This means Shattering Throw decreases the value of ArP. However, it still gives a dps increase.

Spoiler: Show

This graph is for PvP or non-boss mobs. It shows the value of Armor penetration on low armor targets. As you can see it increases linearly from (0,1) to (7616.25,1.5). From that point on its value stays the same (50% damage increase for 1400 rating).

Wowwiki has a few tables for this too. Even though their calculations are a bit off, the conclusions we can derive are the same. I'll post the link together with some more good links at the end. Keep in mind Wowwiki shows 1230 ArP rating as the hard cap because it's outdated. "Patch 3.2.2 (2009-09-22): The amount of armor penetration gained per point of this rating has been reduced by 12%." This and together with some more buffs/nerfs/fixes is why you shouldn’t use old sources which were made during for example the Ulduar patch. ArP was simply better at that point in the same gear which gives false conclusions as you probably play on a 3.3.5 server.

Now comes a fact has a dramatic impact on ArP’s value: bleeds are not affected by armor. This changes a lot about ArP on different armor targets. Earlier I said ArP has always the same value if the target has more than 7616.25 armor. Bleeds change this. The damage of your Deep Wounds (DW) and Rend does not depend on your target’s Armor. When the armor of your target increases, the damage of your non bleeds will decrease. The damage of your bleeds however, won’t change. This means the part of your total damage that is affected by armor will decrease on high armor targets. Now a smaller part of your attacks gets increased by ArP, which decreases it’s value. I’m now going to show 2 graphs. One will show that the amount of damage that is affected by ArP decreasing with more armor. The second will show the value of ArP changing on higher armor targets. I’m assuming 17% of our damage is bleed damage on a 10643 armor target while we have a constant 900 ArP.

Spoiler: Show

The graph above shows the non-bleed damage part of your total damage on different amount of armors. Y = 1 means all of your damage is non-bleed damage, which can never be the case cause we always have constant bleed damage. At 10643 armor, Y = 0.83 because of my initial conditions. It may look like the right part of the graph is linear, but it’s not. It approaches 0 slower and slower, as 0 is the asymptote of this graph. A remarkable point is the sudden change of the graph around 7-8k armor. You can probably guess this is the 7616.25 armor point.

We now know the non-bleed part of your damage gets smaller on higher armor. We also know ArP gets less effective on targets below 7616.25 armor. This means there is an optimum amount of armor, where ArP has its highest value. We will see that in the next graph.

Spoiler: Show

This graph clearly shows how the value of ArP changes on different armor levels if we include bleeds. The optimum is 7616.25 armor. If the target’s armor is below this, ArP’s value decreases rapidly due to the ArP cap exceeding the target’s armor. On armor above the optimum, the value of ArP decreases (although slowly) because bleeds becoming a bigger part of your damage. Although you might think ArP becomes more effective on higher armor target, this graph actually shows the opposite. If we fight a million armor target, ArP’s value is really low. In PvP, against popular believe, ArP’s value decreases on high armor targets.

This also means the value of ArP depends heavily on your Rend usage and a little bit on crit chance (more crit = more DW).





3) ARMOR PENETRATION VERSUS OTHER STATS

Now ArP vs Strength (STR). Many people are not sure what they should gem and some point and I hope to give some clarification. Some give certain baselines like “Gem it once you can reach cap”, which can be good in some cases, while it other cases it’s just not the best option. From now on I'm going to assume we always have the two main armor debuffs on the boss at all times.

The major difference between these two stats is: ArP gives a percentage to our damage, while STR gives a set amount. This automatically means there is a breakpoint where ArP surpasses STR. I’ll try to show this with the following example:

Imagine this situation, HIGHLY simplified and unrealistic but good to show the point: We have 1000000 AP. We now can choose between 100 ArP or 100 STR. Obviously the 100 STR will give a really small increase in AP compared to the 1000000 AP we already have. Taking the 100 ArP is by far the best option. Now what if we had only 50 STR. 100 STR would be a really big increase. The 100 ArP would still give us the same percentage, but now this will be lower than the massive increase we got from AP.

Now more realistic:
Imagine we have pretty good gear, giving us 1000 ArP with 20 empty gem sockets. This is a lot of ArP, which is only reachable with tier 10 gear. We now have the option to either fill the 20 gem sockets with ArP (bringing us to the hard cap) or gemming 400 STR. We can calculate that the 400 ArP rating would give us a damage increase of 14.29%. Sadly there are no percentage buffs which increase the amount of ArP rating you have. Now we have to keep in mind that bleeds are not effected by armor. Bleeds include your Rend and Deep Wounds. Deep Wounds is on average 17% of your damage. This simply means ArP is 17% less effective than what we thought. I’ll leave Rend out of this example, but keep in mind if you use Rend, it will make ArP even worse. With this in mind, our damage increase from the 20 ArP gems is reduced to 11.86%.

Now let's see what the other option (gemming STR) would give us. Unlike ArP, STR has a lot of modifiers. The talent [Improved Berserker Stance], Blessing of Kings and the 10% AP buff (for example Trueshot Aura) scale multiplicatively. This means every gem of STR gives us slightly over 58 AP, and our 400 STR gives 1162 AP. Now we have to determine whether 1162 AP is more or less than a 11.86% increase. Unfortunately this is very hard to do without the use of a damage calculator or spreadsheet. A raw estimate is that 1% of AP gives 0.8-1.0% of damage. From these numbers we can calculate we need about 9000 AP for ArP to become better than STR in this situation. If you have below 9000 AP in this situation, gemming ArP will not give more damage than gemming STR. Going from 1000 to 1400 ArP rating will give you a set percentage increase in damage. STR/AP gives a set increase in dps. Of course this is a slight simplification of the real situation, where we have other factors such as rage.


We always assumed we had a constant amount of ArP not changing during the fight. Trinkets with a proc involving ArP change this. Reaching the cap only with a trinket proccing is called the soft cap. In terms of ArP’s value compared to STR, it makes a major difference if you can reach the cap with a trinket proc, or the hard cap. The trinkets have an uptime of 17% average. This means that throughout the majority of the fight, you won’t even be close to the cap. You can calculate the average ArP value you have during a fight but this is often not a reliable representation of the real situation. A good player will synergize his dps cool downs with a ArP trinket proccing, meaning (excluding the extra damage due the proc) you deal a lot more than 17% of your damage during a proc. The best way to find out what to gem is to use a spreadsheet. You can also do your own calculations, but those will be really complex to give an accurate and reliable answer. It is possible for ArP’s value to be so high it’s worth gemming ArP above the soft cap. This means throughout 17% of the fight your additional gems will go to waste. This point requires high tier 9/tier 10 gear and is hard to reach.





4) TL;DR

Here are the main conclusions from the guide:
• 1400 ArP rating is the hard cap.
• Every boss has 10643 armor
• 80% ArP + Sunder Armor is NOT 100% ArP. Sunder always gives an dps increase on bosses
• ArP does NOT apply to all of the armor a boss has, only a part of it
• You can only reach 0 armor with 100% ArP AND Shattering throw AND Sunder Armor/Expose Armor
• Bleeds are NOT affected by armor (and thus not by ArP)
• In general, your ArP gets worse on high armor targets (against common thought)





5) USEFUL LINKS

Wowwiki on ArP:
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/Armor_penetration

Wowwiki on Armor:
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/Armor

The fury warrior guide which covers everything about fury warriors in detail:
http://web.archive.org/web/201302091...ry_compendium/

Make sure to adjust Rawr or Landsoul's to the the bugs on your server if you know them.
Landsoul's Spreadsheet:
http://www.filedropper.com/warriordps2602cexcel07

Rawr 2.3.22:
http://download-codeplex.sec.s-msft....00&Build=21018

[Bensten]

In my opinion there are some heavy mistakes in your guide.

First of all your constant - 15232.5 - refers to the target level, not yours. So against a level 83 Boss-Mob this changes to 16635 (based on this formula: 400+85*targetlevel+4.5*85*(targetlevel-59)). However, there is a different formula for you being lower than level 60, but this doesn't matter here at all.

Technical explanation from Ghostcrawler
Quote from: Ghostcrawler

Okay, here is a fairly technical explanation we put together for how armor pen works.

We didn’t want Armor Penetration Rating to be too powerful against low armor targets, like it had been in BC. We also didn’t want Armor Penetration Rating to be too powerful against high armor targets.

So, we decided on a system where there is a cap on how much armor the Armor Penetration Rating can be applied to. So, the first X armor on the target is reduced by the percentage listed in the Armor Penetration Rating tooltip, and all armor past that X is unaffected. Another way of understanding that is we multiply the percentage in the tooltip times the minimum of the two values: the cap, and the amount of armor on the target after all other modifiers.

Computing the cap is a little tricky unless you are already familiar with how World of Warcraft armor works. There is an armor constant we’ll call C. C is derived as follows (in some pseudocode):



If (level<60)
C=400+85*targetlevel
Else
C=400+85*targetlevel+4.5*85*(targetlevel-59);
For a level 80 target, C=15232.5. For a level 83, C=16635.

The cap for Armor Penetration then is: (armor + C)/3.

A level 80 warrior creature has 9729 armor. C=15232.5. So, the cap is (9729+15232.5)/3=8320.5. Let’s say a player has 30% armor penetration from armor penetration rating and no other modifiers that complicate the calculation (talents, Battle Stance, Sunder Armor, etc.). The game chooses the minimum of 8320.5 and 9729, so 8320.5. That is multiplied by 30% = 2496.15, and so that much armor is ignored. The effective armor on the target is 7232.85 (9729-2496.15). From a player point of view, the armor penetration rating didn’t ignore the full 30%, but instead ignored 25.66%. (85.5% as effective as expected).

These equations should help you be able to test and verify that Armor Penetration Rating is working correctly and as we designed. The tooltip is not actually inaccurate, as it states: “Enemy armor reduced by up to 30.00%.” That "up to" is key.

Please be sure to test without any other effects which modify the armor calculation (Battle Stance, Sunder Armor, Mace Specialization, etc.) as they may involve other systems that add additional complexity to the calculation.

The formula for the Armor Penetration cap can be simplified to ArPcap = (935/6)*x + y/3 -44335/6, where x is the target level and y the target armor. Then effArmor = targetArmor - ArP * min{ targetArmor, ArPcap} as explained above, with the Armor Penetration ArP of your character. ArP is given, lately changed in 3.1.2,[2] by the formula ArP = min{ 1,(Sum ArPcontributions)%}.

Calculating
Calculating the ARP it's done in 2 parts:

First up - the debuffs. These reduce your target's initial armor. For example, if your target has 10k armor and it gets 20% sunder, its armor would be 8k. The debuffs stack additively, so [Faerie Fire] will stack with sunder, totaling a 25% reduction on the target, taking it to 7.5k armor.

Second, comes the formula GC provided, you grab the armor after the debuff calculation and to that armor you apply the formula (armor + C)/3. Using the same example as before, lets say the target is level 80, so C=15232.5, now calculate (7500 + 15232.5)/3 = 7577.5. This makes the target's armor lower than the result, meaning that each 1% removes 75 armor and you are hitting a 0 armor target on the 100% ARP get. The ArP "buffs" (items, stances and such) stack additively too, meaning that 90% ARP on battle stance for a warrior would mean a 100% ARP final.

This is also covered by your source http://wowwiki.wikia.com/Armor_penetration on the final damage table, as calculations will show that there is a brekpoint on C/2 - after this point there will be untouched armor left - and the table shows maximum damage up to an armor value of 8317, which is just 16635/2 if you assume you can't have .5 armor.

Also the Battle Stance part doesn't work on Warmane. There is already a post in the bugtracker about the fact that the 10% arp isn't additively added, it just ignores 10% armor.

[Basasjoblu]

Hello there, thanks for your reply.

About the constant you mentioned, different sources say different things. The
compendium from Elitist Jerks uses 15232.5, and Landsoul's does the same.
I looked the code up in Trinity and it seems like it does base the constant on
the boss' level (so 16635) . I'll try to test it and change everything accordingly.

It seems weird to me a source like EJ would make such a big mistake.

For the battle stance, I'll remove that part.

[DarkenedHue]

Great stuff :D.

Arp is an extremely unintuitive concept for most players. Something like 9 in 10 fury warriors I come across in pugs don't stack sunder armor, and a good number of those are convinced there's absolutely no need to. Real shame because the 20% armor reduction is like the biggest raid debuff available to most physical DPS classes.

[Joltie]

Great stuff :D.

Arp is an extremely unintuitive concept for most players. Something like 9 in 10 fury warriors I come across in pugs don't stack sunder armor, and a good number of those are convinced there's absolutely no need to. Real shame because the 20% armor reduction is like the biggest raid debuff available to most physical DPS classes.

Most times it comes from the idea that "Any ability that doesn't do damage" = "Dps loss" = Lower position on recount = Everyone laughing at you = You get kicked from raid/guild = Don't do that ever.

EDIT: Without having looked at the calculations because I can't be bothered, I have to say that this is a great effort guide. Congrats Basasjoblu.

[DarkenedHue]

Here are the main conclusions from the guide:
• 1400 ArP rating is the hard cap.
• Every boss has 10643 armor
• 80% ArP + Sunder Armor is NOT 100% ArP. Sunder always gives an dps increase on bosses
• ArP does NOT apply to all of the armor a boss has, only a part of it
• You can only reach 0 armor with 100% ArP AND Shattering throw AND Sunder Armor/Expose Armor
• Bleeds are NOT affected by armor (and thus not by ArP)
• In general, your ArP gets worse on high armor targets (against common thought)

I tested this out and it seems just 1400 Arp, 5x Sunder Armor stacks, and Faerie Fire are enough to bring a boss' armor down to zero.

This should be easy enough for anyone to confirm. Test the damage of Bloodthirst on a heroic dummy with Sunder Armor + FF, and then again with Sunder Armor + Shattering Throw. If you're at 1400 Arp, and were careful not to let any procs change your AP, you'll see Bloodthirst will do exactly the same damage.

On researching the matter a little more I came across this: https://itisatrap.wordpress.com/2010...r-penetration/

Moving on, we’re now applying the bossses fully debuffed armor to Ghostcrawler’s formula. He told us the constant for an 83 boss is 16635, so our formula will be (7982+16635)/3, equaling 8205.6. As per GC’s instructions, we take the minimum of these two values, so 7,982. This is where I worry about wowwiki’s validity. The way GC explains the formula, the number we should get from dividing armor+constant by three should be less than the bosses current armor, so that 100% armor penetration=/= 100% of the bosses armor being stripped. However, it seems that with a sundered/faerie fired boss, the armor value is lower than the number given through the formula. Since ArP is then applied to the minimum number of the two, we can apply 100% armor penetration to that 7,982 armor, bringing the boss to 0 armor and increasing physical damage done to it by 41%.

In conclusion: assuming Wowwiki is right, it is possible to bring a boss to 0% armor, but only if debuffs (or static ArP buffs, such as a warrior’s battlestance buff), are present. Armor Penetration alone will not bring a boss to 0% Physical Damage Reduction, but it can tear chunks in your opponents armor.

Let me try to explain that in my own words.

We know that your Arp is applied to one of either two values; either the armor Cap, or the actual armor, whichever value is lower.

When the boss' armor is higher than its Armor Cap, your armor penetration is applied to the lower value, i.e. the Armor Cap. In this scenario, the boss will always have some armor left. When the boss' armor is lower than its Armor Cap, which happens with enough armor debuffs on it, your armor penetration is applied to the lower value, i.e. the Boss' armor, and thus 100% Arp in this situation would remove all the boss's armor, and you'd effectively be hitting a 0 armor target.

What the Armor Cap is is determined by the boss' current armor, as well as the Armor constant C, as per the following formula:
Armor Cap = (Armor + C)/3

C for a level 83 boss target in WotLK is 16635, so plugging that in, we have the following:
Armor Cap = (Armor + 16635)/3

The point at which the Armor Cap becomes equal to the actual armor of the boss is the point where you start ignoring all of a Boss' armor with 100% Arp. For a level 83 boss target, this value is 8317.5 (plug this into the value of the Armor Cap and Armor in the above formula and you'll see I'm correct). We'll round it down and take 8317. This basically means that for you to ignore all of a Boss' armor with 100% Arp, the boss has to have an armor value of 8317 Armor or below (in other words, 8317 Armor is the maximum armor a boss can have that would be entirely negated by 100% Arp. Armor values above this will never be reduced to 0 regardless of you having 100% Arp). Below 8317, whether the boss has 7000 armor, 1000 armor, or 5 armor is inconsequential as your 100% Arp is going to negate all of that just the same.

Sunder Armor + Faerie fire bring a Boss' armor down to 80% x 95% x 10643 = 8088.68, a value that is below the 8317 cut-off point. This means 100% Arp does indeed make you treat a boss as if he had 0 armor if he has the Sunder Armor and Faerie Fire debuffs on him.

Sunder Armor alone does not cut it. 80% x 10643 = 8514.4. This value is above the 8317 cut-off, which means that even with 100% Arp, you won't be hitting a 0 armor target.

Hello there, thanks for your reply.

About the constant you mentioned, different sources say different things. The
compendium from Elitist Jerks uses 15232.5, and Landsoul's does the same.
I looked the code up in Trinity and it seems like it does base the constant on
the boss' level (so 16635) . I'll try to test it and change everything accordingly.

It seems weird to me a source like EJ would make such a big mistake.

For the battle stance, I'll remove that part.

The confusion stems from this: Some say the Armor Constant is based off the Attacker's level (which would make it 15232.5 for a level 80 attacker), and some say it's based off the boss' level (which would make it 16635).

Ghostcrawler's exact words were this: "For a level 80 target, C=15232.5. For a level 83, C=16635," which you'd think would settle the argument, except that there were apparently several discussions on EJ which found that the armor constant was in fact based on the ATTACKER's level, rather than the boss'.

Either this was a bug on retail, or Ghostcrawler himself was wrong. Whatever the case might be, the fact stands that the implications of this are pretty major. On Warmane you can achieve 0 armor through 100% Arp, 5x Sunder Armor stacks, and Faerie Fire. On retail, that would've left the boss with around 315 or so armor, which would give it a remaining 2% or so damage reduction through armor. This does also explain some of the damage discrepancy between here and retail.

[hebe]

I still dont get this lol, please some one answer clearly.

a warrior completely ignoring ARP and going full STR, VS a 80% arp warrior with same gear
Assuming the 1st warr has 2600STR and 30%arp unbuffed and the other has 2100STR with 80%arp
who would get a higher recount/bigger numbers on screen?

[Qtinz]

I still dont get this lol, please some one answer clearly.

a warrior completely ignoring ARP and going full STR, VS a 80% arp warrior with same gear
Assuming the 1st warr has 2600STR and 30%arp unbuffed and the other has 2100STR with 80%arp
who would get a higher recount/bigger numbers on screen?

50% arp is equal to 700arp. So you gain 700arp for 500str. This alone is a worthy trade.

In any case I can think of your arp-str-trade-ratio is 1:1 at best. Most of the time you are losing more str than you gain arp. (e.g. taking Toskks over any Plate/Str non arp alternative). So in your scenario you'd also have to increase your itlvl by a lot to achieve such a conversion.

[Fluffybully]

Bump for all the pleb warrs, who still don't know why am yelling in rejds for sunder armor.

[Gnimo]

1360 armor pen + 40 strength / agility / attack power
vs
1380 armor pen + 20 strength / agility / attack power
vs
1400 armor pen + 0 strength / agility / attack power

Which one deals most DPS overall and why?

I saw some interesting things on forums nowadays about this so i want to know which one are true.

Strength / Agility / Attack Power, depending on which class we are talking about.
Strength for DKs and Warrs, Agility for Hunters, and so on... If u get what i mean...

[DarkenedHue]

For the Warrior, the 1400 Arp would be more desirable in any circumstance.

For the others, you'd have to be more specific about the kind of the situation. As a Hunter, for instance, if an encounter heavily featured AoE, that would bring into play significant amounts of Arcane and Fire damage that derive no benefit from Arp, thus pushing the scale in favour of Agi. Of course, in such a hypothetical situation, you'd be better off going even further below 1360 Arp to collect more Agi.

If that wasn't the kind of situation you were talking about, and instead you were operating under a belief that the value of Arp is depreciated significantly once it gets as high as 1360+ and that you'd therefore be better off stacking Str/Agi, then no that isn't true at all. The reason has to do with the mechanics through which Arp increases your physical damage by negating enemy armor. Every point of Arp has slightly more potency than the last, and it's therefore always the last Arp points before your Arp cap that are the most valuable. In other words, the concept that 1360 Arp + 40 Str > 1400 Arp as a general rule couldn't be more wrong.

Some quick numbers to show what I mean, using 350 Arp (25%) increments.

Formulas used:
EffectiveArmor = Armor – ArP rating / 1399.6 * min{Armor cap, Armor}
DR% = EffectiveArmor / (EffectiveArmor + 15232.5)

Basic Parameters that will be used:
Boss Armor: 8088 (This is 10643 x 0.8 x 0.95, i.e. base boss armor with 5x SA stacks and Faerie Fire)
Armor Cap: 7773 (This is derived from the Blizz-like armor constant of 15232.5, I'm not sure whether this is the case on Warmane's servers yet)

Having 0 Arp:
Damage Reduction = 8088/(8088 + 15232.5) = 34.8%
Effective Damage = 100 - 34.8 = 65.2%

Having 350 Arp:
Damage Reduction = 6145/(6145 + 15232.5) = 28.8%
Effective Damage = 100 - 28.8 = 71.2%

Having 700 Arp:
Damage Reduction = 4201/(4201 + 15232.5) = 21.6%
Effective Damage = 100 - 21.6 = 78.4%

Having 1050 Arp:
Damage Reduction = 2258/(2258 + 15232.5) = 12.9%
Effective Damage = 87.1%

Having 1400 Arp:
Damage Reduction = 350/(350 + 15232.5) = 2.2%
Effective Damage = 97.8%

Let's call the damage when you have 0 Arp Y. This amount Y is achieved after the 34.8% damage reduction.

At 350 Arp, you now deal 71.2/65.2 = 1.092 Y damage. Your damage increased by 9.2% from Y.
At 700 Arp, you would now deal 78.4/65.2 = 1.2 Y damage. Your damage increased 20% from Y, and this is a 9.9% damage increase over the previous increment.
At 1050 Arp, you deal 87.1/65.2 = 1.34 Y damage. 34% damage increase over Y, and this is a 11% damage increase over the previous increment.
At the full 1400 Arp cap, you deal 97.8/65.2 = 1.5 Y damage. 50% damage increase over Y, and this is a 12% damage increase over the previous increment.

What this vaguely demonstrates is that every 350 increment was better than the last in that it netted an even greater % increase than the last did. The exact same concept applies when you scale down the increments and apply it to 1360 Arp vs 1400 Arp. Those last 40 are the most valuable 40.

Spoiler: Show

Spoiler: Show

And I just noriced an error with the guide, these two graphs should be swapped.

[Gnimo]

Thanks for the reply... :D

[Kidpachi]

So I'm wondering if most of you are also like..
Read read read... understand understand understand..
*Math formula**.. comprehending...... loading.. skipping... skip skip skip...
*Graphs* staring... comprehending...... loading.. stare stare stare...
then read read read..

[Beanlord]

So I'm wondering if most of you are also like..
Read read read... understand understand understand..
*Math formula**.. comprehending...... loading.. skipping... skip skip skip...
*Graphs* staring... comprehending...... loading.. stare stare stare...
then read read read..

Probably yes. All of the explanations are rather straightforward.

[Jakkre]

• In general, your ArP gets worse on high armor targets (against common thought)

I didn't read the whole text but does that actually mean that in PvP ArP is more beneficial against a cloth than against a plate opponent?

In many Arms warr guides they recommend to get something between 60% - 70% ArP and stack strength afterwards. Why?