The Enigma Order

Was asked to throw some light on the still new statistic - armor penetratrion - by some fellow hunters.
Having posted it on hunters' forum, I thought that it might actually be interesting to other classes as well.

So here goes:

Based on offcial forums, mixed a few posts to come up with something comprehensive.

Armor reduction of a level 73 (standard)  boss attacked by a level 70 player is 37% for 6200 armor, and 42.17% for 7700 armor. Sunder Armor x5 is -2600 armor, Faerie Fire is -610, and Curse of Recklessness is -800.

For a boss with 6200/7700 armor, SA x5 gives a damage increase of 18.36%/16.61%.

If we assume now that the boss has SA stacked x5 on it, adding just FF gives a further 4.5%/4.05% increase, CoR gives 5.99%/5.38%, and with both on they give 11.06%/9.9% increase over just SA.

Armor Penetration is a bit more complex because it comes it varied amounts. If the boss has just SA x5 on it, then the effect of ArP is as follows:

100 ArP: 0.71%/0.64%
200 ArP: 1.43%/1.29%
300 ArP: 2.16%/1.95%
400 ArP: 2.91%/2.62%
500 ArP: 3.66%/3.3%

For a fully debuffed boss (SA x5, FF, CoR) the increase from ArP is:

100 ArP: 0.79%/0.71%
200 ArP: 1.59%/1.42%
300 ArP: 2.41%/2.15%
400 ArP: 3.24%/2.89%
500 ArP: 4.08%/3.64%

As you can see the higher your armor penetration gets the more valuable each point of it becomes. It is an incredible stat in that it is the only one that scales with itself AND with other stats (gonna edit this one to explore the machincs bit more).

Now I would be careful before making the plunge into armor penetration if you are not ready for it. It used to only be in BT/Hyjal making it impossible to stack it until you were ready for it. In the last patch with the new badge gear it is easier to collect before you can truly support it.

As mentioned it does not truly shine until you can get several pieces of it and it is not worth destroying your crit/hit to gear to get 2 pieces of it.
That being said armor penetration is the future of dps stats so learn to love it. (quote, donno how true this one is).


Bottomline - keep that BoS warmed up, we're about to out-aggro you tanks big time and that is only using auto-attack. Oh wait, we already do.