WoD Armor Theorycrafting

[apepi]

I thought about taking a look at armor in WoD, at first I initially looked at it because of the increase in Moonkin armor, but I found it fairly interesting. I made some tables.

In this first I used the new Glad gear in pvp mode to see how much armor we will have. I choose the pvp gear in pvp mode because it can show a high item level, the raid gear has not been implemented and I am mainly a pvper. Now understand that things can change.

WoD glad pvp mode	Leather	Mail	Plate	Cloth
Back	64	64	64	64
Chest	191	345	581	127
Feet	131	237	399	87
Hands	119	215	363	79
Head	155	280	472	103
Legs	167	301	508	111
Shoulders	143	258	436	95
Waist	107	194	327	71
Wrist	84	151	254	56
Total Without Shield	1161	2045	3404	793
Shield		2370	2370
Total	1161	4415	5774	793
Moonkin MoP/Shadowform	2322
Moonkin WoD Perk	3483
Dk Blood Presence	5276.2
Bear Form	2554.2
Thick Hide Bear Form	4992.3
Metamorphosis	2775.5

So what does this tells us? Not too much, but Moonkin armor boost is going to be pretty strong, they will have as much armor(or a little stronger) as plate classes that do not use a shield. Not only that, but shields seem pretty strong.

Now in this next graph I am interested in the item(armor) squish, so I will use the prideful gear.

	Cloth		Leather		Mail		Plate
	Live	WOD	Live	WOD	Live	WOD	Live	WOD
Back	1340	17	1340	17	1340	17	1340	17
Chest	2681	34	3412	52	4747	93	6483	158
Feet	1843	24	2346	36	3264	64	4457	108
Hands	1675	22	2132	32	2967	58	4052	99
Head	2178	28	2772	42	3857	76	5268	128
Legs	2346	30	2985	45	4154	82	5673	138
Shoulders	2011	26	2559	39	3561	70	4863	118
Waist	1508	19	1919	29	2670	53	3647	89
Wrist	1173	15	1493	23	2077	41	2837	69
Total Without Shield	16755	215	20958	315	28637	554	38620	924
Shield					20796	643	20796	643
Total	16755	215	20958	315	49433	1197	59416	1567

Okay now this is really showing us something. The farther we get from cloth the more armor we seem to have. While of course that is supposed to happen, but the gap is huge. In Live the difference from cloth to plate is 231%(or 2.35*), but in WoD it will be 430%(4.3*), so the difference between the two is 199%. But why is this happening? Lets check the squish on the prideful gear.

MoP Prideful Gear Squish	Cloth		Leather		Mail		Plate		Cloth to Leather		Leather to Mail		Mail to Plate
Back	78.82352941		78.82352941		78.82352941		78.82352941
Chest	78.85294118		65.61538462		51.04301075		41.03164557		13.23755656		14.57237386		10.01136518
Feet	76.79166667		65.16666667		51		41.26851852		11.625		14.16666667		9.731481481
Hands	76.13636364		66.625		51.15517241		40.92929293		9.511363636		15.46982759		10.22587948
Head	77.78571429		66		50.75		41.15625		11.78571429		15.25		9.59375
Legs	78.2		66.33333333		50.65853659		41.10869565		11.86666667		15.67479675		9.549840933
Shoulders	77.34615385		65.61538462		50.87142857		41.21186441		11.73076923		14.74395604		9.659564165
Waist	79.36842105		66.17241379		50.37735849		40.97752809		13.19600726		15.7950553		9.399830401
Wrist	78.2		64.91304348		50.65853659		41.11594203		13.28695652		14.25450689		9.542594556
Average	77.94497668		67.25163955		53.92639698		45.29147407		10.69333713		13.32524257		8.634922912
Shield					32.34214619		32.34214619

Okay this tells us a lot now. First we understand why Cloth to Plate is so big now, they are not squishing at the same number(or even close) and shields are the least affected by the squish. Not only the item squish variates, it does not even variate a steady amount, the gap to leather to mail squish is very large.

Okay for this next table I decided to look at the squish if it was just one number(I used 77.94497668). I decided to add a graph under the table(I tried the others but it did not really work right).

Fixed Armor Squish	Cloth		Leather		Mail		Plate
	Fixed	WoD	Fixed	WoD	Fixed	WoD	Fixed	WoD
Back	17.19161	17	17.19161	17	17.19161	17	17.19161	17
Chest	34.39606	34	43.77447	52	60.90194	93	83.17406	158
Feet	23.64488	24	30.09816	36	41.87569	64	57.18136	108
Hands	21.48952	22	27.35263	32	38.06531	58	51.98539	99
Head	27.94279	28	35.56355	42	49.48363	76	67.58614	128
Legs	30.09816	30	38.29625	45	53.29401	82	72.78211	138
Shoulders	25.80025	26	32.83085	39	45.68607	70	62.39017	118
Waist	19.34698	19	24.61993	29	34.25493	53	46.78942	89
Wrist	15.04908	15	19.15454	23	26.647	41	36.39747	69
Total Without Shield	214.9593	215	268.882	315	367.4002	554	495.4777	924
Shield					266.8036	643	266.8036	643
Total	214.9593	215	268.882	315	634.2038	1197	762.2813	1567

Now this is what it would be if it just progressed like it would in MoP.

But why would they want to variate the squish? I am not exactly sure but there could be a few reasons that they could want to. Maybe they just want a real difference in the armor type classes and putting a shield will really change things. Or maybe they have something like base resilience for armor where all classes get 20% then having extra armor(or armor)gives us a minimal amount of physical damage reduction. Blizzard does not really talk much about the armor squish, so I really can't tell where they are trying to go here, are these the armor numbers that we will end up on live(WoD) or are they still adjusting them? I am trying to get them to comment.

Now how much damage reduction will this mean in-game? Well I wish I could tell you, but we still do not know how much armor equals 1% in physical reduction.

This is my first time really to theorycraft something, so if I got anything wrong or you disagree with it please let me know. If I miss a certain armor buff please tell me and I will add it to my table.

[Senka]

Although it's too early to tell if they're moving forward with these numbers, this is very interesting. For anyone that played Classic or TBC, this should be very reminiscent of those times. That's not to say it's all good. While it may make sense that cloth should be much more vulnerable, it's a little worrying because it caused problems in the earlier lives of WoW.

In Classic, the difference between Cloth's Armor AND Stamina compared to Mail or Plate was.. wide to say the least. Oddly, Leather and Mail were closer to each other than Leather was to Cloth, and Plate was in a league all its own in both Armor and Stamina. From what I remember, just a ballpark example: A Plate wearer could have 5K health and get crit by Aimed Shot for something like 2K while a Cloth wearer in equivalent gear could have 4K health and get crit for 3K. It was not fun times as a cloth wearer in PVP unless you were a Fire or Frost Mage with trinkets. :P EDIT: I forgot that Warlocks were very unique in that they had as much health as, or possibly more than, a Plate wearer.

Also, I remember that even in Classic Moonkin Form granted Plate-level Armor, which was interesting. Oh, and I think Shields were a huge deal in Classic, but I forget exactly. I would be okay with returning Shields to such glory for tanks.

The boost to Health per Stamina in TBC as well as some changes to cloth-wearer armor spells helped bring things more in line with each other throughout TBC. I remember cloth wearers mostly ended up being about as durable as Leather wearers, which was kind of odd. I might be remembering wrong, but I thought Discipline Priest and Warlock were out of whack.

I think it was for Wrath when they brought the Stamina on armor types much closer together. As a result, I think some casters ended up extremely durable, but oh well.

For Cataclysm, they did some very serious normalization of both Armor and Stamina between armor types. This was primarily done to introduce some variance in raid damage without unduly punishing cloth wearers and is the entire reason armor modifiers were so drastically changed such as the one for Moonkin Form.

I don't think anything major changed with Armor and Stamina in Mists, but I could be forgetting anything.


Anyway, it seems strange they would go back and turn Armor into a big deal again.

[Blindman213]

Well its not that strange. They said they wanted to make armor matter around the same time WoD was first announced/leaked. The point to this was that wearing plate didnt feel like you were wearing sheets of steel, meanwhile a warlock in what was suppose to be pajamas could take a ton of damage and walk away.

I actually agree with this new normalization. Its going to feel nice knowing that my plate armor means something.

[apepi]

Snip

That is how I remember it as well. I kind of agree with you, I would like to get a comment on blizzard about it.

Well its not that strange. They said they wanted to make armor matter around the same time WoD was first announced/leaked. The point to this was that wearing plate didnt feel like you were wearing sheets of steel, meanwhile a warlock in what was suppose to be pajamas could take a ton of damage and walk away.

I actually agree with this new normalization. Its going to feel nice knowing that my plate armor means something.

I really can not find anything on this. I am afraid that it could be too strong which would have to make spellcasters being better at taking magic damage or having more stamina.