Fekta

As i'm trying to find a solid formula to determine whether the new "Equip: Ignores XXX armor" stat is worth it's weight in salt, (which I feel that it is after finding some good info on this forum) I starting thinking more about that quandry that is hunter itemization.

It seems nothing short of a dev getting alittle to high to create an item that is balanced for our huntering needs. Being the mana using physical damage hybrid our items avaliable stats are all but focused. We have agility, int, mp5, atp, crit....well we have it all, and yes I know it's been beaten to death already.

My qustion to you is this. How do you think the addition of the new above Equip bonus will effect future itemization of our gear with all the other stats we already need? What does make me feel better is the fact that they took the time to re-evaluate the Ilvl of the exisiting epics which will hopefully give us some more breathing room for future items.

 

Cheeky

As I see it, the biggest problem is knowing what armor value a fully sundered, FFed boss has. Once we have that figure there are published armor -> damage reduction equations we can use. But since armor varies so much from mob to mob, and the lower the armor the better this stat is, it's going to be hard to give a one-size-fits-all DPS estimate per point of penetration.


It's more of a rising seas, all boats kind of thing. Every other DPS class is going to see the same bump in item value. And since it has been shown, for example, Mages get more DPS per point of +spell damage than Hunters get per +2 AP (same item budget) this is going to make the scaling of different classes more apparent. I'm thrilled I'll have more health, more mana, and do more damage. But there is going to be a lot of QQing if the changes widen the gap between Locks/Spriests/Mages and Hunters. We'll see if the changes to Kill Command and Hunter's Mark are enough to balance this out.

Cheeky of Havoc

 

Fekta

Well it seems the general consensus amongst those who are theorycrafting on the damage increase of a fully sundered mob is around 5% at level 70. What about above level 70? Bosses? This is where the line starts blurring for me. It's not a clear cut stat by any means.



Seems like the new HM is really designed to lend itself to what blizzard "invisions" us as...which is sustained long term DPS w/out much maintenance needed. The thought of having a renewable ATP buff without expending anything is refreshing; but it really seems to have minmal impact on a mob that dies in a few seconds. In the end I think hunter's will probably be sitting where they are now on the damage meters....there will just be more damage from all.

 

The Iron Colonel

Unfortunately, there is a large amount of anecdotal evidence that indicates bosses vary wildly in mitigation. There are low/no mitigation bosses (Shade of Aran, etc.) and bosses with what I can only call SOME mitigation. The second group of bosses have physical mitigation that is some non-zero value but may or may not vary significantly. Without substantial empirical evidence, it's probably going to be difficult to determine whether the mitigation of bosses is a purely bimodal distribution or there is a large gradient with respect to physical mitigation; consequently, modeling how armor penetration will effect damage will be a non-trivial task.

If I get the time, what I'm going to do is start going through WWS logs of our raids (unfortunately we don't seem to have many) to see average shot values versus expected shot values for a variety of bosses to survey what the boss mitigation landscape looks like.

 

Arko

Well, to put that into perspective: The benefit does vary, but not much. Suppose you ignore 1000 Points of armor:

5000->4000 Armor: 7.0% damage increase
1000->0000 Armor: 9.5% damage increase

This is about 25% percent difference in effectiveness. If some actual boss armor values come in (use beast lore, no messy statistics), I would bet they are nowhere near 5k fully sundered. 100 Armor = 1% damage increase should be a good rule of thumb.

The formula was taken from: http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor, I can elaborate calcualtions if you want.

 

Fekta

Just to clarify you used?

X= AC /(AC+400+85*(Level+4.5*(Level-59)))

After doing some more searching I found this formula on another thread.
X=AC/(AC+467.5*Level-22167)

Really both formulas are the same within a decimal of .5..for example
AC=5000
WowWiki:
X=5000/(5000+400+85*(70+4.5*(70-59)))
X=5000/15557.5
X=32.14 % damage reduction
I'm not going to take the time to type out the progression of the other formula...but it checks out if you want to do the math. All that being said where do you go from here.

It seems like the Armor pen bonuses from these new items is really going to shine on a fully sundered mob. When I say "shine" I mean realize the full potential of the stat. This presents another interesting aspect to the hunter itemization. Up until now the stats on our gear have given a static increase to our damage, mana pool, regen ETC,(minus trinket and set procs.)

This new stats maximum benifit is placed on whether a mob is fully sundered or not. Without any solid data on the AC of mobs it's hard to say whether or not the viariable damage increase of having armor pen is worth sacrificing static stats. Frustrating to say the least. Really all this just brings back full circle to what cheeky originally said.

EDIT: I r such a gewd Spellur

 

Zediono

This is also a question I've been searching the answer for.

One thing I'd like to ask for those who know: does armor and damage reduction work in the same way for mobs than it does for players? I.e. does having 5000 armor lets say give the same damage reduction for a mob than it does for a player? I'm asking this because IIRC attack power doesnt work the same way for mobs than it does for players in most cases, but I might be wrong :P Maybe it is the same for armor, or maybe not..

As for some anecdotal evidence I experienced about armor debuffs/ignore: I was testing out a survival build - 05/20/36 with dragonspine trophy - on PTR on Dr.Boom. Depending on crits and procs, I was averaging 690-820 dps with a pure steady/auto spam macro (the lag wasn't helping..) and no buffs other than AotH. At some point a warlock was kind and put a Curse of Recklessness i.e. -800 armor on the target, and my dps for those 2 min was about 930 dps or so. I know this isn't empirical whatsoever, but its still over 100dps increase over my previous maximum for 800 armor reduction/ignore. If others can reproduce this then we could test how useful armor penetration really is I think... well hopefully :P

Well, I think all of us would like to have more answers on this subject, since it will effect our gear choice in the future IMO

 

Ladwenae

Was gonna make a new thread but found this one so thought I might as well ask here.

With the change to kill command the 4 set bonus from the beast lord set is basicly up all the time and while I have begun to upgrade the BL armor im beginning to think that loosing the 4 set bonus might actually cost me to much DPS so I was curious if anyone know what kind of AP upgrade I should be looking for before I actually gain something from loosing basicly permanent ignore 600 armor?

 

Glaurong

Armor pretty much works the same for monsters as it does for players. Your test against Dr. Boom could have been due to a crit streak or other random factors (edit) but a good chunk of it definitely came from the curse.

From what I've seen most rogue spreadsheets put mobs at 20% damage reduction after sunders. Given current armor formulas this puts your average raid mob at about 2000 armor (2005.9 actually!).

Armor ignore of 600 takes a mobs damage reduction down to about 12%

This takes you from 80% damage done to 88% damage done, a 10% increase. A very worthwhile buff.

Log Parser for BM Hunters (Right click, save as) - Updated 10/11/2007

 

Ladwenae

I am still trying to figure out how WWS works, so my plan of testing it today kinda went bad.

The issue with testing the 4 set bonus from the BL armor is that you cant do it on dr. boom since pet is a no go there so from all I know the only other "viable" option is to use the blasted lands mobs which are kinda low lvl, but I asume that at least the avg hit increase would give a pointer of the value.

If 10% is somewhere close to the actual value the BL 4 set bonus seems hard to replace until tier 5 equivalent gear I would guess, and while it didnt recieve a buff like the Kara epics it just highlights how badly designed the tier 4 bonuses are comparatively.

Anyway, I would really like to test this so I would like some input if the following is a viable way to do a test:

Two set of tests, one with and one without the use of KC. Only use autoshot since the max hit size should be enough of an indication of the gain and if my stupidity still refrains me from using WWS I can always check it in the log files I guess. Using blasted lands mobs. Would this work?

 

Zaroua

This is all done with the WoW Wiki formula.

Let's say a Hunter with 100 spreadsheet DPS and maxed hit rating.

Hunter attacks a mob with 5000 armor (32.14% DR) and will do 67.86DPS.

Hunter attacks a mob with 2400 armor due to 5 sunders (18.52% DR) and will now do 81.48DPS. (20.07% increase from no sunders)

Hunter attacks a mob with 1790 armor due to 5 sunders + faerie fire (14.5% DR) and will do 85.5DPS. (25.99% increase from no sunders or 4.5% from 5 sunders)


Same Hunter attacks a mob with 10,000 armor (48.64% DR) and will do 51.36DPS.

Hunter attacks a mob with 7400 armor due to 5 sunders(41.21% DR) and will do 58.79DPS. (14.47% increase from no sunders)

Hunter attacks a mob with 6790 armor due to 5 sunders + faerie fire (39.14% DR) 62.86DPS. (22.34% increase from no sunders or 6.9% from 5 sunders).





Next, a mob with 2000 armor (after other classes' debuffs)

2000 armor = 15.92673701 %DR
1999 armor = 15.92004141 %DR

1900 armor = 15.25185631 %DR
1899 armor = 15.24505278 %DR

1800 armor = 14.566053 %DR
1799 armor = 14.55913891 %DR

And so on and so forth.



The point is the following (as others have pointed out): the more -armor you have stacked up a target, the greater the effect in terms of increase of DPS will be.




For shits and giggles...

Using http://www.wowhead.com/?item=11607#z0z a mob with 2000 armor would reduce its DR by another 2%, further increasing physical DPS from the raid (and threat from the tank). Now would have to wonder this: if enough physical dmg dealers use enough -armor items/buffs, would it then be worth having an Arms Warrior with that weapon + Blood Frenzy in a very melee heavy raid?

Dogma also claims that God has a sense of humor and at times presents Him as a joker of sorts, thus again lowering Him to human level. While I am certain God has a "sense of humor" since He gave it to us, I find it most difficult to believe He finds humor in sin since He will cast the unforgiven sinner into the lake of fire for eternity. Not very funny at all.