Is arm pen viable for enh

[Gray_Matter]

Moral for the story: don't pug with 12 year olds.

I unfortunately don't have a choice. I can't raid regularly because of family commitments and need to take what I can get when it comes to ICC runs. Most weeks I miss our weekly guild ICC run (we are a 10 man guild) because they are online earlier than I am. It suits me because I am more of a casual player but it can just be very frustrating at times. Especially when things like this happen. The problem is that these perceptions exist about which class is better suited for which gear. I am hoping that Cataclysm will change this.

[evan_s]

Armor Pen is not our preferred stat and I've never seen any situation where stacking it and trying to hard cap it was worth while but it is far from useless for us. Typically it seems to sim about equal to hit above the spell hit cap and below any crit cap issues. As it stands it is pretty much impossible for us to avoid armor pen as blizzard doesn't make enough mail armor for us to avoid it completely.

Given the choice we are better off with other stats but armor pen isn't like a caster shaman picking up spirit or a healer picking up hit.

[Deleted]

Given the choice we are better off with other stats but armor pen isn't like a caster shaman picking up spirit or a healer picking up hit.

Exactly. Its a decent stat it boosts our damage, we just take moderate quantities of it. We should neither gear for it nor avoid it. Anyone who suggests that something with ArP on it isn't for Enhancement Shamans is WRONG and does not understand the spec.

[Dhurn]

i may be wrong, but arent melee attacks and mutilate physical damage? if so it would be 30 +10-15% => 40-45% physical damage, 55-60% poison.

no you're right. I read the same post you quote and had a little head scratching
moment too. Mutilate is physical damage, it merely benefits 20% from targets being poisoned. The only nature damage assasination rogues do is IP/DP/Envenom, and it's usually very nearly a 50/50 spread of physical/spell. For reference arp is usually worth ~1.1 EP for assasination rogues, which I believe is fairly similar to enhance, perhaps a bit lower (depending on gearset ofc).

[Renzokuken]

I would expect this kind of discussion on the official Shaman forums, I'm very disappointed in you all. Threads like these are the reason the stigma of ArP has been perpetuated for so long. If you don't understand how ArP relates to Enhancement, please refrain from posting garbage like "ArP is Hunter gear" or "BDW is crap for Enh". ArP is sub-optimal not useless, there's a big difference. A car without a CD player is sub-optimal, a car with no engine is useless. Avoiding potential upgrades on the basis of "ArP isn't as good as crit/haste, so this item must be DE fodder" is wrong, period. If you can't get past that mentality, you're not playing Enh correctly.

[baelon]

This is a big problem for casuals. I won the roll on http://www.wowhead.com/?item=49988 in a pug and after a lot of complaining by a hunter in the group about ArP not being a Enh Shammy stat, they decided to give the pants to him. At the time, I had my 232 T9 pants so it was a good upgrade for me.

I still wear those. Luckily pugs on blackrock tend to just give it to the highest roller (or simply ninja lol) rather than try to make judgement calls. I've checked rawr and if I were switch to the t9 pants and 25man dreamwalker gloves I'd only gain ~15 dps.

Arp isn't as bad for us as a lot of shamans like to make out. A lot of people are tunnelvisioned min/maxers, and technically it isn't as good for us as other stats, so they tend to see it as horrible when it really isn't.

[aikouka]

Exactly. Its a decent stat it boosts our damage, we just take moderate quantities of it. We should neither gear for it nor avoid it. Anyone who suggests that something with ArP on it isn't for Enhancement Shamans is WRONG and does not understand the spec.

The hunter probably just complained because those pants are highly sought after by hunters since it's better than their set piece.