Hi everyone, I would like to voice a concern about the scaling of physical mitigation versus the scaling of ways to remove physical mitigation (primarily Sunder Armor R6). This is a repost of my post on the WOW-EU beta forums a few weeks ago.

Along the way to 70, and at 70 doing the instanced content available, you cannot help but notice how less and less efficient stacking 5 Sunders becomes.
I could previously (level 60 content, raid or otherwise) stack Sunder Armor to 5 and see a mob's DR drop considerably, this has quickly become a different story as the AC value has scaled rapidly, since a mob will have around 40% DR for his level on average (unless it is flagged for less armor such as many caster mobs).
With so much more AC needed for 40% DR at level 70 and Sunder Armor R6 only removing 70 AC more per application it becomes less and less efficient as we level, and our main way to handle DR is becoming quite less efficient than it is on the Live realms currently.
Considering all the outcries after the weapon skill change, it is surprising noone addressed this as it appears to be a bigger DPS hit for all physical damage dealers.

Very few numbers, tested on a Skettis Lynx [PH], level 70 beast:
Bloodthirst base damage: 609 (tooltip).
Bloodthirst after 5 Sunders: 445.
Bloodthirst before Sunder: 377.

This give us 38.1% DR pre-Sunder, and 27% DR post 5 Sunders.

38.1% DR on level 70 mobs, after I remove 2600 armor I'm left with 27% DR.
38.1% DR on level 60 mobs, after I remove 2250 armor I'm left with 17.1% DR.

What this translates to is this:
Versus level 70 mobs you're going to be doing about 11% less damage overall than previously (remember the mobs at 60 still had mitigation) using Sunder alone in the example above, this gets worse as you progress and you encounter higher level mobs (72-73) which will have an even heavier AC value, you need 7000 AC for 40% DR at level 70, you need 3675 for 40% DR at 60, does anyone feel another 350 AC removed through the new rank of Sunder Armor is enough to keep up with this?

Blizzard had changed the AC values on items, since they had acknowledged the change to the AC formula was quite a steep one. Why then, were AC reducing abilities not changed in correlation to this?

Additions to the original post:
This subject seems to have recieved no interest at all. Maybe this has already been covered, but as I stated in the original post this is a heavier hit than the weapon skill change. This is very noticeable in grinding most mobs and doing instanced content, especially since Bloodthirst is static damage. When you have 5 sunders on a level 72 mob, but your BT with a tooltip of over 1100 is hitting for about 750-800 give or take (from memory - it has been a while, do not quote me on this), it's not really compareable to today's content. For my examples I only took Sunder into consideration, I do not see how the new ranks of FF and CoR will change this much, their scaling was much of the same.

Let's try then.

60: An average level 60 mob would have about 3675 AC, "fully stripped" it would have 280 AC left. Giving it 4.8% DR.

Note the same is not true for most raid mobs, they have higher AC since they are not level 60, etc. Their AC may have changed in 2.0 aswell, something I can't comment on since I have done no 2.0 raiding.

70: An average level 70 mob would have about 7000 AC, fully stripped it would have 2990 AC left. Giving it 21.9% DR.

Screw SA, let's use EA instead.

70: 7000 AC fully stripped using talented EA would have 2515 AC left. 19.4% DR.

That's much worse than I imagined, actually.

The increase from SA4 to SA5 was under the old AC formula, so was the increase to SA6 one can assume. It's rather obvious the AC formula is no longer the same in the bracket of 61<>70.

Can't comment about any caster changes, I did play one and +3 level mobs were not much different for my mage (on appearance alone), though at the time AB never saw partials - something that has since been changed, and it has been a few months with a few patches since I last played it much.

The only time so far my spells have done significantly less than expected is when the mob had a particular buff on that reduced it (some shield wall versus specific schools, while another of note in Netherstorm takes 50% reduced damage from spells as a buff [1 charge]). I've done everything through CoT and haven't hit TK or Shadow Labs yet, so perhaps there's something there. However, at this point, the answer is "No, they haven't done anything to significantly inhibit caster DPS".

Interesting find. This may be the culprit of lower rogue damage just as much as anything else right now on beta at 70.

Oh wow, I had missed this post. As a rogue who is somewhat disillusioned with our apparent uselessness in raid content at level 70, I find this observation to be enormous, and hope it attracts the attention it deserves.

Edit: This should probably be cross-referenced in the TBC rogue thread, but it just occured to me that envenom's usefulness could be huge here...

Making one cumbersome finisher ignore armor at the cost of a huge nerf to all other damage is a pretty poor 'bonus'.

It looks like they are trying to make casters deal more damage than melee in tbc thats all. The bright side is if they balance damage around raids where mobs always have huge armor and no resists to speak of then in pvp the casters are going to feel much more squishy.

I wasn't suggesting that Envenom was a bonus of any sort, really...just that it may be more useful than initially thought due to its ability to ignore armor. This, of course, is also assuming something like a mutilate build where getting 5 stacks of DP would happen very quickly.

People are massively underestimating Envenom's use for a Mutilate build; self-buffed, I've seen it crit for 2700, and my DP stack is right back up within a couple seconds (i.e. before the next tick of DP) half the time. Is it going to beat out Evis for raiding? For my current build, absolutely, because I specifically decided to save the three talent points for Imp Evis and use them in better places (it's an interesting build for 5 mans, 46/8/7). Overall? Eh. For Mutilate builds, probably. For non-Mutilate builds, probably not.

This will definitely give mages the edge in damage over rogues/warriors as Blizzard stated a couple of months ago, and make poison based builds a little stronger for raiding as a rogue. Serrated Blades will lose some of its edge though.

Could this be seen as a druid threat reduction as well, or is that giving them too much credit?

They'd said they still want rogues to be #1 DPS. Of course they'd also said that mages were being left with the highest margin over their "target dps" or whatever.

Blizzard pretty clearly stated that mages were top damage, but that that was not the intended state of affairs.

That said, from running around a bit in beta 5 mans at 70, at least until Murmur shows me some love, they haven't fixed it yet. Rogues are definitely a weak class at the moment for PvE.