hmm, as i understand it bosses are level 63's right now. Is that incorrect or it going up with the patch? Also does this mean our mitigation against equal levels will be increasing substantially?

Sorry if I'm missing something, I feel dumb.

Besides Shadow Embrace, there's also Scorpid Sting, which will be adding a 5% miss rate. Combined, and perhaps with some other ability I don't know of, this will neutralize much of the overall DPS increase, but Shadow Embrace helps against spikes, while Scorpid does not...

So, in the end we may be able to balance it, but it's going to force at least one warlock into a particular spec, and force at least one hunter to be the scorpidier.

Prolly be wiser to try Scorpid Sting on a boss not immune to nature spells.

Thanks Gurg for reopening.

First, my little bit of extra data. As you can see from the formula, the armor mitigation starts ramping up at 60 and not after 60. As a result, players are going to see an increase in physical dps as well. About a 2% increase against mobs in the 2-3k armor range up to a 5% increase against anything at 10k armor. I did tests of live vs. ptr to see if mobs had more armor as a result of this change. It seems just like they are not rescaling the damage done by mobs, they are also not rescaling their armor. I definitely did see this dps increase as a result of the new armor formula which essentially will make us all level 64.5 according to the current formula.

Thanks to this thread, I did look into Shadow Embrace. It is specific to the mob and will help offset this some. Probably even help on the one fight I was most worried about this change for, which is Patchwerk. The more and more I see of how all the different changes work, the better and better I feel that raiding will still work just fine at 60 after this patch. In fact, I am expecting to see a nice dps increase raid wide. So we will probably have an easier time with things once we adjust to slightly higher spike damages and the changes to mods/healing.

No bugged armor values are on PTR. My original post outlines why we are seeing a decrease in mitigation. In fact, you won't see a decrease on PTR on the character sheet, since that sheet is vs. level 60s which the increase in armor values seems to offset well enough as shown in Melthar's data.

Scorpid Sting is actually a great dps decreasing ability already available to people now. However, almost all raid bosses seem to be immune to it. I always have our hunters try it, since it tends to offset the AP increase from CoR perfectly. So if we can land it, then we get CoR for free even on a newish boss. Hopefully this is not the case in the expansion end game. But I am confident that they will properly tune encounters there for the new armor formula. My big concern of bringing this here is how it will affect us right after this upcoming patch while we wait for expansion to release. Since current content is definitely not tuned with any of these changes in mind. However, it is interesting to note how they have steepened the armor formula to deal with the higher ilevel gear in the expansion.

Sorry for not being clear. I was saying that because items are getting a bit more armor, that a warrior tank with about 10k armor on live will be around 11k armor after patch. And a druid tank with 15k armor on live will have about 17k armor after patch. Both are just estimates and not completely accurate, as Melthar's data shows him gaining 1k armor. However, the point still stands that even with a nice little boost in armor from items in the patch, we will see a decrease in mitigation against level 63 mobs.

Also, those noting mitigation changes as they leveled in BC, remember that those are just against an even level opponent. So against a level 73 boss, it will be even lower by a fair portion. That has always been true of the character sheet damage reduction formulas.