3 impenetrable facts about Armor

A a quick, light-hearted Friday post I wanted to share some factoids about armor that aren’t widely known or understood. Hopefully you’ll join me in falling in love with this stat as much as I have this week.

Armor has a cap

This isn’t widely known, because previously reaching the armor cap was just about impossible. Now however, with sky-high iLevels and offset pieces loaded up with +armor, it might be attainable (with the help of pots and procs).

The physical reduction provided by armor is 75%. There is a diminishing returns curve to reach that number once you stack enough armor–for example, at 30k armor I have around 65% damage reduction, and to get to the magical 75% number (versus a level 83 raid boss) I’d need 45k armor. That’s 30k to go up 65%, and an additional 15k to gain another 10%. Diminishing returns indeed.

The armor you have is worth more as your total armor increases

But! that doesn’t mean armor is worthless once you get to the 30k level. Far from it. As you add more armor onto the pile, the pile you already have is worth more than it was before in terms of how much damage it reduces. This is a confusing idea so I’ll demonstrate it with a quick example:

Say a raid boss hits for 60000 against a naked character. If you adopt 30k armor for 65% damage reduction, suddenly that raid boss is hitting you for 21000. Add more armor and get up to the 70% DR (damage reduction) mark, and that raid boss is now hitting you for 18000. Increasing your DR percentage by 5% reduced the damage you were taking by 15% per swing.

Let’s go further–so we know going from 65% to 70% DR reduces overall physical damage taken by 15%, how about going from 50% to 55% DR? Same raid boss that hits for 60k on a naked character, with 50% DR, hits for 30k. With 55% DR he hits for 27k, a 10% reduction in physical damage taken per swing.

As you can see, not only does adding armor reduce physical damage taken, but the more armor you add, the amount of damage you reduce each swing by gets even higher. The value of armor shoots up the more armor you have.

ICC is the perfect storm of armor

Raid damage previous to ICC was fast, varied, and often avoided. With the Chill of the Throne dodge nerf, Blizz changed gears and made raid damage slower, more predictable, and more consistent. This switch (along with the addition of +armor plate) has given armor the second life to armor as a stat.

In the early days of ICC the common expectation was that post-Saurfang most damage would be magical and stamina would continue to be king. Time has not borne this conclusion out, instead rewarding damage mitigation (once you reach the not-getting-two-shot threshold) above all else. Coupled with boss mechanics involving damage transfers and you’re seeing a perfect storm of encounters favoring armor.

Just looking at logs from this raid week, the amount of my damage taken that was physical per boss (excluding Deathwhisper for obvious reasons and Rotface cause I was kiting) was:

• Marrowgar: 100%
• Saurfang: 91% (would be 100% if we were faster about switching on Rune of Blood)
• Festergut: 70% overall, but during the 3-stack burst portions 95.8% of damage taken was physical.
• Blood Council: ~95%
• Putricide: 88%, and more importantly during P3, 91% of the damage I was taking was from melee attacks. Each swing was doing about 20k damage each, which is a huge opportunity for damage reduction.

In ICC-25 normal, aside from Sindragosa perhaps, there just isn’t some magical damage boogey man that necessitates stamina stacking to the degree we have been doing so. This doesn’t mean you should be gemming agility for the pittance armor you would gain (continue to gem stamina), but you should definitely enchant your cloak with Mighty Armor and prioritize getting the +armor Emblem of Frost pieces.