Arms?

Keisarvexius · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:37 pm Post subject: Arms?

Arms is getting a MAJOR overhaul in 3.1. Is anyone going to try it out? I'm considering it. Battle stance now gives 10% armor reduction, and armor reduction is actually amazing now.

Unclal · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 5:06 pm Post subject:

I'm giving Durghan an Arms try. I have gear to get me hit-capped and some decent AP and crit. Hopefully, I'll be able to get on tonight and lay it out and try it's DPS against quest mobs or argent tournament stuff. There's dummies too.

Tygragaris · Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 7:30 am Post subject:

I need to do a little bit of reading up on armor penetration these days... before 3.1 it was a joke, but if it's worthwhile now, it'll work similar to the old style of armor penetration.... That being you get more benefit from more armor penetration.

The way they changed it to a percentage instead of a raw value though makes me think that there's going to be some sort of 'magic number' where stacking armor penetration becomes more worthwhile than stacking attack power. After all, your first 25% armor penetration isn't going to be adding nearly as much damage as your last 25%.

I'll post some numbers once I do some reading.

Ganggrel · Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:22 pm Post subject:

it was never a "joke", it just wasnt as disgustingly overpowered as it used to be. and even after the change it was still good. you hear a lot of "its useless" or "its a joke" from the pure raiders. the ones who do nothing outside of raiding.

and even then, it was still good, just not something you would sacrifice crit for if you want to squeeze the most out of your damage in raids. the problem only lies in that it calculation is that it happens AFTER sunder armour is calculated. so this is assuming that you have a prot warrior or either a dps warrior or a rogue that is willing to give up a large chunk of their dps to keep it sundered.

the patch just increased the amount of penetration you get per rating point by 25%. they didnt change anything else about it.
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Tygragaris · Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 6:57 am Post subject:

Gang:

I never said it was useless... some ArP is better than no modifier at all, and occasionally the little extra ArP is just enough to make one piece of gear.

It was, however, the least valued stat of all other DPS stats. Everything else was desirable over ArP- it was the 'red-headed stepchild' DPS stat. So yes, in 3.0 it was a joke, for all classes.

The 'pure raiders' we get this information from are usually the ones who have taken the time to actually do the number crunching and have a good reason /why/ they say it's useless. To not merit this is to purposely ignore good advice.

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Keis:

After doing a bit of reading, I've come up with a number of different results regarding armor penetration.

Popular theorycrafting has led most folks on the EJ forums to suggest stacking the HELL out of Armor Penetration, including replacing all your strength gems with it.

However, I found a thread that suggests that ArP is bugged and is actually operating at about 81% of what it should be.

I just found another thread with a whole ton of number crunching in it, gonna poke around in there and see if I can come up with something more substantial.

Ganggrel · Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 12:28 pm Post subject:

by the same token, if you read ALL the numbers and calculations that they post, you would have seen how good it was assuming there was no sunders or expose armour. but the pure raiders attitude is always that there will always be a prot warrior there. bigredkitty showed both sides of the coin even though he HATES armour pen, as did an elitist jerk writeup.

thats a pretty large assumption to make in 5 or 10 man, especially since there 4 viable tank classes, on top of which dks are viable tanks in all 3 specs, they just need the tank gear, druids can get away with being a bastard mixup of dps and tank.

and this is also completely ignoring pvp or solo play.

sorry for being argumentative, but it really grinds me when people just spout out HEAVILY biased and assumption heavy information as fact.

IF you do NOTHING but raiding, and have a prot warrior in your raid all the time,THEN armour pen was the least desired stat. if not, then it was pretty damn good, at least as good as crit for physical dps. doubt this? all they did was bump it 25% and now all of a sudden EJ is hailing it as the best stat to stack even in the worst possible situations for that stat (sunder armour always being up).
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Tygragaris · Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 2:09 pm Post subject:

(No worries about seeming argumentative... I always enjoy a good debate.

)

Good points... armor pen are definitely more useful when you don't have sunder or faerie fire to consider, since the ratio of armor reduction would be greater. Since it's not guaranteed that you always have a warrior or druid (or rogue or warlock or hunter with a pet that debuffs armor, etc), ArP begins to come into its own the less separate sources of armor reduction are present.

However, one of the problems with ArP is the narrow range of abilities which are affected by it. Arms warriors, rogues and feral druids rely on bleed damage (and rogue poison) which is not impacted by ArP at all. Ret paladins do more holy damage than they do physical, which is not impacted by armor at all. Death Knights rely on a large number of damage from elemental sources, making ArP minimally useful for any spec other than Blood.

When you compare it to straight attack power, which affects virtually every skill and damage source available to all of these classes, even with linear scaling it's still more attractive than ArP.

I think that if Blizzard had changed nothing with ArP, it would have been the stat of choice again anyways once T9 content was released, as itemization would allow for higher amounts of it stacked on your gear. With a 25% damage buff I think it's well on its way to becoming overpowered.

Besides all that, Keis was asking about it for himself, and the guy is decked out in 25-man gear like a beast.

BTW - according to this other thread I've been looking at, ArP is functioning at 81% of what it's supposed to... effectively making it worse than it was before until that bug is fixed. I'd say once that's fixed it'll be worth gemming the hell out of and stacking as high as possible.