Second look at armor!
My colleagues Honors and Wrathy have already written about this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.
The conventional wisdom for a while now has been that 11 armor is equivalent to 1 stamina. Theck, however, has turned this assumption on its head by plotting out the value of armor based on how much of a fight is magical damage. In this post he has a graph basically showing various armor/stamina values–with this as the money quote:
So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.
For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth.
It’s interesting because just about every fight has *some* magical component to them which means that the old 11:1 figure is just about worthless. This kind of throws out the window the ancient understanding of EH as a figure of armor and stamina, with no vacillating in between. Now, serious vacillation is needed.
What this means is that if you’re evaluating two pieces of gear, one with lots of armor and one with lots of stamina, you should choose the piece with more stamina (assuming the excess armor doesn’t exceed the value of excess stamina for the amount of magical damage in that fight). All that means, ultimately, is this is another point in the column of “stamina > all”. Stamina remains the safest bet, sadly.
Well, not totally, armor does have some worth. Just not as much worth as we assumed it had before.
Armory Feed
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25 November 2009 at 11:17 am #
This is even more true as a DK tank. With all of the extra armor we get, anything with bonus armor is usually heavily outweighed by stamina items – i.e., much as it pains me to wear one, a Brewfest trinket > Glyph of Indomitably.
@Rhidach
25 November 2009 at 1:09 pm #
Exactly. It’s sad but true. Blizz really needs to do something about this in Cataclysm.
Great post. I’ve always figured that on magical fight armor dosen’t really do all that much so having high stamina or a high stamina set is of much value which makes sense for such situations. WTB Bigger Bags for Cataclysm for too much gear in Tow!
I wrote a post about Icecrown Itemization yesterday. The thing about it is that while everyone’s focused on the +armor pieces, what I’m kinda excited for is the scope of customizability that blizzard is going to give us. Even though we don’t have a magic resistant 4pc like ever other tank *grumble*, there are still solid choices in cohesive sets, which allow us to build an effective health set, an avoidance set, a threat set, a frost resist set, a block value set, and we can then mix and match in between them based on the encounters.
Interestingly enough, will we need a Frost Resist set? And i assume by that it will be the IceBane set since i don’t see any Frost Res gear in IceCrown.
But yes, there are a lot of pieces to get, and I’m looking to get every piece (Not blindly tho) since I’m sure they will all have their uses. This change to EH was very much understandable before, knowing that where there is magic damage armor becomes a lot less useful, but having a graph and formula’s to follow should allow us to say which sets are better rather than guessing.
I’m not sure it changes much, honestly. The choice between armor and stamina almost always comes down to neck, cloak, rings, and trinkets. In ToC itemization, your option is Expertise or Armor (neck), and stamina or armor (258 Anub ring vs. badge ring). The armor trinket is already strictly inferior for EH, and it would only be worn in some theoretical mana-limited/stamina punishing fight (Vezax 2.0, for example).
If the choice is between armor and avoidance, I’m generally going to choose armor. If it’s between threat and armor, I’m generally going to choose armor. If it’s between stamina and armor, I’m generally going to choose stamina. Overall, this information really only codifies what we already knew… that 11:1 armor:stam ratio was a best-case scenario.
@Rhidach
30 November 2009 at 10:14 am #
I think the only thing this’ll really change is it’ll give us empirical evidence to say “okay, this fight favor armor over stamina” and “this fight, go for broke on stam”… it broadens our understanding of the true value of armor. Pretty revolutionary change, in my opinion.