What do you think of Armor Penetration in DC?

daniell501 · March 2014

For some time I have seen many DC with Armor Penetration, it made me think if I should add to my build Armor Penetration. I have the Critical Strike and Recovery very high.

I would like to give me your opinion about this, and if someone uses ArP I would like to explain to me your experience.

Thanks!

proyekcja · March 2014

If you're interested in dealing damage (be it solo playing daily campaigns, or foundries etc) then armor penetration is going to be the best way to boost your damage. I believe going as a "damage dealer" to a dungeon/skirmish is going to be disappointing as you'll be dealing significantly less damage than other classes with comparable gear level. Still, you can do that just for fun, and armor penetration is good for that as well.

If you're going somewhere as a healer, armor penetration is going to be completely useless.

It makes sense to hold on to 2 sets and switch between them to fit the situation, or to not care about the fact that you're healing less efficiently as you're fine as long as you still keep everyone alive, but I feel like when I go healing, I want my gear as optimized for healing as possible, as any death will reduce party efficiency much more than a little extra damage would help, and if I want extra damage, I'd rather do it with buff/debuffs like divine glow than by taking a direct damage spell anyhow.

vorphied · March 2014

Since Armor Penetration or lack thereof has no effect on the DC's ability to buff, debuff, or heal, it's of minimal importance to a support DC. The only DC who will care anything at all for ArP is one focused on DPS.

I actually used to slot an extra augment companion on my DC, one loaded up with ArP for making dailies more efficient and for use in dungeons on the rare occasion that I ended up filling a supplemental AoE DPS role, but I ditched that idea when companion bonuses were introduced since I play my CW when AoE DPS is needed in PvE and find ArP stacking to be overkill in solo PvE. It's nice and all, but the content is so easy that I can live without dropping elites and bosses slightly faster.

daniell501 · March 2014

My main stats:
Power 5.1K
Recovery 3.3K
Critical Strike 3.2 (I worry spend the cap)
Defense: 2.1K

Should I increase Recovery and Critical Strike? Or should increase focus on other stats?.

Thanks again for your opinion.

plavia · March 2014

at some point ~ 14k GS u almost max all relevant stat
since DC dosnt need regeneration and life steal --> armor penetration is not bad
but again, I wholdnt put is as main priority
u can go bit higher with defense and maybe deflect if you want
or put bit in armor penetration
the savage enchantment can replace few of your Azure if you got any

scozzers · March 2014

If you want damage all you need is high prophet set. I stripped my hp set dps/burst dc (chains/glow/daunting) of all enchants, most of which were armour pen and it's now relegated to just grinding dailys and guess what ... it's damage/kill speed is hardly affected at all. Power's pretty meh as well. Just get your cooldowns nice and short and get decent crit (33.4% +). Obviously you will damage dungeon mobs/bosses more with some arp but unless the rest of the dps in your party suck hard, it isn't going to make much of a difference on the charts or to the speed of the run. Add to that it still doesn't work on a large number of our powers and only the first tick of dots.
Basically don't sacrifice cooldowns, survivabilty or crit to stack arp. For pvp it's a different matter but I feel that since tenacity, that kinda dc had it's day vs anything but the lowest of the lowest geared pugs (altho, it can be fun to dominate those if that's your thing

)

equilam · March 2014

Please keep in mind that almost all DC power's fail to use your armor penetration stat. You can see that in the combat chat tab. So if you stack ArP you are:

An optimist, that thinks this issues, which is around and known to the devs for over 12 months will be fixed in future updates,
or you think ArP is worth stacking if you use one of the few powers that use this stat.

That's why I wouldn't recomend ArP to any DC. I know this is sad, and leaves some feat- and boon choices as a trap.

dnosrc · March 2014

equilam wrote: »

Please keep in mind that almost all DC power's fail to use your armor penetration stat. You can see that in the combat chat tab. So if you stack ArP you are:
An optimist, that thinks this issues, which is around and known to the devs for over 12 months will be fixed in future updates,

or you think ArP is worth stacking if you use one of the few powers that use this stat.

That's why I wouldn't recomend ArP to any DC. I know this is sad, and leaves some feat- and boon choices as a trap.

Almost all DC abilities work with armor pen.
The most important encounters for a dps rotation: Searing Light, Daunting Light, Divine Glow, Flame Strike all work with apen.

Especially for solo stuff 20% armorpen is a good investment.

sathado · March 2014

dnosrc wrote: »

Almost all DC abilities work with armor pen.
The most important encounters for a dps rotation: Searing Light, Daunting Light, Divine Glow, Flame Strike all work with apen.

Especially for solo stuff 20% armorpen is a good investment.

Brand of the Sun, Forgemaster's Flame, Break the Spirit not work with armor pen.

goldroger007 · April 2014

sathado wrote: »

Brand of the Sun, Forgemaster's Flame, Break the Spirit not work with armor pen.

mmmm normal attack+divinity is for what u really need arp, atleast in pvp

demonkyuubi · April 2014

goldroger007 wrote: »

mmmm normal attack+divinity is for what u really need arp, atleast in pvp

u mean punishing light? and i agree. that and hammer of fate r the only decent attacks we have.

spani4rd · April 2014

The only reason to take APen for PVP is because you are attemtping to run a dps set up. If you're a tanky healer/support cleric there's no point to take any apen, you don't get enough return on it, a little extra dmg/divine power from at-wills isn't worth it. The only reason to take any woudl be that you had excess recovery that you wanted to lose. But even so it would be hard to aquire since if you get it on gear you lose other more beneficial stats and if you socket it then you're not socketing power or crit which are both more useful.

demonkyuubi wrote: »

u mean punishing light? and i agree. that and hammer of fate r the only decent attacks we have.

Hammer of Fate, really? I can't believe people still use that anymore, it's beyond awful. At least punishng light is decent, although it's a waste to spend all your divinity there to drop somebody HP, pretty much just useful to provide some burst for dropping a player once he's at low HP.

demonkyuubi · April 2014

spani4rd wrote: »

Hammer of Fate, really? I can't believe people still use that anymore, it's beyond awful. At least punishng light is decent, although it's a waste to spend all your divinity there to drop somebody HP, pretty much just useful to provide some burst for dropping a player once he's at low HP.

well, it's a 10k damage attack and maxes at 15k if every hit is a critical. best usage is on someone who can't/won't dodge or on someone who is distracted. and at least it can hit higher than ice knife.

vorphied · April 2014

demonkyuubi wrote: »

well, it's a 10k damage attack and maxes at 15k if every hit is a critical. best usage is on someone who can't/won't dodge or on someone who is distracted. and at least it can hit higher than ice knife.

You're lucky to hit 10k even if the target stands still, is crit by all three highly-telegraphed waves, and deflects none of them. It's pretty horrible unless used to attack naked people with no stamina, no guard meter, or damage-mitigating abilities. With enough DR it's not even worth dodging more than maybe one wave, anyway. On my DC I'll usually eat the whole thing just to avoid wasting stamina that could be better used for dodging prones and actual burst.

demonkyuubi · April 2014

vorphied wrote: »

You're lucky to hit 10k even if the target stands still, is crit by all three highly-telegraphed waves, and deflects none of them. It's pretty horrible unless used to attack naked people with no stamina, no guard meter, or damage-mitigating abilities. With enough DR it's not even worth dodging more than maybe one wave, anyway. On my DC I'll usually eat the whole thing just to avoid wasting stamina that could be better used for dodging prones and actual burst.

i can understand deflect, ITC, Unstoppable, and block but no other forms of mitigation made me hit that much less than base damage as i never use it without prophecy.

i even hit 10k on a guardian and ended up killing him. the 2nd time, he blocked quick enough to stop the last hit but turned his back on my team and died anyways.

vorphied · April 2014

demonkyuubi wrote: »

i can understand deflect, ITC, Unstoppable, and block but no other forms of mitigation made me hit that much less than base damage as i never use it without prophecy.

i even hit 10k on a guardian and ended up killing him. the 2nd time, he blocked quick enough to stop the last hit but turned his back on my team and died anyways.

Geared players have so much DR with Tenacity that you will never hit them for anything close to true damage unless they are debuffed way beyond what an application of Prophecy will accomplish.

Here I go being negative again :P What I'm really trying to say is that Hammer of Fate needs the love lordgallen talked about giving it following the huge nerf that no one asked for or needed.

demonkyuubi · April 2014

vorphied wrote: »

Geared players have so much DR with Tenacity that you will never hit them for anything close to true damage unless they are debuffed way beyond what an application of Prophecy will accomplish.

Here I go being negative again :P What I'm really trying to say is that Hammer of Fate needs the love lordgallen talked about giving it following the huge nerf that no one asked for or needed.

i'm only at 12k, but u really make me wonder how tanky people r beyond 13k though.

vorphied · April 2014

demonkyuubi wrote: »

i'm only at 12k, but u really make me wonder how tanky people r beyond 13k though.

For the sake of illustration, my "suboptimal" max WIS half-elf DC has something like 43% DR + 21% Tenacity and 23% Deflection with 33k HP in PvP.

Make him a Halfling and build him exclusively for PvP with higher CON and DEX and then the tankiness gets even more real.

In PvE gear he runs over 16k, but drops to 14.2k with PvP gear and without companion bonuses. GFs and GWFs can achieve very high base DR as well; HRs can become extremely resilient with their class feature, high Deflect chance, and auto-healing set bonus; TRs don't exactly top the DR charts, but their Deflect is no joke even when you get clean shots at them. All of this is why I sound like a party pooper when I talk about DC damage in general lol.

demonkyuubi · April 2014

vorphied wrote: »

For the sake of illustration, my "suboptimal" max WIS half-elf DC has something like 43% DR + 21% Tenacity and 23% Deflection with 33k HP in PvP.

Make him a Halfling and build him exclusively for PvP with higher CON and DEX and then the tankiness gets even more real.

In PvE gear he runs over 16k, but drops to 14.2k with PvP gear and without companion bonuses. GFs and GWFs can achieve very high base DR as well; HRs can become extremely resilient with their class feature, high Deflect chance, and auto-healing set bonus; TRs don't exactly top the DR charts, but their Deflect is no joke even when you get clean shots at them. All of this is why I sound like a party pooper when I talk about DC damage in general lol.

i see

i am currently at 19% armor pen, 16% buff from terrifying insight, and dunno what prophecy gives. also, currently testing high prophet to see if the extra squishyness is worth placing a 30% debuff on people.

also considering getting plaguefire's debuff or lightning/bile (purely for punishing light) or bronzewood for more armor pen

What do you think of Armor Penetration in DC?

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