[armor penetration]

[Alubert]

Since armor pene patch (WL, mara, SH, SW) works too effectively. I don't know what this is caused by. Have the dmg conversion schemes changed or is there just too much armor pene capability.
In this situation it depends to look into it and either do something about it or restore 180 armor talismans or take away the cap (75%) from armor stats.

[Sinisterror]

RoR has Added ALOT of Armour Pene tactics and are afraid of Crit dmg/power and has nerfed crit by huge amount. Which makes no sense to me, because obviously armour pene only works on Physical dmg classes and Crit is Universal to everyone thus the best way to give as close to fair ground you can get. Without modifiers heal/dmg crit is 35-55% increase so there is 20% that is luck based, and that is only thing in this game that is, and this is more reason to get back to Crit meta not armour pene meta

RoR has given Armour pene tactics to Wh/We/Wl/Sw/Sqh/Engineer. Did i miss any?

[leftayparxoun]

The reason for their effectiveness is that they can reach very high amounts of armor penetration (arpen). Most mdps classes can, at BIS, reach around 60% arpen via gear (including 4pc Triumphant proc), talis and renown (normal Crit, FS build).

On top of that, the tactics are added.

• MSH, Choppa, Slayer have a +120 STR + 120 WS -120 TOU tactic

• Mara and WL have a +25% armor pen tactic for their most important AOE skills

• SW has both a +120 BS +120 WS -120 TOU tactic and a +15% armor pen tactic on their Skirmish (AOE) tree

This means that instead of ~60%, the classes end up aproximately at:

• WL: 88% arpen

• Mara: 85% arpen

• Choppa: 69% arpen

• Slayer: 71% arpen

• SW: 85% arpen

• MSH (sacrificing all crit): 82% arpen

Let's now take the case of Mara for example, at 85% armor pen and lets pit him against a BIS tank and a BIS light armor healer.

The tank will have around 4900 (111.4%) armor and 4% reduced armor penetration (redarpen).
The cloth healer will have around 2900 (65.9%) armor and 5% redarpen.

Running the calcs we get that against the Mara they will end up having these physical mitigations:

• Tank:
  Physical Mitigation = 111.4×(1-0.85+0.04) = 21.2%
  Damage Taken = 78.8%

• Healer:
  Physical Mitigation = 65.9×(1-0.85+0.05) = 13.2%
  Damage Taken = 86.8%

As you can see, increasing the Physical Mitigation hardcap (currently at 75%) will do absolutely nothing. Even the tanks are just barely reaching 20% mitigation.
And just to clarify again; Armor has no caps. Only Physical Mitigation has a hardcap.

But what about Armor talis?

Lets examine your other suggestion; Armor talis: 136 --> 180

Currently only healers run those talis so lets check there. In the above cases I assumed the healer has 6 armor talis on, so lets add to their armor total this extra hypothetical armor:

Healer armor = 2900 + 6*(180-136) = 3164 (71.9%)

Redoing the calc we get:

• Healer:
  Physical Mitigation = 71.9×(1-0.85+0.05) = 14.4%
  Damage Taken = 85.6%

Compared to the previous 86.8% they would only be taking 1.4% less damage. Barely any difference.

As you can see, both proposed solutions would do basically nothing to reduce the amount of incoming physical damage.

The reason for this is that current armor pen% numbers are absurdly high.

To give you an example, to reach the physical mitigation cap (75%) without reduced armor pen vs the worst offender currently (WL at ~88% arpen) you'd have to have a whoping 27500 armor (625%).

There are two actual solutions here if the devs want to tone things down:

• Bandaid method:
  Adding more reduced armor pen% into the game either by adjusting abilities/gear bonuses (DOK's new Covenant of Tenacity does that basically)

• Direct Method:
  Reducing armor pen% availability by either nerfing gear sets, tactics, etc. Alternatively they can tune down the scaling from Weapon Skill (e.g. 18 WS --> 1% arpen, instead of the 14 WS that it is now). The later should probably also be acompanied with a scaling down of arpen% tactics or else thing change would risk favoring certain dps classes (Mara,WL, SW) more than the rest (Choppa, SL, MSH)

[dirnsterer]

I would agree with this if there would be proper alternatives to armor, but as it stands its still the best defacto defensive stat in the game that if you want durability, you stack it. And bunch of armor pen tactics were already nerfed.

[Battlefield]

Some SHs started hitting tanks like Sorcs

[leftside]

[Florian90210]

Melee dps in reality are not that good, you need bis gear, you need healer, you need tank to do noticeable damage.
As melee you always under Challenge ability, it's -30% damage output.
Ranged dps on other hand less likely to be challenged and magic damage defences have cap of 50%. Also rdps has ranged resists debuffs, even AoE ones. Good sorc or magus without direct support from tank or heal can decide all battle. Choppa without tank or personal heal is just nobody. 3 tanks casting HTL is a problem for rdps, but even in sieges huge AoE damage spill through it.

[Farrul]

• Mara and WL have a +25% armor pen tactic for their most important AOE skills

• SW has both a +120 BS +120 WS -120 TOU tactic and a +15% armor pen tactic on their Skirmish (AOE) tree

This means that instead of ~60%, the classes end up aproximately at:

• WL: 88% arpen

• Mara: 85% arpen

In this case Mara 's armor penetration is superior to WL since it works on all mutations( single and aoe abilities). WL at least is restricted to the 2 aoe skills.

Also these two classes got an 1500-1600 flat armor shred that can't be defended against , the 5k armor tank becomes 3,5k armor if targeted by them.

[Farrul]

Melee dps in reality are not that good, you need bis gear, you need healer, you need tank to do noticeable damage.
As melee you always under Challenge ability, it's -30% damage output.
Ranged dps on other hand less likely to be challenged and magic damage defences have cap of 50%. Also rdps has ranged resists debuffs, even AoE ones. Good sorc or magus without direct support from tank or heal can decide all battle. Choppa without tank or personal heal is just nobody. 3 tanks casting HTL is a problem for rdps, but even in sieges huge AoE damage spill through it.

The fact is that all mitigation in this game is terrible, physical at least need to invest into weapon skill.

Magic has 350-370 resistance pen abilities which means their effective damage is always super efficient, plus resistance % mitigation is low per se.

But the avoidance is also bad for the attacker, with stuff like hold the line etc.

[leftayparxoun]

Ranged dps on other hand less likely to be challenged and magic damage defences have cap of 50%.

The non-physical mitigation softcap is 40% and there is no hardcap.

If we are talking about orvr, most people end up with 460 Resistances.
When buffed by their teammates (KOTBS/Chosen auras, Shaman/AM resist bufff) they reach around 780 Resists.

In the best case scenario, an AOE resist debuff has the value of 378 (for maxed out mastery tree). This means that the leftover resistance of enemies is around 400.

400 Resistance = 23.8% non-physical mitigation

As shown before, BIS mdps are usually looking at ~10% mitigation vs cloth healers and medium armor dps, ~20% mitigation vs tanks and medium armor healers and ~ 5% mitigation vs light armor dps.

The ~24% value for non-physical mitigation is still true against all enemies while the physical mitigation should be lower if the targets hit are not at BIS.


Regarding Challenge, while it's true that you are less likely to be hit by Challenge if you are a Magus/Engi (you can have 81 ft range for most stuff vs 75 ft for Challenge), all other AOE dps play closer in orvr (skirmish SW, Sorc, BW).
It is also important to note that 360° mdps have a much easier time breaking Challenge once they get through enemy frontlines (WL, MSH, Choppa).

Regarding avoidances, you pretty much covered it.