What if we had armor gems?

[uglie]

Just a crazy wild idea. If Blizz decided to give us armor gems would there be a point in which if we had enough passive stam ( stam from gear w/o gems) that for melee heavy fights we would start gemming a separate armor set with pure armor gems? just like when warrior/ hunters/ kitties switch from strength or agi gems to ArP gems.
Granted this would hinge on how much armor the armor gems gave. Currently if they followed the current method of how much of a stat gems give armor gems for non jc's would only be 20 armor, so imo for this to work armor gems would have to give maybe 100+ armor per gem.
Like i said in the beginning this would cause us tanks to have to build a separate gear set, which i think would make things a lot more dynamic for a tank rather than just switching trinkets. I also remember reading others posts about how they miss having to gear for the fight.

[MellvarTank]

Like i said in the beginning this would cause us tanks to have to build a separate gear set, which i think would make things a lot more dynamic for a tank rather than just switching trinkets.

I run 3 different gear sets as is. One EH, one 4-piece T10, and a threat set. The only way to get more dynamic would be to make avoidance viable again, which would make it so we didn't need armor gems. It seems that is the direction blizz wants to go too.

[Aggathon]

10 agi is 20 armor, pure armor gems would likely be more like 300 armor to stay on par with gem/item levels tbh.

[felhoof]

It's tough, because armor and stam have very similar values in terms of raw EH (which is what most tanks care about), but stamina is budgeted far more cheaply than armor is most of the time.

Because stamina is a good thing for any kind of encounter damage, I doubt that you'd see armor gems eclipse stam gems most of the time. You would see it be used situationally against specific hard fights that emphasize either mitigation or physical damage risks, or for whatever reason have partial heals being the norm.

I do think that armor is going to have even more of an advantage than it currently does over stamina come cataclysm; between being able to reduce damage taken (which reduces healing required) and how it multiplies the effects of heals when you are not healed to full compared to an equivalent amount of stamina in EH, armor should in theory be much more valuable than stamina in a world where overhealing is bad. But we'll see.

[Insahnity]

We have one data point, back in TBC. 240 armor to gloves was given to us, and at the time the equivalent was Heavy Knothide patches, which was 10 stam. Both are ilvl 70, so I'm gonna assume equal budget stats.

Following that budget and assuming linear relationship, an armor gem would be 720 armor. Considering you could spare something like 20 sockets, you could cap out armor far too quickly even in crappy gear, which is probably why they didn't go that route. Possibly, they could have made it like a nightmare tear (unique-equipped), maybe up it to Engineering levels (885) if unique.

[Andenthal]

IBecause stamina is a good thing for any kind of encounter damage, I doubt that you'd see armor gems eclipse stam gems most of the time.

What Felhoof said mostly. From a survivability standpoint, ICC gear with bonus armor on it works great even on heavy magic damage fights - because we're not sacrificing Stamina to get it. We're sacrificing Avoidance for the most part, which is useless on magic fights anyway. With gems it's a different story, and you are sacrificing Stam for more armor.

But it would make gemming for socket bonuses far more attractive I would think, depending on the color of the armor gem. Which has the option to further customize gear sets IMO - rather than just having a one size fits all kinda deal.

[Unger]

I would likely think it would be a moot question. It wouldnt take long for sites like this to calc how much EH an armor gem was for a particular fight (magic or phyiscal), there would be one gem that was superior (Stam/Armor). High end tanks would figure their current armor to understand how much EH 300 more armor gives them.

Additionally, kings and other buffs affect STA and not armor as a % so Stamina will typically scale better.

Seems like it would be redundant unless tanks could realistically get to cap easily and then just gem Stamina. I believe only druids can get to cap without killing themselves....

[felhoof]

Druids actually have the lowest armor of all the tanks right now, thanks to all the bonus armor pieces.

And while stamina gives more raw EH with buffs (though kings is only going to be 5% now) armor reduces damage, which means less healing. That's supposedly going to be an important point come cata. That being said - don't ever see this happening. Which is a real shame.

[Aggathon]

Stam and armor scale the same for physical damage because you're just multiplying the EHP equation by a constant. However it would give you more MEH faster, that is true, so it really would depend on how much of the fight is really threatening magical damage.

[Insahnity]

The idea of gemming for armor is interesting, but a related point - gemming for resists.

Back in TBC, we had +3 and +4 resists, but I found you had to invest a LOT of resources just to build a resist set (Mother Sharaz anyone? Farming those damn HoDs so your 25 raid had full shadow resist??). Adding resist gems didn't really add much to your resists, and it gimped your output (we saw more of this in WotLK, for tanks that geared frost resist and then had threat problems).

It would be nice to gear all armor, or all stamina, or all avoidance, or all threat, or all resists. Out of that list, we only have 2 really (stamina and threat), since all avoidance meant really silly situations (rogues with 90% dodge), and gearing for armor or resistance would trivialize healing, something they want to avoid and is evident in cata.

[Kojiyama]

Gemming for Armor probably wouldn't be as great as one may think unless they balanced the base armor on high ilevel Plate to be a lot less compared to the hard-cap than it currently is.

It's not as if we are all that far away from it at the moment, so you may not even be able to fill all your slots before you had to go to Stamina gems anyway.

[Insahnity]

I'm trying to think here... A fully armor focused person in BiS with respect to armor only on everything except trinkets will hit what, 38k? Then add 4-5k for armor trinkets, and another 3k for raid buffs, it's still too far away before you hit the cap, unless I'm missing something. If we were given a 250 armor gem, we could potentially hit it (a 720 armor gem I mentioned would make it trivial though, if not unique).

[uglie]

Well regemming a armor set would really be limited to those in the gear to support it just like a warrior will only regem for ArP when his gear supports it. granted those not in the gear to support a full armor gemming could use a couple for match socket bonuses. According to the EH model of tanking we use today there is, imo, only one viable place/ gem to socket bonus match which is agi/stam gem in helm. granted just my opinion. For min/maxxing purposes everything else should be stam. So lets say the straight armor gem was yellow (green for armor/stam gem ofc) this would allow us at least a few more options when it comes to gemming at least for a few fights.

[Aggathon]

With raid buffs and trinkets I can get to like 42k armor buffed in ICC, and I don't even have close to full BiS, I don't even think I have anything that's 277 except for the ring, which doesn't really count since it doesn't have static armor.

[veneretio]

Just to add to the speculation this was said in a blue post a while ago:

Armor - The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth. (source)

I suspect this means that we'll be starting at lower physical damage reduction levels initially and never reaching the damage reduction points we are as tanks today. I don't think Blizzard particularly liked that a lot of tanks have been ignoring every piece of gear that doesn't have bonus armor on it.

For those reasons, my guess is that armor gems aren't likely to exist in Cataclysm and that bonus armor won't be a stat we aggressively seek out. (If anything, we might find ourselves complaining about bonus armor "wasting" the item budget on some of our pieces)

As to your post's question, if gemming for armor did exist today, I think we'd see armor gems used a bit to focus already high armor level pieces even more on armor, but I doubt we'd ever see anyone gemming every slot for armor.

[Kojiyama]

I don't think they are implying that the value of bonus armor has decreased relative to other stats.

It seems to me what they are saying is that they have lowered the gap between Mail and Plate on the mitigation curve, and thus had to bring the tiers closer together in terms of absolute balance. That would require rebalancing the absolute numbers used in order to keep the relative balance the same.

So, while the bonus armor number may go down (in addition to the initial damage reduction when we log on, since it's balanced for Level 85) I wouldn't take it to mean that they specifically changed how good bonus armor is relative to other itemization.

(That is not to say it isn't, but more that the quoted bit doesn't say it is.)

[joe1010011010]

Well regemming a armor set would really be limited to those in the gear to support it just like a warrior will only regem for ArP when his gear supports it. granted those not in the gear to support a full armor gemming could use a couple for match socket bonuses. According to the EH model of tanking we use today there is, imo, only one viable place/ gem to socket bonus match which is agi/stam gem in helm. granted just my opinion. For min/maxxing purposes everything else should be stam. So lets say the straight armor gem was yellow (green for armor/stam gem ofc) this would allow us at least a few more options when it comes to gemming at least for a few fights.

I like what uglie said about how warriors depending on their passive stat levels will influence their gemming. In this situation that warrior usually has to have a proc'ing trinket that will allow them to achieve 100% ArP(soft cap). the alternative to this is to gem for 100% ArP(hard cap)

perhaps in this armour gem proposal, some gear sets could be built based around a "soft capped armour set". this mechanic looks like it could be very interesting to play with

[Itsover]

Armor gems in your resist set? Its the same concept as switching trinkets. Gem for armor and have stam trinkets.

[Andenthal]

We have one data point, back in TBC. 240 armor to gloves was given to us, and at the time the equivalent was Heavy Knothide patches, which was 10 stam. Both are ilvl 70, so I'm gonna assume equal budget stats.

Following that budget and assuming linear relationship, an armor gem would be 720 armor.

As a note, item enhancements don't necessarily follow the same itemization rules that gear does. Especially in TBC.

[Menethal]

Yep but it seems quite reasonable to imagine that an armor gem would be around 250 armor. And I'd love to have it in red color for instance