Defensive Stance

[Concillian]

The plan I am entertaining right now is going for Improved Revenge, Tactical Mastery and Enrage.  I hope that it will give me a decent amount of damage (from enrage) while taking a defensive footing and using stuns from Revenge.  [right][snapback]66872[/snapback][/right]

I just did a writeup on Sunder armor on another forum, and thought it would be appropriate here. If you look at the damage increase of 5 Improved Sunders, even on a heavily armored target, your damage increase is LARGER than the difference between a 1H and 2H weapon. So Sunder is not just a threat tool, but a way of adding signficant amounts of damage for a protection specced warrior.

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I think sunder armor is an often overlooked skill. I also think Improved Sunder is an often overlooked talent that helps more than you might think. Armor reducing skills/talents are the only skills that I know of that have accelerating returns. Just to demonstrate that fact, I'm going to go through a few examples of lvl 60 warrior vs. lvl 60 something else based on the forumula at Thottbot that was made into a tool at this site:

http://www.merciless-gilde.com/inde...ow=tools&tool=1

1st, look at a lvl 60 whatever with 5000 armor and how it affects damage reduction:

Code:

armor    sunders   dam. red.   with IS
5000      0      47.62%      47.62%
4550      1      45.27%      44.53%
4100      2      42.71%      41.05%
3650      3      39.89%      37.11%
3200      4      36.78%      32.60%
2750      5      33.33%      27.39%
---------------------------------------
Total DR gain    14.29%      20.23%

So you get signifiacnt defense reduction and it looks okay... I mean with 5 stacked, you have changed damage reduced by 14.29%, and that means 14.29% more damage right?

NO. It means more than that. Say you do exactly 100 damage per hit (low for level 60 I know, but just for example's sake) Now that gets reduced by this percentage to less damage. Here is what you would be doing with each hit, and how much actual % gain you get in each case:

Code:

sunders  dam   dam (IS)  benefit  benefit with IS  % increase of IS
   0    52.38   52.38      
   1    54.73   55.47     4.49%       5.90%          31.5%
   2    57.29   58.95     4.68%       6.27%          34.1%
   3    60.11   62.89     4.92%       6.68%          35.8%
   4    63.22   67.40     5.17%       7.17%          38.6%
   5    66.67   72.61     5.46%       7.73%          41.6%
--------------------------------------------------------------  
Total                    24.72%      33.76%         36.6%

This one may be tougher to follow, but the benefit column indicates how much extra damage each sunder gives.
Also, IS = Improved Sunder and assumes 3/3 points.

A full 5 sunders gives 25% more damage in this case than with no sunders. If you have imporved sunder you are doing almost 34% more damage. That's like doing as much damage with a 1H weapon as a 2H weapon.

You can see why I said Sunder and improved sunder have accelerating returns. The benefit of 3/3 in IS vs. 0/3 goes from 31.5% extra damage on the first sunder up to over 40% on the last.

This is a case where fighting a level 60 with 5000 armor. What about a level 60 rogue. Looking at the profiles on Thottbot, at level 60 it seems like a decent rogue has a little over 1000 armor. Say it's one who has pretty good stuff at 1200 armor.

Code:

armor    sunders  dam. red.   with IS      
1200     0       17.91%     17.91%      
 750     1       12.00%     10.06%      
 300     2        5.17%      0.54%      
-150     3       -2.80%    -11.22%      
-600     4      -12.24%    -26.15%      
-1050    5      -23.60%    -45.70%
------------------------------------      
Total DR gain    41.51%     63.61%

and a total damage increase of:

Code:

sunders   dam    dam (IS)   benefit  with IS  IS %increase
   0     82.09    82.09      
   1     88.00    89.94      7.20%      9.56%     32.8%
   2     94.83    99.46      7.76%     10.58%     36.4%
   3    102.80   111.22      8.40%     11.82%     40.7%
   4    112.24   126.15      9.18%     13.42%     46.2%
   5    123.60   145.70     10.12%     15.50%     53.1%
----------------------------------------------------
Total                       42.67%     60.89%     42.7%

Not that you will necessarily get a chance to stck 5 sunders on a rogue, but with Improved Sunder, each sunder increases your damage done by about 10%! So against foes with low armor, sunder is even more effective and the benefit of improved IS is also magnified.

I initially wanted to do this analysis to see if putting points in Improved IS is worth it on a protection spec warrior if I had to take the points out of 1H weapon spec. In the case of a high defense enemy it takes 4 stacked sunders to offset the benefit of +6% damage with 3 points in 1H spec. In this case it's almost certainly not worth it.

However in the case of the low defense enemy, it only takes 2 sunders before IS is better than 1H weapon spec.

Seeing the total benefit, I'm considering taking points from elsewhere in the build to add to IS. At the very least the analysis shows how much benefit you can get later in a fight by stacking on the sunders early in the fight. The benefit was much larger than I would have expected on initial glance.

Edit: Clearly this forum doesn't use 'preformatted text' in the same way, the tables were not very readable just copy and pasted, I needed to edit for clarity.