The Glade 4.0

I know many of these things are changing in the expansion, but I am trying to get the most out of right now.

Working on several classes, both for me and my wife and had a few questions.

On Hunters. Currently The character is cookie cutter survival build and doing ok. I have been accumulating armor pen gear for switching to Marksmen. What % or armor number is good to make the switch.

Paladins: Again currently Ret speced, building a tank off set. It seems most paladin attacks are physical, crusader, divine storm should benefit from armor pen. But is it really worth stacking or building up? Or should I keep going for attack power stacking? Again what kind of numbers should I work towards.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

It's not so much that you need Armor Penetration gear to switch to Marksmanship as you need to meet certain thresholds in general. Survival with a heavy focus on Agility gems remains mostly competitive through the first Tier of 25 man ICC content, while certainly being more viable until a full set of ILVL 245 Tier 9 gear.

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As I am pretty much a casual non raider, you would recommend sticking with survival? As I will probably never achieve the gear level to do Marksmen justice?

On a DK question, I moved mine into tanking (two hander, don't have the hit to pull off one handing), I was working on my dps spec. I know Unholy is the easiest to gear for, but I really enjoyed blood. Is armor pen what is needed to make blood work more efficiently or tons of Attack power?

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

UF:

It's all about preference, but Survival tends to be easier to gear with the things available to the casual player. Eventually, you can get enough emblems of frost to assemble a full set of 251/261 Armor minus bracers. And in that case, the crafted 245 bracers are pretty much a god send. You could switch to MM then with little trouble. Survival just tends to perform more evenly and on par with MM until you reach much higher gear levels. The disparity isn't really worth it unless you spend a lot of time raiding.

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I was under the impression that ArP is low on the pole for paladins. I read that haste is more valuable than ArP. Not much into theorycraft, so don't know the exact thresholds......but I just tend to stack strength after I get hit and expertise.......Pretty sure that paladins attacks are mostly considered Holy, not physical per se. Holy being a "magical" attack like other magical attacks, just doesn't have a resistance that I know of......

As for hunters and ArP for MM.....I *think* the threshold you wanted to reach prior to recent patches was 1000 (with trinket proc) for a pure ArP build (using steady shot). I believe this was upped due to changes.

I hear you can also use the softer version of MM with arcane instead of steady.......if you can't get that high of ArP, and it would be competitve.

I would think without upper tier gear you are likely to find that SV would be the way to go to maximize dps, especially in lower gear levels.

I have crappy gear on my hunter (ilvl 200 gun, some mixed pieces of badge gear) and I can pull around 3k in heroics using SV, while watching TV:)

Just stack agility out the yingyang after you reach hit cap..........

1400 is the Armor Penetration cap. You should get as close to this as possible with your trinket proc. (If you don't have an ArP trinket, just get as close as possible--with the caveat that you need about 900 ArP before it starts being worthwhile and noticeable.)

Due to the way Armor Class works with diminishing returns, Armor Pen scales exponentially, the opposite of diminishing returns. Each point that gets you closer to the cap has greater effect than the last.

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I think a good amount of Ret's damage is listed as weapon damage, which would make it a physical attack?

And generally, I guess per class, is the haste caps?

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Sam:

ArP is a tricky beast for Hunters, because it only works if you can guarantee a major armor debuff on the target. Without Major Armor, you're losing DPS.

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Ret Pally damage is actually pretty highly magic-based, at least compared to the rest of the physical dps specs. Looking over some data I'm seeing something like 50% of their damage output would be helped by ArP, while the rest would not. I'm not exactly clear on Seal of Corruption damage, since I'm seeing it pop up before the target has 5 stacks of Blood Corruption.

Meanwhile 100% of the Fury Warrior's damage was assisted by ArP (including Deep Wounds in a roundabout fashion), about 3/4 the Feral Druid's (100% physical but I believe the two bleeds are unaffected), and the Blood DK was around the 3/4 mark too.

Didn't have any Hunters at all in that raid, but I believe the same holds true for comparing Survival to Marksman... the former having much more of their damage coming from spell damage than the latter.

It somewhat stands to reason: if ArP was so good (i.e. something worth stacking at the expense of other stats) for a decently spell-heavy spec like Ret Paladin, it would kind of be off the charts for specs that are spell-light. Granted logic isn't always a trusted guide when it comes to design issues... :p

edit: This is not to say ArP is entirely worthless for Rets or anything like that. Shadow's Edge's has it and it's hardly a bad Paladin weapon. But, especially when you combine the exponentialish growth of ArP, it's not really going to be something you particularly want to get unless by accident.

I'll put this in here since it's a mostly hunter related thread as it is, and it's an easy question (I would think at least... lol).

How good is rawr for hunters? I know it's pretty much the thing to use for a couple classes, so I wanted to check if it's what I should be using on my hunter or not.

Use Shandara's spreadsheet.

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