Hammering the Armor Pen discussion into the ground

Ok,

Last comment regarding the Armor Pen situation.

Let's discuss a value/cost estimate of Armor Penetration vs. Critical Strike rating.

Recall that each percentage point of Critical Strike costs 46 crit rating points, while one percentage dps increase from Armor Pen costs 25.45 percentage points (based on our model earlier which shows that for bosses 100% armor pen is equivalent to a 55.6% dps increase, so on average it requires about 1.8 percent armor pen to achieve a 1% dps increase.

It is clear just from looking at these, that if we're trying to decide on gems or attribute values to allocate, Armor Pen is "more valuable" than crit rating.

Since these each have essentially a cap, the overall "best" we can do with them is to get the 55.6% increase from Armor Pen and, let's say, a 60% increase from crit rating.

So the product of these two shows that this would be effectively a dps increase of 149%

How much does this "cost"? Well, 1400 armor pen + 2760 crit = 4160 total rating points. Since in most cases (e.g. gemming) these have the same value, so they can basically be added directly without needing conversion rates.

Clearly, if you have to choose one to go with, you go with Armor Pen first, and then add critical strike in afterwards, since your metric from 0 will always be minimized taking that route.

What about Strength? Well, it depends on your current dps, and many other factors, but since strength is linear, the cost in strength rating to accomplish the same task depends on your dps.

At 100 dps, the 149 additional dps you're getting from 100% ArP and 60% crit is equivalent to 1049 Strengh points. Clearly you have a huge advantage going with Strength over ArP + Crit in this case. Then again, if you're doing 100 dps, you're doing something wrong.

As you increase your own dps, the value of your higher ArP + Crit also increases, for example, at 5K, the resulting increase of 7450 dps would require 52,150 strength rating. Clearly less cost effective than the 4160 from earlier.

In fact, what is the "break even" base dps? Well, according to a chart, the cheapest way to get each percentage increase from 2% up to this "cap" of 149% shows that the break even dps numbers are between 300 and 400.

Now, this is all theory crafting, and is not based on actual abilities that take this into account in different ways. For example, some abilities use weapon damage and also add a fraction of attack power. In those cases, strength is playing double duty, as well as the 10% raid buff from kings which affects strength and nothing else.

However, Even if we are very generous and say that we'll double the value of strength (effectively buying our dps at half off), the break even point never deviates much above about 800 after you get up to a 10% or more dps increase. And I know very few fury warriors that can't get more than 800 dps even using vendor white weapons and no armor or trinkets.

I'd like to run some simulations on some numbers with training dummies, although this can be difficult, but basically it should be that the amount of armor penetration and crit rating can affect how valuable your strength is, but strength alone will not be able to do the kind of dps increase that crit and armor pen can accomplish.