Armor Pen to be Nerfed in Patch 3.2.2

Ghostcrawler dropped a post late last week to announce that Armor Pen rating would be nerfed in the next WoW patch:

The nerf to armor pen in 3.2.2 is intentional. Compared to the recent buff where we increased the value of armor rating to 125%, this nerf would take it back down to 110%. While we are still evaluating the effects of this change in the 3.2.2 build, we did want to let you know of the possibility in case you were about to spend a lot on armor pen gems.

In fact, this was really the point. Several melee specs (and Marksman hunters) had begun to focus on armor pen at the expense of all other stats. Gear without armor pen was being passed over and gem sockets were increasingly being filled with just this one stat. While every spec has stats that are more valuable than others, this one felt like it was starting to trump everything. Not coincidentally, characters stacking lots of armor pen were starting to do more damage than their peers and more damage than we were comfortable with.

This change is largely for PvE reasons, though we won’t cry at all if melee damage in PvP drops a little as a result.

We’re letting you know now so that this doesn’t feel like a stealth nerf, assuming it goes live. While you might disagree or be frustrated by the change (though I also suspect it won’t come as a surprise to many players), we ask that you try and keep your response to something appropriate for these forums.

I am a little surprised at this move, though I guess I shouldn’t be.  It is true, for most classes that deal a large portion of their damage as physical damage, that there comes a point where Armor Pen is more valuable than any other stat.  This is related to the way ArP works, as it scales with itself- the more of it you have, the more valuable each additional point becomes.  Blizzard knows this, of course, which is why they put a ridiculously complex formula in the game to calculate the maximum amount of armor that can be reduced for any player or mob in the game.    The point here is that ArP is capped (at something like 1200 rating I believe).  So yes, players will reach a point where it will always be advantageous to choose ArP over any other stat.  But they will also reach a point where adding ArP gives no benefit at all, in which case they will go back to other stats.

If the point is that players were choosing ArP at the expense of other stats, I don’t really see how Blizzard can complain about that.  Hitting stat caps has  always been important for players who want to maximize dps.  Prior to hitting the caps for Hit and Expertise, you should always gem or prioritize for that.  And even after you have met your requisite caps, there is always a best stat.  Before the buffs that made ArP viable, Warriors always gemmed for Strength, and Strength only.  After the buffs, that changed to ArP but there was still the same amount of diversity in gem choices.

So Blizzard’s complaint is that Marksman Hunters and Combat Rogues are doing more dps than other Rogue and Hunter specs because those specs don’t benefit as much from ArP.  In their typically flawed understanding of the game, they have decided that if A) players did not like ArP at its original level and B) players like ArP too much at its current 25% buff, then it must follow that C) reducing ArP’s benefit to a level between A and B will produce the optimal value of ArP.  The problem is that once ArP is decreased, it stops becoming more valuable than other stats and all the Hunters, Rogues, and Warriors go back to gemming straight Agility and Strength.  Blizzard does not understand that the nature of ArP is what causes players to prioritize it at the expense of other stats.  There will always be a point where ArP becomes so good that it dwarfs the value of other stats.  But up until that time, ArP is always going to be considered of secondary importance.  You  take it because it was already on the piece of gear you would have taken anyway.  Until you hit that magical point, your gear choices are going to be based heavily on the amount of standard stats present on the gear, i.e. Strength, Agility, or Crit.

If ArP specs are outscaling non-ArP specs, then the solution to the problem should be to change the way non-ArP specs scale or make them get more benefit out of ArP.  Changing the value of ArP doesn’t change the way the system works, it just pushes the breaking point back to a higher tier of gear.  Unfortunately, the history of WoW shows this to be the preferred method of operation for Blizzard.  Rather than proactively fixing flawed systems, they bandaid patch them and put the problem off until a later patch so that they don’t have to deal with it.  Changing the value of ArP may not create a visible problem at this point in time, but it is not the right way to fix this problem and it will cause it to continue to be a problem until the Cataclysm expansion when they remove the stat from the game entirely.

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