Feral Druid and Armor Pen
When modifying cars there is a saying called “I can feel it in the seat of my pants”.
This is when a performance modification is made where you feel the difference but can’t prove an actual benefit through simple Dyno testing. Maybe you don’t Dyno at all or when you do the numbers just don’t show enough of a gain to factor out just random environmental differences when testing.
But when the rubber hits the road you can just feel that your car is faster.
This is how I am feeling about socketing for Armor Pen over agility at moderate gear levels.
On a leap of faith before my raid last night I dropped well over 1K gold gemming ArP and swapping out all my Agility gems.
It turned out horribly.
No Enhancement Shammy was along for the ride and Crit fell way off. My rotations didn’t feel right and my tempo was thrown all off.
So I decided to do some Target Dummy testing and I realized the loss in Crit was just killing my rotations. At one point in the past couple months I at times definitely felt I was generating too many CP’s and could tweak things to remedy this. I did switch out some gems to ArP and that is exactly what happened but to my surprise when I went all ArP the complete opposite happened as my CP’s dropped just too low. Here are a couple of thoughts I have now on ArP after switching back to a balance of Agility and ArP gems…
- ArP becomes really good if you have an ArP proc trinket to get to the Hard ArP cap.
- If self buffed you are sitting at 49%-50% Crit get more agility not more ArP.
- Stacking ArP makes you more dependent on good RNG and favorable raid compositions more so than sticking with agility.
- ArP makes it more important not to mess up your rotation, agility is more forgiving.
I do think there is a point where your Crit can be high enough to afford socketing all ArP gems but I think this is going to take much better gear than I have now and possibly even a must for an ArP trinket.
The ArP proc trinkets allow you to get a boss to 0 armor which is a much bigger deal than getting a boss to 50% armor. The way armor works, if I am reading it correctly, is the first 1K armor is more valuable then lets say the next 1K… and so on. This is the reason why the more ArP you get the better it becomes because the next 1K of armor you remove is more valuable then the last 1K you took off. For this same reason is why I think when you theorycraft using BiS situations including the ArP trinkets is why it gets so attractive.
Bottom line is I spent the better part of a day testing the “seat of my pants” feel for gemming one way or another and I have decided I am happier with the flow of my rotations balancing both at least for now. As soon as I feel I can endorse an all out switch to ArP Gems like we did at the beginning of Wrath with Strength I will let you know but I don’t think it is a simple as a move like that was.
All I can say is if you have a couple of gear peices that you use for strict DPS give ArP gems a try but go overboard at your own risk, at 200+ gold a pop it isn’t a cheap thing to mess around with… speaking of Epic gems of course.
In my next post I will talk more about why a balance of stats seems to work better for me and why I don’t like to rely on my major damage coming from shred.
How much ArP did you have, for curiosity’s sake? You really do need a trinket like Grim Toll, at the low end, to make it worthwhile. In addition, once you hit 50% crit unbuffed, that is when you want to start moving toward ArP. Also, what idol were you using? Once I switched to ArP, I saw a significant damage boost; I’m a little perplexed as to what’s going on here (and would like to help, if I can).
Thanks Runy.
I think the issue is my playstyle as well as being borderline 50% crit. I am going to make my next post about it.
Maybe I will send you some parse links and you can tell me what you think.
On the plus side, Kell said he was getting the ArP cut next
I think you should try check your dps on some more boss’s. When i went for Arp gems, i became number 1 on dmg, and that is in 25 and 10 man, the setup does not matter, get your 50% crit so you in all kind of partys will have it. Then go for Arp. and get grim toll and you will see your dps become sky high.