LoDBlog

Do you know any warriors who currently wear leather? How about MAIL?? Have you ever heard the argument of, “ZOMG why u taek leather u r warror?!!”? Clearly, these players are terrible because they aren’t stacking strength and they don’t deserve the gear against leather wearers! But, is that really true? Do we just take the old generalization of plate wearers having leather or mail as bad? We as a community will probably agree that we are prejudice against that, and some will even discriminate, but what does a warrior see in the item that’s so enticing to give up plate?

That is what you will discover as you read along!

While I personally try to aim for plate upgrades, there are items that are deemed as BiS (best in slot) which are both leather AND mail for Fury. These include:

Bracers of Dark Determination
Belt of Deathly Dominion
Icewalker Treads
Sabatons of Ruthless Judgment

The items above have plate counterparts which would be widely considered as the “actual” BiS, but for Arms, these are absolute BiS:

Bracers of the Untold Massacre
Legguards of the Lurking Threat

They are BOTH mail! What’s the deal here?!

Armor does not matter

In the grand scheme of things, your armor won’t make a bit of difference in your performance. Yes, perhaps you will have more success off-tanking something in an emergency situation, and you’ll probably have a few more points of AP from Armored to the Teeth compared to a leather or mail piece, but if you are talking about your best dps performance, armor really doesn’t matter. Leather and mail also tend to have way less stamina on them compared to plate pieces.

Leather and Mail have more stats

This is the primary reason why leather and mail pieces persevere over plate. Blizzard has every intention on wanting plate items to be the best for plate wearing classes, but they have not done 100% good on that vision. The only way that I can accurately explain the differences is by comparing pieces, so lets get to it!

Gloves of the Silver Assassin VS Gloves of Bitter Reprisal

Ignoring the sockets, we see that the leather piece has agility, crit, attack power, and armor penetration. The plate one has strength, crit, and armor penetration. 4 stats vs 3 stats is already leaning towards the leather piece, but lets not forget that 107 strength on the plate gloves equates to 214 static attack power, which is way beyond the leather piece! However, the leather piece has two stats that adds to crit – Agility and Critical Strike Rating. Knowing that for every 62.5 agility a warrior has equates to 1% crit, 97 agility roughly equals to be 1.55% crit, which means you are potentially grabbing 2.88% crit just on a pair of gloves! It looks like a close call – now lets add the sockets. The leather piece wins. Will it ALWAYS win in EVERY situation? That solely depends on your current gear, but unless you are way beyond the crit cap, then they will generally be better.

Sabatons of Ruthless Judgment VS Greaves of the 7th Legion

Once again, we see the 4 stats VS 3 stats happening between these two items. This scenario is a bit different because the mail boots contribute to 4 different stats instead of “double dipping” in crit. Generally, Fury warriors do not need a lot of hit (4% from gear for Alliance and 5% for Horde), so the mail boots may not seem to be such a huge upgrade until you start collecting most of your other BiS pieces, which don’t have hit on them. While the mail boots may not “double dip” in crit, it certainly provides a strong case to be “double dipping” in power. Strength + ArP is an amazing combination on plate, and the mail boots have its own version of it in attack power and ArP while the plate ones do not have that combination. The Sabatons also nearly have as much crit as the plate boots (98 agility ~ 1.56% crit VS 76 crit rating = 1.66%). However, you cannot forget what else the plate boots have: Expertise! Expertise and hit rating are always top priority in reaching the soft cap before taking care of any other stat as Fury, so the real question is whether you need the expertise on the boots or not. If you need it, the plate boots would be better, but if you are talking about overall, raw offensive stats, along with needing the hit, the mail boots are the clear winner.

I can continue to compare items and note all the differences, but I hope I’ve made it clear in the top two examples how leather and mail pieces fiercely compete with plate itemization.

I really have just one major suggestion that would more than likely fix the problem and keep plate wearers away from leather:

Give Strength a crit component

Strength already gives 2 attack power for each point of strength, and Improved Berserker Stance already rewards us for using strength, but that hasn’t proven to be enough to sway warriors from picking up other pieces. The primary reason why leather is picked up is because the amount of crit + agility on the gear usually outweighs the extra attack power you would have gained from picking up strength, especially when armor penetration is on the leather piece. Since strength is the only stat on our gear that makes plate stand out to be on its own, that seems to be the only logical stat to buff. If this is done on plate gear, it does not touch the effectiveness of leather and mail gear for other classes while making strength even more appealing and (hopefully) permanently “the” stat to go for. I would say to make the change through the warrior talents, but since other plate classes occasionally run into the same “problem” we do, it would just make most sense to just make strength give crit. How much crit? However much would be balanced! I would also prefer to make agility less attractive in the process to not make the strength buff seem too overwhelming.

Now, I’m sure Blizzard isn’t on “blue alert” about this problem in itemization because while it’s an annoying fact we have to deal with, it’s not an epidemic. Tier really helps out with this problem and we only see it on a few slots, but it’s there. I’m sure fixing the problem is beyond a simple stat change, but I can certainly dream! :D