choice between armor pen and critical strike in pvp, which is better?

qthephysicist · March 2014

SO, i am faced with this choice because i dont have a super amount of armor pen yet. so if you had ot choose between the two, which would you choose for your gear?

overddrive · March 2014

HR gears tends towards arpen so it just makes sense to use crit enchants. The offensive priority imo is arpen, crit, power. But they are all important and none should be neglected.

my two cents.

kolevra · March 2014

Depends a lot upon your ability scores, which contribute to both crit chance and resistance ignored. Also depends a lot upon your playstyle as well as your preference for PvE/PvP.

utuwer · March 2014

In my opinion, for pvp, having about 2000 crit (~33% crit chance) is good to go, then go for armor penetration.

jonkoca · April 2014

A lot of people in pvp stack armor, especially gwfs, up to 40+ percent. So for pvp, stack as much arpen as you can, plus a weapon enchant like terror, or better, plague fire. Pve, bosses stack max 24 %. Crit, as people have said, needs to be about 30+.

smishmint · April 2014

For PVP it kind of depends what classes you would like to do better against.

Cleric, GWF, and GF typically have armor(40%), so stacking arPen will do better against those classes.

However, every point your over cap for the lesser armored classes is a point your behind in crit or power. Classes like CW, HR, and TR will have armor(25%), so getting at the PVE cap(24%) and then stacking crit will do better against those classes.

Take your pick.

frozenflame22 · April 2014

I'd do it in increments. Crit to 2000, then Armor Pen to 20%, then Crit to 3000, then Armor Pen to 24%, then Crit to 3500. Then if you PVP take the Armor Pen to 40%

goldheart · April 2014

utuwer wrote: »

In my opinion, for pvp, having about 2000 crit (~33% crit chance) is good to go, then go for armor penetration.

+1 .

smishmint · April 2014

To expand on what I said before, it also depends on your weapon enchants. Things like Vorpal, Terror, and Plague will change how arpen weighs against crit. Something to consider is, unless you have over 100% critical severity, arpen will always provide more average dps than crit until all their 'damage resistance' is 'ignored'.

If you have something around 125% crit severity however, then crit will start mattering more -roughly- around when their 'damage resistance' is around 20% after factoring in 'resistance ignored'. Of course I'm talking about crit chance vs resistance ignored instead of the stats on the armor whose weights will change depending on how much you already have of each stat.

Something else to consider is that the armor penetration stat is very efficient until around 2000 and still somewhat efficient until around 3000. In fact, it's the one stat that increases in efficiency until around 600 or so.

It can get confusing(for me), but as a general rule of thumb just keep in mind that if you Vorpal, Terror, or Plague, that increasing your critical chance my 1% will generally be better than increasing resistance ignored by 1%. While if you were other enchant like flaming, lightning, or nothing, then the opposite is generally true.

jonkoca · April 2014

smishmint wrote: »

For PVP it kind of depends what classes you would like to do better against.

Cleric, GWF, and GF typically have armor(40%), so stacking arPen will do better against those classes.

However, every point your over cap for the lesser armored classes is a point your behind in crit or power. Classes like CW, HR, and TR will have armor(25%), so getting at the PVE cap(24%) and then stacking crit will do better against those classes.

Take your pick.

Not entirely true, I'm an hr, and my armor is at 34%.

choice between armor pen and critical strike in pvp, which is better?

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