Hit replacing Armor Pen?

Well, this will be odd, but I suppose since we won't have armor pen in Cataclysm, at least we can use those 1400 points to eke out our 24% hit rating (obviously assuming some 3% extra hit talent or whatever) and still have 600-700 points left over to add more haste and crit.

So maybe there's some silver lining after all, but I can't claim to be excited at the thought of stacking nearly 900 hit rating (which does very little for my dps, really, it can maybe add as much as 5% total) as a replacement for armor penetration. I'm adopting a wait and see attitude, because I'm sure that Blizz has caught all this stuff, but I'm also nervous to see how our starting dps compares to other classes that aren't losing their most important stat.

Cataclysm Rage Changes good, Haste changes lackluster

I have been reading for a couple months now how, in Cataclysm, Blizzard plans to make haste a more attractive stat for melee dps (citing us in specific) by making it better for us especially in terms of resource management.

So, now Bornakk comes out with a description of rage mechanic changes along with a brief blurb about haste.

<source>

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

• Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
• Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
• Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
• The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
• Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
• In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.

To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn't successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound -- it was just that the previous implementation didn't balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

• If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
• Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.

2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.


We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character's Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

So, basically, I'm torn here. First of all, I really like the ideas of the changes to rage mechanics. Yes, I know that in the beginning this will severely nerf our dps at the high end, because now we'll basically be using one heroic strike every now and again, so it would be equivalent to the 1K dps loss I see if I don't use HS at all during a fight, and yet, I think overall this will be good for the class in general. It makes crit more attractive, it makes hit more attractive, and it keeps things working in general the same for warriors at all levels even though that "sameness" will likely be less than it is now.

Am I "excited" at the prospect of dropping back in the pack as I resume my lackluster gcd restricted rotation of WW, then BT, then hit Slam only if Bloodsurge procced, then wait until BT is off cd, then hit it again, then wait for Slam to proc, then rinse/repeat? Not really, but in the big picture, at least we'll be able to hit HS for one or more of those awkward pauses in the action, and I like the fact that tanking will be so much more arranged around having better gear instead of not. I do worry some that basing the rage mechanic on total Health will prompt the exact same kind of over-emphasis on Stam stacking that goes on now, but if that's something Blizz wants to encourage, at least we know what's what.

Now, onto the blurb about haste. I mean, really, HOW IS THAT DIFFERENT THAN NOW?!?!??!?

Right now, the ONLY effect haste has on us is decreasing our swing timers. Our gcd that actually manages everything we REALLY do stays constant, but our swing timer goes down. So, stacking 10% haste (which is quite expensive, don't you know) increases our white swing damage and rage generation by 10%. Ooooooh.

And their proposal to "fix" haste so that we want it more? Leave it exactly like it is.

They're removing Armor Penetration something which I've seen personally increase dps by 40% and more even at relatively low levels, and to "make up for that" they're making haste do exactly the same thing it does now.

I'll be honest, the changes to rage are actually exciting to me, even though I dread the overall impact that the changes to HS/cleave will have on our dps as a class (I just hope they don't drop enough that I'm not invited to raids anymore). I think overall they will be good changes.

The changes to haste? Bah! What a cop-out.

Essentially, Blizzard wants to make haste more attractive, so they're trying to FORCE us to use haste in order to have enough rage to do our 75% of current dps in the future.

I mean, if you wanted to talk about changes to haste for melee dps, I have some ideas that I think are more innovative than "NOTHING":

• Make haste affect not only swing timers, but also gcd and cooldowns. If 10% haste meant gcd went down to 1.35 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds, warriors would be camping on haste so fast your head would spin. Especially now that we will have one new thing to activate our gcd during combat (HS and Cleave). If our overall cooldowns went down with haste, we could get through our rotation that much faster. Faster rotations = more interested fury warriors who don't have enough to do during their rotations as it is = Warriors and ret pallies (and possibly rogues) flocking to jump on the haste bandwagon.
• Allow haste to scale abilities that are instant. Abilities with cast timers receive this kind of bump from haste, since cast times are affected, but instant abilities (i.e. virtually everything we do) are unaffected, hence haste does nothing for us in that regard. If 10% haste meant a 10% buff to damage from instant abilities, once again, we would see melee dps flocking to haste like a bunch of escaped convicts to a government subsidized whorehouse. This is possible since so many of our abilities are based on weapon damage which actually does scale with haste on white swings, but that change isn't reflected in our yellow instant strikes which make up more than 80% of our damage.
• haste should scale dots, i.e. the dots from poisons, deep wounds, etc. that we do should speed up just like you've done for healers and caster classes. Furthermore, these dots should somehow figure into your rage calculation so that having haste would NOT ONLY increase rage generated from white strikes but would also benefit us in rage from having our dots up on targets.
• Or, finally, just drop the attempt to make haste beneficial to melee and come up with something else. Make it something called "Uberness" and it can directly scale with attack power to make everything hurt more, say 10% Uber = 10% overall increase in dps (scaled appropriately, of course).

Because, the simple fact of the matter is, if everything is going well, a warriors dps should only be about 10-12% from white strikes, and if haste ONLY affects our white strikes, then 10% haste means a whopping 1-1.2% increase in our overall dps. ONE PERCENT! 328 haste rating (equivalent to more than 16 gem slots) to improve our dps by ONE PERCENT!

If you can't do better than that, how about just leaving us armor penetration since at least that does what we need?

April Fool's Day 2010 Blizzard jokes.

Once again, everyone is in rare form this April Fool's.

Some things I can link because they might still be there, others probably won't, so you'll have to see them while you can.

1) On the armory today, you'll see some "differences" in your character (see below for example).

2) Interested in finding a 2's partner in life? Try this site: Blizzard.net's Matchmaking Service

3) Sick of Pugs with no gear clue? Now this Gear Potency Number will help.

Off Off Off Off Off Tanking For Dummies

Howdy,

Well, I'm finally close enough on my main spec gear list (with some modifications for quickness) that I can start trying to see about what to do for my tank gear. Tank gear is harder for me, because it's my off spec, so in order to roll on decent gear, either (a) all the tanks in the raid need to have that item or better, or (b) I need to be tanking that night with the understanding that I'm rolling on tank gear only.

With that in mind, several things have to take a back seat to my main spec, so my tank gear has to be primarily drops, since I don't know how long it will be until I can afford to purchase any of the tier gear for it (not until I've bought 4 pieces of my main spec's tier 10 gear), so I have to temper my dreams for my tank gear a little more than usual.

However, I find that tanking gear is a little bizarre for me at this point. If I upgrade pretty much everything, I actually end up trading defense and some expertise for armor and health. That's pretty much the tradeoff. I'm just baffled, as my dodge stays about the same, my parry about the same, my hit about the same, It makes me wonder what exactly they've itemized around. After all is said and done, I think I gain about 200 strength, and about 400 stamina, which is certainly good, but I'm losing about 24.5 defense skill for it (which isn't a lot, admittedly, but it does increase block, parry, dodge, and attacking miss chance by about 1/5 of a percent each.) It ends up being a tradeoff of about 300 ish defense rating for those 200 strength and 400 stamina (which I'm willing to admit is a great trade up) but I'm also increasing my iLevel quite a ways on most of those pieces (in some cases from 200-219 up to 251-264) so I almost find myself wondering why nothing else is improving any more than that.

Regardless, here is a beginning wowhead comparison of my current gear to an "eventual" gear set (which won't be any time soon, but it's somewhere to start).

Tanking Gear Comparison

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.

Is Armor Pen Worth it? What about Sunders? Haste? Strength? What do I gem?

Ok, so I did a little calculation, and here's what I can say about these things.

First the part that you can find many other places.

It is widely accepted that bosses in LK have been adjusted to all have 13083 armor value. GC also announced exactly how armor penetration is calculated, and I gave a few statements toward that earlier.

So, here's the skinny:

BASE:

Boss level = 83, boss armor = 13083, boss physical damage mitigation = 46.2%.

this means that out of every 100 points of damage you do, 53.8 points "get through" armor.

Before we look at armor penetration, let's look at sunders/faerie fire.

a 5 stack of sunders and FF give 25% reduction to armor value, which gives:

Boss level = 83, boss armor (minus Sx5/FF) = 9812, boss physical damage mitigation = 39.18%.

this means that out of every 100 points of damage you do, 60.82 get through. So, for classes with all physical damage output, that's a flat 13% dps increase. Sure, it takes some maintenance during the fight, but it stay's up pretty much the whole time, and it's raidwide.

Ok, now what does 100% armor penetration do for us?

Well, calculating the value using GC's formulas shows that for bosses

C = 400 + 85*(Lvl) + 4.5*85*(Lvl - 59)

or

C = 16635.

So, summing this with the armor value and dividing by 3 gives us the armor pen "effective armor" value of

(16635+13083)/3 = 9906

So, 100% armor penetration (no sunders) gives us:

Boss level = 83, Effective Armor (minus 100% ArP)=3177, Phys Damage mitigation = 17.26%.

so now, out of every 100 points of physical damage dealt, 82.74 get through, or an increase over the base of 55.6%.

I.e. for us, this means a flat out 55.6% dps increase without changing anything about our rotation.

Now, with sunders.

The calculation above is taken based on boss armor value, which is decreased by sunders and FF, so if we take these into account, remember the boss's armor value is reduced to 9812. So now the ArP cap becomes

(16635+9812)/3 = 8815.

So,

Boss Level = 83, Effective Armor = 997 (yep, that's all), Phys. Damage Mit. = 6.14%.

So, now, out of every 100 points of damage dealt, 93.86 get through. That's an increase over the baseline of 74.4%, and an increase of 13.4% over 100% armor penetration alone.

Now, as to whether or not this is worth going for is difficult to determine. Percentage increases for armor penetration are just as confusing as percentage increases, say, in critical strike. However, it's fair to say that a 1% increase in dps is the same either way. Especially if they stack, as these do. Notice, however, that a 1% increase in critical strike costs 46 crit rating points, while a 1% increase in armor pen costs 14. Admittedly, 1% armor penetration is really only about a half a point dps increase, but even looking at the scenario above, the price is still only about 25 armor pen for a 1% dps increase.

Strength, the other popular choice for gems, is a linear increase, and as such, benefits more the person who doesn't already have high dps. Each 20 points of Strength yield 40 Attack power, which add 2.86 dps onto your weapon stats, and if those scale with abilities, it adds to there too. However, many of our abilities use weapon damage and only use portions of our Attack Power to calculate damage dealt. Notice that if you're doing, let's say a respectable 5K dps in raids, 3 dps is adding a tiny fractional increase to your overall dps.

However, the combination of all of these seems to be the most effective. High strength/crit when possible, ArP until you hit cap, then your doing the following:

(DPS + Str)*Crit*Arp

That way you're getting the most out of all three.

If, for example, you have a 40% crit rating along with the 100% ArP and sunders, you're looking at a calculation like:

(DPS + Str)*(1.4)*(1.74) = 2.436*(DPS + Str)

Which should be doing an awful lot for your dps, I would think.

Compare that to either of the other possibilities:

(DPS + LOTS_Str) = DPS + Str + Extra Str

or

(DPS + Str)*(1.6) = 1.6*(DPS + Str)

around the point of crit diminishing returns

or even

(DPS + LOTS_Str)*(1.6) = 1.6*(DPS + Str) + 1.6*(Extra Str)

You can see that the higher your baseline DPS, the better benefit you get from using multiplicative stats over linear stats. If Haste actually affected your dps similarly, I'd end up going with a ArP + Crit + Haste model, but Haste only affects your swing speed, and your melee white damage typically hits about 12% of your overall dps, so if Haste speeds up your white swings by 100% (3279 haste rating, by the way) it would mean a 12% increase to your total dps, this is why warriors typically frown on haste in general. Supposedly in Cataclysm they're modifying how haste works for melee in some way to try to make it more attractive, but I'll have to wait to see. Since our attacks are primarily either instant, or (like Slam) on a specific swing timer that doesn't adjust (and this is not something that would really benefit a lot from needing massive amounts of haste rating) I'm not sure how they're planning on monkeying with our haste<-> rage conversions, but I'm keeping an open mind.

So, at the moment, my advice (take it for whatever it's worth) is to consider your stat priorities as follows:

Hit rating (minimum 164) try for 230-"ish"

Expertise soft cap at 214 rating.

Armor Penetration hard cap at 1400.

And whatever else you can afford, dump into some combination of critical strike and Strength.

Since Crit seems to hit a wall at about 60% (with raid buffs), I suspect that if your crit is already in the 45-50% range, you probably want to do more Strength.

And it is possible to do all of these, see my earlier post for examples.

So, how can I get 100% passive armor pen as fury?

Well, you'd need a phenomenal and well designed gear set. Now, this is VERY high end, I realize, but if you'll notice there are actually a few "throwaway" gems that are being used for Strength/Crit, or other types of gems that aren't really needed. If you happen to be a JC/BS as many people are, then rejoice, because you can get 82 more armor penetration than anyone else can, which makes this even easier to get.

The goal is to shoot for the 1400 rating, and that's going to involve filling every available slot with the best item you can find that has armor penetration.

However, notice that I could have gone a little differently, because I used one trinket for hit rating, instead of getting the other armor pen trinket, and you can also substitute in something like the Scorpion until your gear is up there, since even though it won't work 100% of the time, 15-20% up time is better than no uptime at all.

I'm also not happy that this gear set has so much expertise (you need about 26, 32 is a little overkill) and I'd love to be able to trade some of that for a little hit rating (I think, and most people agree, that your minimum needed is 164 (with Precision), but since you don't cap out until 820, and your white strikes generate rage as well as about 12% of your dps, I think I'd like to have somewhere in the mid 200's, like 263 or so, but I could definitely make do with the 178 that this gear set has, and I could always use up those other yellow gem slots on more hit gems, but in this case I chose not to.

Here is a second possibility done by swapping around ranged weapons, rings etc. that has more hit rating, still goes just over the 1400 cap (and really, you could stop at 1397 and be fine, I think but I wanted to demonstrate that the 1400 cap could be achieved). It still has a little more expertise than I would like, but I'd rather have 27 expertise than 25 since you don't get fractions, so if you can't get 214 rating, go to 223.

And last, but not least, you might say, well, Gurggy, I don't have a guild that's pwning ICC 25 heroic every week yet, how can I get this 1400 cap? Well, admittedly, it requires a little bit of patience and creativity, but here's a comparison of the last choice with a gear set that's attainable, pretty much, by lots of frost emblems, and a few 25 man runs, no heroic gear, and it doesn't even count on the drops to upgrade the tier gear.

It does, admittedly, take into account completing the initial quest for Shadow's Edge, which I've already mentioned, but even taking that into account, if you're a serious raider in a serious raiding guild, this should be very doable.

Don't forget, as long as you can keep your expertise at around 214, and your hit rating at about 240-260 (minimum 164, remember) you can feel free to gem as much as possible to the 1400 armor pen cap.

In almost any set of gear you'll have, you should be looking at at least 200-300 armor pen possible just from sockets alone (or 15 gem sockets all together), maybe more. If you'll notice, this lower set of gear holds the equivalent of 19 total Fractured Cardinal Rubies, or 380 armor pen rating just in gems. Again, if you're a BS/JC as many are, you can notch this number up another 82. So even in this set of gear there is still some play to move things around. You'll notice a couple of what I call throwaway gems that are Str/Crit gems.

Also notice that in each case, I've satisfied the metagem conditions with two puissant dreadstones, and also fulfilled the 4 piece tier 10 bonus, even though this was entirely optional (some of the tier pieces could have been traded for higher armor pen pieces that didn't budget in the set bonus, but eh, why not?).

Fourth version, even easier, uses a better + hit rating trinket that isn't as cool, but can be bought for emblems of triumph.

Fifth version, trades low drop rate Flame Leviathon thrown weapon for badge one.

Last one. I think this one may be my starter Armor Pen set. I already have many of these pieces, and most of the rest I can do as I acquire more frost emblems, and I only have 4 drops that I have to hope for in ICC 25. The catch here is that the hit rating is lower than I'd like and the expertise is way too high, but without doing 25 Ulduar or some other raids that will be difficult if not impossible to get people to go for, this may be my best bet for now (of course, it still hinges on getting down more bosses in ICC 25, but I have faith in my guild. Even when we struggled at things before, we eventually overcome.

Here is my transition chart so I can follow along.