How does armor penetration work vs plate and cloth wearers? Is it less important vs a cloth wearer? As a rogue playing against a cloth wearer, would it be better to have gear that does not have armor penetration boosts, such as crit or attack power? Do people have multiple sets of gear that they can swap in arenas, for this reason? If so, how do you know when to swap gear?
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Member
Armor Penetration vs Cloth Wearers
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Banned
Armor penetration ignores a % of your target's armor, which means the higher your target's armor, the more armor value you ignore. More armor = more armor ignored = more DPS stats on your gear, so yes, it nets you less damage against cloth than it does against plate. Keep in mind that arp is a very poorly designed stat and scales exponentially, which results in it being crap when you have low amounts of it, and too good when you have a lot.
What this boils down to is:
Can you get 70%+ arp?
Yes ==> Rank1 here I come
No ==> I guess I'll gem something that isn't broken
Will swapping to an ap set vs cloth improve your damage? Yes.
When to do it? When you see them wearing a dress, obviously.Edited: March 17, 2017
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Banned
If it scales, shouldnt it be better vs people with already low armor?
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Banned
Tell me, which one of these produces the bigger number? 70% of 30 000 or 70% of 5 000?
There's another thing you need to keep in mind when wondering how Blizzard managed to create a stat this stupid and that is that high armor classes are usually balanced with their armor in mind, just like cloth. A mage doesn't feel handicapped by the lack of armor because the class was designed not to get hit, just like warlocks have passive damage reduction outside of armor. But once you take a warrior's or a shaman's armor away, they become paper because their toolkit was balanced around the assumption that they actually have armor, which, thanks to the generous amounts of arp on PvE gear and its availability, they really don't.Edited: March 17, 2017
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Member
But you don't see the amount of armor you ignored as the damage number, you see your damage on a target with 9000 and 1500 armor.
So, that means you'll be hitting your cloth targets for a lot more damage.
EDIT: And if I'm not mistaken, if arp scales exponentially, that means a small difference in armor at these amounts (hundreds) means a huge difference in damage.Edited: March 17, 2017
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Banned
70% arp on a 30,000 target will likely only reduce armor by some 13,000 to 15,000.
jk, its actually even less, its something around 11,000.
arp is better designed than y`all would believe.Edited: March 17, 2017
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Banned
Obviously arp will still increase your damage even against cloth, the point is that it's a percentage value that depends on both your target's armor and how much arp you have, where the more armor your target has, the more DPS you gain point for point of arp up to a cap. Now the cap in PvP is a bit nebulous as the only proper info on it pertains to raid bosses and not players, but if we assume players behave the same way lvl 83 bosses do when arp is involved then we can draw the same conclusions. At 100% arp, the difference in DPS gained between smacking a target with 1000 armor and 30000 armor is 6.6% and 52.3% respectively.
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Member
Arp is better vs everybody except mages and locks.
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Banned
Nothing at all is nebulous.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 (targetlevel<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.
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Banned
Just tested it on Blackrock by auto attacking with my arms warrior a priest with 5743 (27,38%) armor.
First I have done x80 auto attacks with 5422 AP and 45,30% arp (full strength gems).
Recount shows:
Average melee hit: 1580
Average melee crit: 2377
Second I have done x80 auto attacks with 4630 AP and 72,45% arp (same gear but full arp gems):
Average melee hit: 1591
Average melee crit: 2310
As u can see, no matter if arp or strength, the dmg was pretty much the same against the clothy.
Keep in mind though that this test was done on Blackrock where BiS gear is not available. I was unbuffed and didn't had any proc trinkets equipped so my AP was pretty low in the ARP gear setup.
In BiS PvP gear and buffed a arms warrior who gems ARP has still at least 5200 AP and even more with doulbe trinket procs.
That makes ARP even more beneficial because the more AP u have the better ARP gets.
I would say as a BIS PvP geared Warr ARP always outperforms strength, no matter if u attack a clothy or a plate opponent.
Not sure about rog though.Edited: March 18, 2017
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Banned
Why would you pick the only cloth wearer that relies on armor for this test? Priests are pretty close to the optimal values for arp with just inner fire and pretty much exactly at the cap with glyph of inner fire. There is absolutely no doubt that arp is better against priests as they're as much cloth as boomkins are leather. The only classes who actually tend to have cloth armor values are mages and warlocks.
It's funny cause Ghostcrawler says it's tricky in that exact same quote.Edited: March 18, 2017
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Banned
Doesnt armor scale weirldy, where (for players) the biggest reduction per point is in the lowest numbers? So while you reduce a lot less armor vs cloth the armor you reduce is "worth" more.
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Banned
Not according to the numbers we're seeing on the Wowwiki charts, where we can clearly see that the increase in DPS is proportional to how much armor your target has. While armor does seem to experience diminishing returns when it comes to how much damage it mitigates per point, it actually increases your effective health linearly, which means it's worth just as much at low values as it is at high ones.
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Banned
> nebulous
> Vague or ill-defined.
Exactly nothing about 'tricky' is vague nor ill-defined.
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