Upcoming boss armor changes

[twinkfist]

so with this change, does it mean that for when in effect, executioner is now better than mongoose for ret pve?

i'm so confused.

[Snake-Aes]

Executioner wasn't better than mongoose before?

[Erendis]

Armor Pen is percentage based. This actually in a bassackward way makes ArP more valuable. BTW, a significantly larger amount of threat comes from our white damage now so while this isn't a -huge- change, it is something to keep an eye on.

You know, I find this to be a little like using a sledgehammer to nail a thumbtack into a wall. The change is squarely aimed at huntards who are only able to do the kind of DPS they do because Judgement of Wisdom procs so much. I'm not going to go deep into huntard theorycrafting, but on a 3 minute fight, the current JoW gives a MM huntard back 33,000 mana. That means no time spent in Viper which was the intended mechanism to bring huntard DPS down.

However, without JoW Hunters have huge mana issues. Going through my rotations on the dummys I spend maybe 1/6 of the time in viper. Viper btw is a huge DPS penalty as opposed to its old version.

[twinkfist]

executioner was better for ret dps due to crusader strike and whatnot...then when more holy damage started to come about, mongoose ended up being better...but now with the armor to boss changes...i'm wonder if it fluctuated again.

[Fridmarr]

executioner was better for ret dps due to crusader strike and whatnot...then when more holy damage started to come about, mongoose ended up being better...but now with the armor to boss changes...i'm wonder if it fluctuated again.

Executioner was only better if you already had about 300 armor pen. Since Divine Storm is now physical, executioner may be better all around. Cromfel's site probably has the data on it.

[twinkfist]

passive armor pen was always the question. i've read it was 300, 500 or 800. before the patch i just tried to get as much as i could which was round 651 because i never saw cat's edge drop.

but yeah, with divine storm being weapon damage based and not holy damage, i'm thinking that armor pen and haste are now going to be pretty big for ret.

[halabar]

executioner was better for ret dps due to crusader strike and whatnot...then when more holy damage started to come about, mongoose ended up being better...but now with the armor to boss changes...i'm wonder if it fluctuated again.

Executioner was only better if you already had about 300 armor pen. Since Divine Storm is now physical, executioner may be better all around. Cromfel's site probably has the data on it.

Cromfel's site is pretty dead.

Have to see what they say in the thread at EJ.

Speaking as a hunter, I like what they did here as a solution, because it doesn't effect solo/leveling/farming/5-mans. I don't have WF up anytime except in raids.

My thought of this as a hunter was "meh, we'll deal with it".

I can see warriors and rogues QQing.

I also hope this will do some of the end-game scaling back they wanted to do to ret, so they don't nerf ret in regular pve anymore.

[honorshammer]

Retpaladin.com is still pretty active.

[twinkfist]

i'll have to check out retpaladin later on tonight to see what they say.

i have a torch with executioner and a blade of harbingers with mongoose.

[honorshammer]

i'll have to check out retpaladin later on tonight to see what they say.

i have a torch with executioner and a blade of harbingers with mongoose.

I've had no luck with Torch, CatsEdge or Soul Cleaver. I'm still about 40 Badges short of a Harbinger.

[PsiVen]

As far as I'm concerned the major benefit of Executioner/Mongoose is the glow. Savagery is good enough

I thought ArP was generally considered to be worse after the rating change, since it doesn't stack as well and was only worthwhile when stacked before?

[fafhrd]

Wonder if this buffs the value of armor ignore.

No.

Well, it buffs the absolute amount of armor removed by each point of ArP, but that's irrelevant if each point is providing a smaller DPS increase than it used to.

Supposed boss has 15k armor now, and suppose all armor debuffs reduce this to 10k.

If you have 30% armor reduction from ArP gear, this brings boss down to 7k armor for your attacks. I think that's roughly 43% damage reduction, so your 1000 damage shot hits for 570.

Now, boss gets 10% more armor, so is at 16.5k, is debuffed down to 11.5k, which your 30% ArP gear brings down to 8050 armor. Which is something like 46.7% damage reduction, so now your 1000 damage shot hits for 540.

You can probably tweak the absolute values above to arrive at some situations where each point of ArP is now worth more than it was before, but I don't think it's going to make ArP any less undesirable than it already is.

[Lore]

I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure most bosses only have 7-9k armor currently. Armor gets debuffed to almost nothing with raid debuffs, which is why Divine Storm doing physical damage wasn't a huge PVE nerf.

[fafhrd]

I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure most bosses only have 7-9k armor currently. Armor gets debuffed to almost nothing with raid debuffs, which is why Divine Storm doing physical damage wasn't a huge PVE nerf.

At 70, bosses have 6200 or 7700 armor almost exclusively (there are a few oddballs like Void Reaver). I'm not sure what the values are at 80 other than the fact that they're higher.

Armor does not even come close to getting debuffed to nothing. With full sunders, FF and CoR before 3.0, armor on a 6200 boss dropped to around 2000, so with around that much ArP you got bosses to 0 armor (basically just hunters and some shamans did this, never saw any plate or leather DPS stacking much more than 1k ArP passive, with 800 on proc from executioner - mail DPS went for 1800-2k passive and 300 on proc from Madness, or 800 on proc from Executioner for shamans).

Now CoR and FF don't stack, and ArP only reduces armor by a % of the value left AFTER all armor debuffs, so you can never get a boss down to near zero armor. Hell you can barely get a priest down to 0 armor anymore.

[Zironic]

Wonder if this buffs the value of armor ignore.

No.

Well, it buffs the absolute amount of armor removed by each point of ArP, but that's irrelevant if each point is providing a smaller DPS increase than it used to.

Supposed boss has 15k armor now, and suppose all armor debuffs reduce this to 10k.

If you have 30% armor reduction from ArP gear, this brings boss down to 7k armor for your attacks. I think that's roughly 43% damage reduction, so your 1000 damage shot hits for 570.

Now, boss gets 10% more armor, so is at 16.5k, is debuffed down to 11.5k, which your 30% ArP gear brings down to 8050 armor. Which is something like 46.7% damage reduction, so now your 1000 damage shot hits for 540.

You can probably tweak the absolute values above to arrive at some situations where each point of ArP is now worth more than it was before, but I don't think it's going to make ArP any less undesirable than it already is.

You're doing it wrong.
This is the formula for lvl 70 attacker:
(Armor / (Armor + 10557.3)) * 100

We'll do this for 4 values, 11k, 10k, 7k and 7.7k
11k = 51% = 49% dmg done
10k = 48.7% = 51.3% dmg done
7k = 39.9% = 60.1% dmg done
7.7k = 42.2% = = 57.8% dmg done

578/490 = 17.9% increase
601/513 = 17.2% increase

Thus ArP is MORE valuable the more armor the target has.

We could compare this with way crit rating, to get our 30% armor pen you need 222 Armor pen (7.4 per %), crit costs 22 per 1%, that means 30% pen which is somewhere around 17% dmg is equal to 10% crit itembudgetwise. So on a high armor target ArP is clearly superior to crit

Sure 15k armor is not a realistic lvl 70 scenario so i'll do the math for a real raid boss.

He'll be down to around 2k armor after all the cute debuffs so we'll compare 2k with 1.4k

2k = 15.9% = 84.1% damage done
1.4k = 11.7% = 88.3% damage done

883/841 = 4.9% increase, about half as good as crit

So on a low armor target crit is clearly superior to ArP.

I suspect blizzard aim for them to be equivalent on a lvl 80 raidboss that's fully armordebuffed.