Armor values

[Haur]

My main spec is fury, but i am keeping track (to some extent) tanking things also. I know armor is good and works with stamina for EH. Yesterday in ICC25, i had around 34k armor fully buffed and i changed ring with 560 armor on with new one. After i checked damage reducion it went down by 0,39%. I remember armor beeing better (when having less of it) and judging by this number it gets worse and worse when you have more of it. Anyone has any numbers to check up and is there any "cap" when armor has so low effect that you are better going for stamina.

http://www.wowhead.com/item=47290 vs http://www.wowhead.com/item=47735
for example.

[Ajire]

I remember armor beeing better (when having less of it) and judging by this number it gets worse and worse when you have more of it. Anyone has any numbers to check up and is there any "cap" when armor has so low effect that you are better going for stamina.

While it is true that you gain less damage reduction pr point armor, the more armor you have, this it offset exactly by the fact that each point of damage reduction is worth more than the last.

Thus, EH skales linearly with armor for all physical damage.

It is only in encouters where a lot of magical damage is being tossed about, that pure stamina it better than armor.

[Dreador]

I believe the armor cap is 49500 or something like that, 75% damage reduction. Also http://www.wowhead.com/item=47290 is way better than http://www.wowhead.com/item=47735.

[MellvarTank]

The same thing happens with avoidance. This is to make it so that the numbers do not get astronomical... ie. you have 100% damage mitigation and 200% avoidance.

[Martie]

There are diminishing returns on armor.

So as you get more armor, the per-point effect of armor is reduced. So, raising your armor from 23000 to 24000 will give you a larger change in damage reduction % then raising your armor from 33000 to 34000.
However, this is a treacherous thing to look at, since while you get less percentage points per armor point, the effectiveness of those percentage points will go up.

An example.
Situation A - When I change my armor from 26k to 27.8k, I go from 63.07% to 64.61% reduction - an 1.54% difference.
Situation B - When I change my armor from 36.4k to 38.2k, I go from 70.5% to 71.49% reduction - only a 1% difference.
So, you'd think that the extra armor starts losing quite a bit of it's value as you get more of it. Now, let's take a closer look at the numbers.
Let's use a blow that does 10000 "raw" damage (convert it into percentages later.)
The extra armor in situation A will make the damage I take go down from 3693 to 3539 - a difference of 154 points.
The extra armor in situation B will make the damage I take go down from 2950 to 2851 - a difference of 99 points.
Now, what is interesting is the amount of real damage reduction we gained. How much % less damage does a blow do because I gained that armor?
In situation A, we check what percentage of 3693 154 is, which is done by 154/(3693/100), which gives us 4.17%.
In situation B, we check what percentage of 2950 99 is, which is done by 99/(2950/100), which gives us 3.36%.

This shows you that while the diminishing returns lessen the value of extra armor, it is by a far less margin then the tooltip suggests.

[Haur]

Thanks for nice post Martie, this is what i was thinking. I am trying to find out sta vs armor ratio. Trinkets i linked in first post were kinda bad example, better example might be http://www.wowhead.com/item=49985 vs http://www.wowhead.com/item=47731 (and for sake of argument we could ignore other stats and just go on 40 sta vs 560 armor). I did some numbers its from head, if anyone wants to do them proper, please, feel free, armor would give you around 0,25% damage reduction at around 33k armor, to offset stamina on the ring you would need to be hit by raw hit of around 125k? Since that is not likelly stamina would make much better choice.

[Martie]

Those comparisons are hard to make (though that won't stop people.)

The thing is that every boss works in a different way. The armor ring may be better against Saurfang, but the stamina ring could very well be better against Deathwhisper. What I do is have a 'base' set, favoring stamina slightly, and several items in my bags to modifiy the set as I go along. The two rings are a good example - I actually carry both of them, and wear the stamina version in the majority of fights. When I really need more armor, I'll use the armor ring and an armor trinket for a nice boost.
(Don't forget that armor makes you slightly easier to heal as well - you should convert healing taken into raw healing taken in the same way you do for damage.)

[Aggathon]

For pure physical damage the rough equation for armor to stam is 1 stam is roughly 11 armor.

The other thing, is that armor gets better with the more stam you have. Let me demonstrate:

If you have 50,000 hit points, and 50% damage reduction, then you can survive an effective 100,000 points worth of raw, completely unmitigated damage. But if you have 50,000 hit points and 60% damage reduction then you can take 125,000 points of damage, and if you get another 5k hit points up to 55k you can reduce not 130k, but 137500 hit points, but if you gained 10k HP but kept 50% reduction you'd only be able to reduce 120,000 points of raw damage. This is what "EHP" is all about.

If you'd like a more in depth explanation, I'd suggest reading http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...g-mechanics%29