700 ArP, what to do?

I recently broke the 700 ArP rating threshold where it is recommended to begin gemming ArP. However, when running the numbers in RAWR, gemming ArP would only increase my DPS by roughly 40 which doesn't seem right (722 ArP -> 1084 ArP, 1168 ArP if I drop WFS for Banner).

Is RAWR inaccurate or should I wait for better itemized gear before finally gemming for ArP (my belt and one ring have no ArP)?

Hello, first of all, good luck with gearing up.
Now about armor penetration, I have seen a lot of people suggesting to hunter players in gearing process, to start stacking armor pen. as soon as they get to 700 passive armor pen. from their gear.
Now the thing that they decide to ignore at this point while making suggestion like that is very important, hunter do not do, only physical damage. Hunter dps is mixture of magic and physical damage.
At this point of game when you have low/to mid gear on your hunter. You'r physical damage will be higher then magic one, but not for too much and the magic damage part of hunter should not be ignored. So what happens next, when you gem and stack only armor pen, you increase only that physical damage output (but keep in mind that we still did not get to that part of gear, where the physical damage is starting to be significantly higher then our magic part of damage). But if we gem for agility, we will be able to increase both of them.
The higher gear you get, physical damage will start to become more dominant, and you will be getting more passive armor penetration from the gear itself.
My suggestion to you would be to start stacking armor penetration, once you get around 900/950 of passive armor penetration from your gear.
Until that point, agility will either be a little bit higher, or around equal to armor pen.

Best regards. :)

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Originally Posted by djubrepokvareno

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My suggestion to you would be to start stacking armor penetration, once you get around 900/950 of passive armor penetration from your gear.
Until that point, agility will either be a little bit higher, or around equal to armor pen.

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This. I made a mistake in calculations (never calculate extremely high, folks) and went full arp gems once I broke the 800 passive arp boundary, like one DBW away from what I originally planned. And at this point there's no difference whatsoever. In fact, I feel like I should've stick with my original plan of waiting to pass 900 passive arp. This especially feels like a fail in fights with a lot of movement, where I can't just stand and spam Steady Shot whole day. :)

Edit: Btw, the recommended minimum from gear is 800, not 700 arp. At 700 you'll have around 1,1k arp with all gems, food and elixir. And that's way of the mark of 1,4k cap.

The 700 Armor Pen break-point you sometimes see referenced in regard to where Arp overtakes Agi is a gross simplification.

The reality is that Arp is influenced by several things other than the amount of "passive Arp" itself. It works, essentially, as a damage multiplier on all your physical, non-bleed damage. Having very low overall damage, as is likely to be the case at your gear, diminishes the value of Arp.

With 700 Arp, all your physical damage does 20% more damage than it would have with 0 Arp (assuming the presence of Sunder Armor/Faerie Fire).

If you're only doing, say 4k DPS, of which only 2.4k DPS is physical, 700 Arp increases your DPS by something like 0.2*2400 = 480 DPS. If your base DPS were higher, and you were doing 8k DPS, with 4.8k of that being physical, 700 Arp would then provide a 960 DPS increase instead. Whereas Arp provides a purely multiplicative effect (i.e. it multiplies all your phys. dmg by a mathematically determined amount), the DPS gain from Agility includes an additive component - the Attack Power. This is a huge part of what makes Agi better with lower overall gear.

The other reason it's an oversimplification is because it assumes the highly unrealistic conditions of no AoE or movement. Realistically, things like Arcane Shot, Explosive Trap, and Volley are going to be used with some frequency in most of your encounters. These things tip the scale in favour of Agility rather considerably, because they derive no benefit from Arp.

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Originally Posted by DarkenedHue

The 700 Armor Pen break-point you sometimes see referenced in regard to where Arp overtakes Agi is a gross simplification.

The reality is that Arp is influenced by several things other than the amount of "passive Arp" itself. It works, essentially, as a damage multiplier on all your physical, non-bleed damage. Having very low overall damage, as is likely to be the case at your gear, diminishes the value of Arp.

With 700 Arp, all your physical damage does 20% more damage than it would have with 0 Arp (assuming the presence of Sunder Armor/Faerie Fire).

If you're only doing, say 4k DPS, of which only 2.4k DPS is physical, 700 Arp increases your DPS by something like 0.2*2400 = 480 DPS. If your base DPS were higher, and you were doing 8k DPS, with 4.8k of that being physical, 700 Arp would then provide a 960 DPS increase instead. Whereas Arp provides a purely multiplicative effect (i.e. it multiplies all your phys. dmg by a mathematically determined amount), the DPS gain from Agility includes an additive component - the Attack Power. This is a huge part of what makes Agi better with lower overall gear.

The other reason it's an oversimplification is because it assumes the highly unrealistic conditions of no AoE or movement. Realistically, things like Arcane Shot, Explosive Trap, and Volley are going to be used with some frequency in most of your encounters. These things tip the scale in favour of Agility rather considerably, because they derive no benefit from Arp.

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Thank you for this. I'm doing about 10-11k DPS after the duration of a fight like Festergut (sitting at 5940 GS with STS+WFS). I haven't used Arcane Shot in my rotation for a long time though (I do use it as a movement filler when necessary) but I do use explosive trap (pre-pull on Deathbringer for example or passing through Halion in Ruby Sanctum). A shame Volley doesn't benefit from ArP :(

So, would you say to avoid gemming ArP unless gemming for it allows you to hit the ArP cap?

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Originally Posted by SupaKaiser

Thank you for this. I'm doing about 10-11k DPS after the duration of a fight like Festergut (sitting at 5940 GS with STS+WFS). I haven't used Arcane Shot in my rotation for a long time though (I do use it as a movement filler when necessary) but I do use explosive trap (pre-pull on Deathbringer for example or passing through Halion in Ruby Sanctum). A shame Volley doesn't benefit from ArP :(

So, would you say to avoid gemming ArP unless gemming for it allows you to hit the ArP cap?

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I would simply use arp gems instead of agi in gear upgrades from now on, and regem to cap once it is reachable. You are at the point where agi and arp are extremely close in terms of dmg output. You can trust rawr in that arp is better for single target (by a very small margin now, which will grow, for me personally it is not worth switching all gems now).

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Originally Posted by jendah

I would simply use arp gems instead of agi in gear upgrades from now on, and regem to cap once it is reachable. You are at the point where agi and arp are extremely close in terms of dmg output. You can trust rawr in that arp is better for single target (by a very small margin now, which will grow, for me personally it is not worth switching all gems now).

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Thank you.

I'd err on the side of switching to Arp as late as possible. Doing it when you know you'll hit the cap sounds like a good middle ground. Obviously this way it's going to be less optimal for tank and spank encounters, but it'll be great pretty much everywhere else.

Another question could be, is it ever worth gemming arp? Do we ever reach the level of attack power where a % damage boost would outperform a further (linear damage boost) stacking of attack power (agility)?