The armor nerf that wasn't

Patch 3.0.8 is out and the Great Armor Nerf was actually a huge buff. I never did the math ahead of time, but I'm baffled by the result.

My bear gear armor went from 33973 to 33640, or about 68.8% mitigation. Yeah, a tiny nerf, but considering I have 2850 armor coming from cloaks, jewelry, trinkets, and weapons that's way, way less than I feared.

The shocker is that in my cat gear, my bear armor went up from 23344 to 31904. Or 60.5% mitigation to 67.7%. I was expecting some buff to the cat suit, but that's just absurd. I'm not quite sure if the bear gear has any purpose anymore. It still has 5000 more HP and 1.2% more dodge, but the armor gap is negligible.

PS: I only have two points in Thick Hide.

Comments

[Mekias]

I was expecting a nerf as well but my armor actually went up. Of course all bears in my guild have almost identical amounts of armor now (33k-34k) and there isn't really any way to improve it in the future, but a buff's a buff. At least now I can get rid of my level 75 armored cloak.

[Melthu]

The real win with the armor change is that we can now use things like Darkmoon Card: Greatness, Essence of Gossamer, and Valor Medal of the First War. I dropped about 2.5k armor (to be expected as I had Offering of Sacrifice, Defender's Code, Staff of the Plague Beast, Gatekeeper, Keystone Great-Ring, Cloak of the Shadowed Sun, and Torta's Oversized Choker) but I picked up a considerable amount of health and dodge thanks to the ability to use new trinkets. Overall I think we got a pretty solid buff.