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.

You should though. FF increased from 505 to 610. Cor from 640 to 800. That adds up to 265. May not sound much but that is nearly the same increase from the difference of 4 Sunders of Rank 5 and Rank 6 (4x70=280).

Do you know at which mitigation you'd look if you include those?

EDIT: May sound silly, but maybe Blizz is aware of this and did this deliberately. Why? A reason could be that they are actually introducing mobs with spell resist so the caster's Spell Penetration is useful for once. Logically they had to reduce melee damage by melee classes to keep the relation. I know, it's just a hunch but maybe some caster could confirm or debunk this?

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.

I'm surprised this hasn't attracted more attention, since the difference on a fully debuffed mob / boss is very large. And even though Warrior rage generation only depends 50% as much on damage as before, this will likely be quite noticeable for Warriors in a raid setting.

Interesting thing to note as well is that while armor scales dramatically post-60, the difference between SA6 (520) and SA5 (450) is actually less than the difference between SA5 and SA4 (360). It seems the armor reduction value of SA is a pretty simple function of the level it's learned (both SA6 and SA5 reduce armor by roughly 7.76 / level) and not very thought through with regards to the increased armor values past 60.

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.

I have grinded my Rogue to level 68, Envenom is definitely the finisher of choice when grinding or fighting any high DR mob, it goes as high as 2400 with 5/5 Vile Poisons while Imp.KS and FW are on while Evis only goes as high as 1800 with the highest rank I think it was, this is with around 1000 AP on fully armored targets though both abilities scale the same from AP (Evis gets 15% while Envenom gets 20% from talents with that build, though).
I might get it to 69 to see R2 but it's substainability is put in question since you lose out on the damage from 5 DP stacks, aswell as your following Mutilate damage bonus quite often in many situations since you keep your energy high for the next cycle and have to hit Mutilate instantly. If at all I would say use it on 4 CP cases when instancing, unless the mob is near death. Make no mistake about it, Envenom is a terrific finisher if used properly under the right circumstances.

Anyway I had some thoughts regarding this. One thing this does indeed give is the possibility for more interesting itemization, items like BotS except passive or with a proc rather than a CD and a use. That could put a rather interesting and positive spin on this. Set bonuses that have your abilities ignore 1000 of your target AC, elixirs that ignore a portion of the AC and the like. Or even reopen the rogue group synergy some more by making some changes to EA, like making it slightly weaker or percentage based again while letting it stack with SA (something that has been rehashed many times, but one can still hope). Then again this is probably an oversight that wasn't given that much thought - the AC values during Beta and Alpha phases shifted back and forth a few times, don't believe SA FF CoR or EA got much attention during that time.

Don't know if casters will "flat out" deal more damage than melee because of this, a level 69 rogue and a 70 hunter held their own quite well while matched with a terrific fire mage and and destruction warlock in Karazhan (mostly wearing T3 gear still), and that was including the AoE component fights like the trash around Moroes and Illhoof which is insanely well suited for a warlock. Warriors still do insanely well in 5 mans atleast, though I can't comment about their damage raids (main limiting factor is how often the aggro kills/makes you stop as a warrior in 5 mans, though - you can outaggro even bears that are in the 1.5K AP range if you're especially aggressive). The damage is still there for melee classes, atleast from my own personal experience in the beta. Almost all classes now have the capacity for rather competitive damage. The DM I saw was for most of the evening however with random deaths in between, not substained single target damage.
Anyway, /derail off.

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?

Druids still have an ample (and probably the best) threat generation even on fully armored targets still, their AP in TBC gets to silly numbers even in tank gear and they can crit for 1.5k using Mauls and Mangles on mobs with SA/FF on, though there are some mobs in Karazhan which druids have a hard time tanking, or even can't tank at all because of the lack of innate threat. I do not think you can look at this as an intended threat nerf to the class since it has a much more profound effect on raiding as a whole.
I'll stand by my statement of this most probably being an oversight - different people in charge of different things, atleast so I hope. Armor values in the TBC beta and alpha shifted around atleast 4 times.

Must agree with Kalman about the 5 man build aswell, Sap is awesome utility and is really something I'd recommend going into hard mode instances with large trash pulls to make it easier, though I was looking at 41/13/7 or something similar.

Another thing I would like to add about CoR, you should not count on seeing it in raid content any time soon; in Karazhan the increase is too small if you have a mage and a destruction warlock along, the DPS increase of many mobs there from the AP alone could outscale the RDPS boost it would give. World bosses hit for about 6k with Imp.DS on them on a 13k AC tank, 8k without and Cleave for the same amount. This is something you can largely rule out for most raid encounters early on atleast.

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.

Hehe, that dagger is definitely awesome. I messed around with a Shiv build earlier today a bit using Deadly on my offhand and then hitting Envenom once I had 5 CP - it worked out very well. I had a shadow priest in the group too, and outdamaged both the shadow priest(by ~80k) and the mage in the group by ~60k at the end of the run. I decided to try this out after I read this thread to see just what it would be like, and like I said, I was very surprised with how well it performed. Envenom is affected by Misery, so that helps quite a bit as well.

Wow, there is something unexpected.
If Envenom is affected by Misery, does that mean it will be affected by the Stormstrike debuff? Probably it will and you end up with another 1.2 multiplier (as long as the shamans let you use their debuffs).

I may be wrong, but I believe any nature damage uses the stormstrike debuff, which means poison procs do as well, so using envenom in conjunction with stormstrike might just be very difficult in terms of timing.

Curious for Rogues how does Envenom compare to Rupture w/ Mangle Debuff?

Well just wanted to comment on this since sure it may indeed be an oversight. Though beeing at least somewhat familair with monster design I don't really understand why Blizzard already didn't give mobs fair migration through armor. The game is supposed to contain both PvP and PvE elements, and the absolutely easiest way to create a game thats balanced for both PvE and PvP is of course to design monsters pretty similar to how player characters are made up.

So if a normal player warrior has 55% damage reduction and 25% to crit then the melee mobs you find in instances should have somewhat similar stats also. Meaning the tank that is equipped to take hits from said mobs will also be a tough opponent to take down in PvP. At least it would feel like the stats you have on your PvE armor are useful. And not be in a situation where you go around crit immune in PvE with your plate armor but when you get to PvP Rogues start crit'ing like crazy, and your character suddenly feels very different. Would most likely mean a statistic like Defence is valuable for both PvP and PvE, instead of beeing overpowered in one setting and useless in the other.

Same with monster armor values and how much damage players are supposed to do. If you want to balance both PvP and PvE then it should be lots easier if monsters have about the same damage reduction as players have. Othervise I really can't see how to avoid a situation where balancing melee/magic damage for raids and bosses, with no armor at all practically, will end up meaning that when armor is factored in for PvP magic ends up beeing overpowered in one way or the other.

This is also a problem for tanking Druids since after the threat nerf they are more dependent on dealing damage for aggro than ever. Ironically, this is hardly a problem for Paladins' threat since that is mostly spell damage based.
Higher mob mitigation is putting a dampener on aggro build up on boss mobs after all, so in a way this seems to go with the theme* of Blizzard wanting DPS classes to be careful to not pull aggro.

So maybe the mob mitigation is supposed to balance tanking more than it was supposed to balance physical DPS?




*Aggro reduction nerf for Mages (or just having no aggro reduction like some offspecs do), decreased threat threshold on all tanks excluding Paladin, BoS being available to both factions and so on.

Has it occurred to anyone that maybe this is an intentional change that was made to prevent melee DPS from scaling out of hand in the presence of a lot of AC debuffs? I mean, how many Patchwerk threads did we have where people scraped every AC debuff together to try and maximize those six minutes? AC is the sort of thing where if you don't have much to start with losing it is extremely painful. A Warrior losing 1000 AC doesn't hurt much, but a Mage losing 1000 AC means they are pretty much naked. Putting mobs up to epic-Mail AC to start with means that in a full raid stack of AC debuffs means that these debuffs account for less of the total damage done by the group, which might be one of the reasons that melee classes are not pacing casters right now. Once we start seeing epic weapons in the hands of melees we'll have a better comparison to go by; that extra DPS difference for merely being epic makes a big difference.

Looks like this will be top dog for rogues for a while if the effect stacks with SA

http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=17813

P.S. How does the [item] functionality work? Does one just type the item name between the tags and the database looks it up or what?

If you take the increased shadow damage debuff that warlocks get from crit shadowbolts, you notice that DOT effects will not eat the charges, while DD spells will.

The hunter pet would certainly eat the charges in a hurry though.