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Wrath boss armor testing
EDIT 2, Dec 5th, 2008: The testing was only done on Raid bosses- reports have come in for regular bosses that show a different armor value. For now, I'm going to put the armor in for bosses that have been tested.
EDIT: as of Nov 30, 2008, testing has been done on all bosses and it appears that for now, all bosses have the same armor value shown on Maexxna: 13083 armor. This is true for heroics and regular versions of the bosses, and 10 and 25 man raid versions. I'm going to keep this list active for now because armor is a variable that Blizzard can vary to fine tune the difficulty of an encounter, but unless we get any data points that contradict the tested 13080 (+/- 10) that Dayve has calculated or the exactly 13083 that Lactose saw on Maexxna, assume that that armor value is accurate. That was easy :) This thread will be for people to post data that will help us determine the armor of all the Wrath bosses. I'll keep this post up to date with a list of all known bosses and the armor values we get for them. The second post is going to be a guide to getting this data, so any guild who wants to help won't have to figure it all out themselves, and we will be sure that the research methodology is mostly the same from boss to boss. Bosses: (NOTE: please PM me if I missed anything or messed anything up, don't reply to the post) Dummies
Utgarde keep (5 man non heroic)
Utgarde Pinnacle (5 man non heroic)
The Nexus (5 man non heroic)
The Oculus (5 man non heroic)
Drak'Tharon Keep (5 man non heroic)
Gundrak (5 man non heroic)
The Violet Hold (5 man non heroic)
Ulduar- Halls of Stone (5 man non heroic)
Ulduar- Halls of Lightning (5 man non heroic)
Azjol-Nerub: Azjol-Nerub (5 man non heroic)
Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom (5 man non heroic)
Caverns of Time: Culling of Stratholme (5 man non heroic)
Utgarde keep (5 man heroic)
Utgarde Pinnacle (5 man heroic)
The Nexus (5 man heroic)
The Oculus (5 man heroic)
Drak'Tharon Keep (5 man heroic)
Gundrak (5 man heroic)
The Violet Hold (5 man heroic)
Ulduar- Halls of Stone (5 man heroic)
Ulduar- Halls of Lightning (5 man heroic)
Azjol-Nerub: Azjol-Nerub (5 man heroic)
Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom (5 man heroic)
Caverns of Time: Culling of Stratholme (5 man heroic)
Naxxramas (10 man raid)
Naxxramas (25 man raid)
The Eye of Eternity (10 man raid)
Chamber of the Aspects (eventually) Ulduar Raid (eventually) Icecrown Citadel (eventually) |
Testing methodology
Here's the original pre-3.0 thread for armor reduction: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16629-r..._armor_values/
The best way to test a boss's armor is to use something like improved thunderclap on a boss without any debuffs and compare its damage to the raw damage (what you would do to something with 0 armor). Note: it's possible on bosses that are classified as beasts for a hunter to use beast lore on them to get their exact armor. |
Naxxramas, 10 person raid - Maexxna: 13083 Armor
Proof:  Maexxna is considered to be of the Warrior class. |
What mod shows those values and how is it 'proof'? The actual game doesn't have any APIs showing armor values.
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I recently updated the addon I used to gather armor values pre-3.0; so far I've tested all the raid bosses except for Archavon, most of them on both normal and heroic modes, and the results have been the same for all of them: 13080 armor +/- 10 for both modes. Since Lactose has found that Maexxna has exactly 13083 armor, it should then be safe to state that:
All existing raid bosses in WotLK have exactly 13083 armor, on both heroic and normal difficulty. |
Those values are really quite odd, I'd have expected them to be rounder figures (e.g. 13000 armor, 2500000 health). That extra 83 armor and 10.1k health can't be having any material effect on the fight. I wonder if they're derived via some kind of scaling rule from rounder values at level 70, or even level 60?
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In any case, I'm going to go and update the first post to reflect this data, but if you could indicate any new data that you get if it's different (or if it changes with some future patch), I'll keep the first post updated. |
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That gives casters and melee the same situation on every boss. For a casters, nothing is dumber than tossing some random resistance on a boss. It's "respec or sit". Same for melee and armour. Imagine DPS was finally balanced, and then you add another new boss. If it's armour is lower than normal, you stack melee. If it's higher, you stack casters. Lowering Armour to compensate for a boss that is anti-melee might sound like a good idea for balance at first. But only causes you stack hunters instead. The correct answer would be rebalancing to find something that melee are better at. Also, it gives ArPen a universal value. You already don't have different caps anymore like in 2.4, but with different armour values you'd have different effects of ArPen rating, requiring different gear sets for differently armoured bosses. It's definately losing a bit of variety, but I think it's better for overall game balancing. |
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That gives casters and melee the same situation on every boss. For a casters, nothing is dumber than tossing some random resistance on a boss. It's "respec or sit". Same for melee and armour. Imagine DPS was finally balanced, and then you add another new boss. If it's armour is lower than normal, you stack melee. If it's higher, you stack casters. Lowering Armour to compensate for a boss that is anti-melee might sound like a good idea for balance at first. But only causes you stack hunters instead. The correct answer would be rebalancing to find something that melee are better at. Also, it gives ArPen a universal value. You already don't have different caps anymore like in 2.4, but with different armour values you'd have different effects of ArPen rating, requiring different gear sets for differently armoured bosses. It's definately losing a bit of variety, but I think it's better for overall game balancing. |
Expose, acid spit, sunder 3925
Faerie fire, sting, cor 1260 Total reduction = 5185 13083 - total = 7898 armor 2 formulas from tankspot not sure if it is the 80 or 83 one I should use but I think it is the 80 one as the attacker(you) is 80: Code:
lvl 80Please check for correctness. |
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(didn't mean to say I don't trust you or your research but a bit more information is probably required form thinktank information) |
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Ex. A dealer tells you a car is $8,403.56, you assume there's a system. Why else would there be 56 cents on it? If he tells you it's $8,500, you assume he just picked a random value that sounded good and try harder to argue him down. Blizzard gets a lot of arguing, I think it's very possible that they may have a "avoid rounded-appearing numbers" policy in place. |
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