What’s This "Ignore Armor" Stuff
So we got our War-Feathered Loop and immediately the BRK Email and Christmas-Catalog Black Hole was overflowing with questions about how the Ignore Armor feature affects DPS. As usual, the answer is:
It depends.
To start with, the formulas that govern damage mitigation are not linear; they are partially based upon your target’s level. If your enemy is between the levels 1-59, their armor-mitigation is calculated with this formula:
%Reduction = ( Armor / ( ( Armor + 400 ) + ( 85 * Enemy_Level ) ) ) * 100
And if your enemy is 60-73 - remember that heroic bosses are assumed to be level 72 and raid bosses are assumed to be level 73 for mathematical purposes - the damage-mitigation formula is this:
%Reduction = ( Armor / ( ( Armor - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * Enemy_Level ) ) ) * 100
Now then, let’s pretend you’re fighting a level-70 BRK and he has 6142 armor. How much physical damage is he mitigating?
%Reduction = ( Armor / ( ( Armor - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * Enemy_Level ) ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 6142 / ( ( 6142 - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * 70 ) ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 6142 / ( -16025.5 + 32725 ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 6142 / 16699.5 ) * 100
%Reduction = 0.3678 * 100 = 36.78% and if you check our armory profile and the armor tooltip, you’ll see that these figures match.
Now you buy your new belt with the “ignores 70 of your opponent’s armor” capability. How does this affect BRK? When you attack him, it reduces his armor by 70 and thus decreases how much physical damage he mitigates.
%Reduction = ( ( Armor - 70 ) / ( ( ( Armor - 70 ) - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * Enemy_Level ) ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( ( 6142 - 70 ) / ( ( ( 6142 - 70 ) - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * 70 ) ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 6072 / ( -16095.5 + 32725 ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 6072 / 16629.5 ) * 100
%Reduction = 0.3651 * 100 = 36.51%
You’ve just reduced the amount of physical damage mitigated by armor from 36.78% to 36.51%. Congratulations!
Now let’s switch your target to Aetherial Circle’s main druid tank, Kelektra. 
Fully raid buffed, she has 27,801 armor and mitigates 72.48% of all physical damage. What does your little belt do against her?
%Reduction = ( ( Armor - 70 ) / ( ( ( Armor - 70 ) - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * Enemy_Level ) ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( ( 27,801 - 70 ) / ( ( 27,801 - 70 ) - 22167.5 ) + ( 467.5 * 70 ) ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 27731 / ( 27731 - 22167.5 + 32725 ) ) * 100
%Reduction = ( 27731 / 38288.5 ) * 100
%Reduction = 0.7243 * 100 = 72.43%
You have now decreased the amount of physical damage Kel mitigates from 72.48% to 72.43%… Congratulations? Kinda.
How much DPS does Ignore Armor provide? As you can see, it completely depends upon the armor and level of the mob you’re fighting.
Comments
30 Responses to “What’s This "Ignore Armor" Stuff”
Leave a Reply
-
Got Something To Say?
Email icon provided by Nexodyne. -
-
-
BRK's Site Meter
-
BRK License Agreement
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
-
BRK's RSS Feeds
lol. So are you saying this is a better pvp stat? Because armor penetration only works on you and not anyone else. For it to be effective you would have to wear a ton of armor penetration gear.
BUT sacrificing stats /ap /crit etc. for armor penetration of any type isn’t worth it is it?
Grats on all the success lately BRK. I’m leaving the guild i’m in for a better one (one that appriciates my abilities as a resto druid). They are where you are in progressing (mabye a bit furthur).
I hope you move up a bit more so that you can post more 25 man raid strats to help hunters. Eg. Like the lurker fight is Full of Win for hunters!!
oh .. edit.. sort of..
Make sure that druid knows s/he has almost reached the armor percent cap. i’ve never seen it pass 75% mitigation. Once s/he gets there i woudl think concentrating on other stats would be important no?
If you got time to comment on that it would be sweet to :p
AC Pen is more slanted to PVP, and like other things, a little bit here and a little bit there all add up into something fantabulous.
Against classes, potentially knocking their AC down below 1000 is huge—ever Expose Armor a Shadow Priest and see how long it takes after before they melt? Now tack on a healing debuff (MS, Wound, Aimed, take your pick) and your team DPS with some Executioner procs and AC Pen gear.. all adds up to a target that is very hard to heal.
In this way it combats Resilience in an indirect way while not dramatically increasing people’s crit rate.
The addition of armor penetration stats seems very tough on cloth wearing classes. When I play my rogue, EA on priests and warlocks was already tough for them to combat. Adding the badge gear and S3 items, along with executioner, I just don’t see how adding this stuff is good for balance. It doesn’t scale well enough, as BRK’s math points out so that it’s effects are equal across classes.
I’d say if you stack AR (Armor Reduction) kit, you’re going to wipe clothwearers in pvp.
If you’re PVE, it’s better go go for other items that spend their “item creation points” (ICP) on something else than AR.
The hard part is to “predict” what level of armor a boss has.
Fx. the 3 new things from badges give you 350 AR.
On a boss with 10k armor, those 350AR will give you 0.88% more damage.
On a boss with 5k armor those 350 AR will give you 1.49% more damage
If you instead had chosen items with those ICP spent on crit rating, you could easily obtain 2% more crit.
On an hunter with 30% crit,5/5 Mortal shots and a dps of 700 over a whole fight, recorded with SWStats, a 2% crit increase would boost damage with 1.54%, regardless of armor on the boss.
To sum up, stack that AR if you want to pwn clothwearers in PVP, but for PVE and especially platewearers in PVP, you are better off getting some more crit or more AP.
Might want to tell your druid to get more Def or Resil also, as to become uncritable
Haha that 409 def is kinda scary ;-p Maybe he/she pots to get to 415 or BRK caught him/her with a flight speed boosting trinket equipped
yeah brk, i have no idea what kind of getup you caught me in, but i’m over the 415 def cap.
BRK, you can’t just subtract armor reduction percentages and accurately show how much your dps has increased.
Take an extreme example: Kelektra goes out and finds items for every slot that are high on armor, and reaches the armor cap, 75% reduction. You hear about this and decide to bribe a GM into giving you stacks of bullets that ignore all armor, so when you duel your unsuspecting friend she, unfortunately, has 0% damage reduction from armor. Do these bullets increase your dps by 75%-0% = 75% against her? No. When she is armor capped you are dealing only 100% - 75% = 25% normal damage, and when she is left with no armor from your special ammo you deal 100% - 0% = 100% of your normal damage. So, your bullets of bear slaying actually increase your dps by 100%/25%= a factor of 4, or a 300% increase.
Now take your original examples again. From 36.78% to 36.51%, you actually increase dps by (100%-36.51%)/(100%-36.78%)= a factor of 1.00427, or roughly a 0.43% increase. From 72.48% to 72.43%, you increase dps by (100%-72.48%)/(100%-72.43%)= a factor of 1.00181, or roughly a 0.18% increase. Armor reduction seems to be more effective against targets with lower armor, but it is also more effective in general than you have made it out to be.
BRK, you can’t just subtract armor reduction percentages and accurately show how much your dps has increased.
We didn’t. We showed how damage was affected, not DPS.
So essentially, armor pen, like resilience, is purely a PVP bonus and is useless in PVE?
edit: i mean, how can you tell how much armor a mob has?
Most raid bosses have been determined to have between 6600 and 7800 armor. (The exceptions are some caster-type bosses such as Aran, and Void Reaver) - A standard slate of raid debuffs - Sunderx5, Curse of Recklessness, Faerie Fire - will reduce that by another 3000 or so.
In other words, Armor Penetration is quite the effective stat - if you want to put a value on it, 3 points of armor pen works out to being equal to about 1 point of AP for my rogue in terms of DPS given - the thing about armor pen though is that it scales better for two reasons.
1) The more armor pen you have, the better - until you reach the ‘cap,’ i.e. as much armor as the mob or your opponent has - each point of armor pen delivers a LARGER DPS increase than the one before it! Thus, it is one of the most effective stats to ’stack.’
2) Armor pen reduces the percentage of your damage which is mitigated, meaning it delivers a percentage increase to whatever your other damage is - the more damage you deal before adding armor penetration, the larger the increase in damage armor pen will give you. AP by contrast, will always give you a 1 DPS increase of every 14 points, regardless of how much of it you have and regardless of what you’re other stats are.
This may be a stupid question but:
Does this new stat scale with pets?
If not then is it known yet if this stat costs cheaper in the stat budget for hunter equipment?
Off-topic”
I managed to score “leggings of beast mastery” yesterday for 650G and i am still left wondering if they are a worthy upgade (if at all) from the greaves of patience from durnholde for DPS purposes.
Are these the super duber uber epic pants BRK talks about in the “shade of aran” video? i cant help but think he sounds sarcastic when he pronounces that, does this mean they just plain suck? save for the stam boost
Thank you so much Feist!
I agree with Matthew. What you said was misleading at best.
Original damage : 100% - 36.78% = 63.22%
New Damage : 100% - 36.51% = 63.49%
Difference : 0.27%
Which is an increase in the damage you do by 0.27/63.22 = 0.43% over the original damage.
Small difference but important.
2nd Example:
Original damage : 100% - 72.48% = 27.52%
New Damage : 100% - 36.51% = 27.57%
Difference : 0.05%
Change: 0.05/27.52 = 0.1%
You said “increased the amount of damage you do”, which was wrong, what you calculated was the increase in damage relative to the zero armor case.
Leggings of Beast Mastery are an entry-level epic. They are alright, but Scaled Greaves of Patience are IMO better because of the 3 sockets. Put 3x +8 Agi in them and this piece will take you a long way.
And shouldn’t you have made up your mind before you shelled out 650 gold?
We actually do use our Leggings of Beast Mastery against Shade of Aran because of the massive amount of stamina they provide us and the boost to our pet’s melee damage they imbue. Aran is heavily vulnerable to melee damage and our pet rips him to shreds when we equip these pants.
And we have modified the post to eliminate some confusion over the implementation of “percents”.
Essentially what I’m wondering is how the new PVP hunter axe (Vengeful Gladiator’s Waraxe) rates as a PVE item and how it compares to Legacy.
^ignore my comment, just realised there was discussion on the wowhead page.
“remember that heroic and raid bosses are assumed to be level 73 for mathematical purposes”
I just wanted to point out that only Raid bosses (10 and 25 man) are treated as level 73. Heroic bosses are still considered level 72 for all calculations.
This is also why Heroic bosses don’t land crushing blows, as crushing blows only come from mobs +3 levels above you.
Heroic bosses are only 72? Well whatdaya know. We’ll change that. Thank you.
Essentially what I’m wondering is how the new PVP hunter axe (Vengeful Gladiator’s Waraxe) rates as a PVE item and how it compares to Legacy.
the numbers I’ve crunched puts the waraxe as the be-all end-all pre SSC/BT!
especially at the bang for buck! 1000 arena points! get out there with a 5v5 and it’s yours in 3-4 weeks tops, even if you lose every match
Raid boss armor values, and some other miscellaneous information, here:
http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2007/12/filling-in-blank-for-brk.html
Nice Karthis!
Saying the stat is good/bad for PvE isn’t really doable anymore. The massive synergies that exist change the landscape completely. Running a 5-man heroic with a Pally tank? Armor pen won’t mean as much without those sunders or faerie fire! 10-man? maybe. 25-man? In a 25-man, sunders + FF are always expected to be up.
So don’t forget when figuring out 25 man raid bosses, that you should assume that 5 sunders and faerie fire are up, will make the armor pen gear mean more.
It’s more of a PvP/Raid stat than simply PvE or PvP.
I’m thinking for a MM or Surv hunter, grabbing the easy armor penetration gear available (Arena Axe, Heroic rewards) will be appreciable for anyone trying to break through/into SSC/TK/BT.
The only problem is that arcane shot and our new scaling stings/traps don’t benefit from this stat. Not a deal breaker, but it won’t net you the full dps increase you’d expect for MM/Surv.
Basically armor penetration is allowing physical dps to finally get some of that massive scaling gear like casters get.
BRK- My bad using the terms dps and damage interchangeably, they are not the same. However, my point remains: you are not accurately calculating the increase in damage in your examples.
Just wondering of a simple fact that seems unclear to me and has been overlooked:
“Your attacks ignore X armor..”.
Does this include pet attacks? If so, then pet dmg scales as with AP. If not… well..
BRK - Thanks for the edit
Armor pen does not decrease in value as the targets armor goes up. The time to kill a target scales linearly with armor pen, like any other stat.
“How much DPS does Ignore Armor provide? As you can see, it completely depends upon the armor and level of the mob you’re fighting.”
Nope.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor
-Agrippina, Perenolde
Fully raid buffed, my 70 Druid Tank has close to 30k armor. I sit at 27K in arena team buffs. I don’t know much about the formulation and mathematics, I just know I can take an ass kicking. I also teeter between 16K-18K health.
In one PvP Match, I had a warrior, 2 rogues and a feral (cat) druid on me and the 4 of them could not drop me. Between my mitigation, resilience and high health, I was a monster. LOL
One of the two rogues was hitting me for 200-300 at a time, and I KNOW he was like, WTF?
Oh, and a tip for feral bears vs. rogues. Use the /dance emote. The motion bears make when dancing make it difficult for rogues to kidney shot, hemmorage and from what I am told, cheap shot as well. I know it sounds silly, but it works.