MM Hunter Armor Pen Build

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

With the ascension of armor pen available on ICC gear, it’s time to take a good look at how the MM hunter armor pen build works.

Bbefore we get started: even if you have the gear, you may not see better dps from a hunter armor pen build. There’s more to it than just gathering the gear. Also, you can absolutely do competitive dps without an armor pen build, and MM does not need high armor pen or an armor pen build to do fantastic dps.

The Armor Penetration Advantage

 

I’m not going to go into detail on how armor pen works — we’ve covered that in our Armor Pen Guide. Suffice to say that 20% armor pen doesn’t increase your damage by 20%, it just reduces the opponent’s armor by 20%.

Armor Pen is useful for all hunter specs, but is most useful to MM hunters who get a bit more of their damage from physical shots, and have talents that boost the damage of those physical shots and combo with armor pen. The armor pen build takes advantage of increased steady shot damage combined with the side effect of piercing shots and the improved steady shot talent.

The Armor Pen Gear

In order for an armor pen build to surpass a standard agility MM build you need the right gear, and there’s more to it than just the armor pen rating. It’s a combination of armor pen, crit, and attack power. In general we try to estimate a passive armor pen rating baseline beyond which you’ll benefit from an armor ben build — we’re assuming that if you have that much armor pen, your crit and AP must be fine too. Keep in mind this passive armor pen floor is the minimum armor pen without gemming for it or sacrificing better gear for it.

Furthermore, at this magical crossover point, you’ll see no statistically viable difference in your dps, even if you’re a bit beyond the crossover. In other words the difference in your dps from the new build is less than the factors of randomness on your dps.

In general I recommend switching to an armor pen model only after you have more than 400 or 450 passive armor pen (that is, without gemming or taking big gear downgrades to get the armor pen). At this point you should see an increase in your dps if you’re doing everything right.

Some other armor pen build notes:

• You do not need an armor pen proc trinket to benefit from an armor pen build.
• If you do have such a trinket, softcaps for the various trinkets can be found on the WHU Armor Pen Guide page.
• Don’t start gemming for amor pen until your passive ArP rating gets around  800. You may even need to wait longer, depending on your gear and playstyle (the exact mark is different for different gear sets).
• Don’t forget to look at leather gear — you will often find better armor pen and agility on leather (at the expense of int).
• Again, MM does not need armor pen to make it a top spec, but at high gear levels MM armor pen builds will outperform non-armor pen builds.

The Armor Pen Talent Build

The armor pen MM hunter uses a slightly different talent build, which looks something like this: MM Hunter Armor Pen Build

The idea here is to use Imp Steady Shot to maximize your extra steady shots, and remove imp arcane since you’ll be dropping that from your rotation most of the time. In addition, truly hardcore armor pen builds (such as those hardcapping armor pen) will usually need at least one point in focused aim because they end up not getting enough hit from all their armor pen gear. If you’re still okay on hit rating, you probably want that point in Imp Hunter’s Mark.

In all honesty, most MM hunters pursuing the ArP route will want 3/3 Focused Aim. They want their hit from talents (and the pushback reduction is okay) so they can get ArP from their gear. If you have a choice, ditch your hit gear for ArP gear and put more talent points here. Take them out of Rapid Recouperation, or even Trueshot Aura if you’ve got DKs providing that buff.

Armor Pen Shot Rotation

Armor pen builds also use a slightly different rotation than the standard MM hunter rotation. Specifically, they drop Arcane Shot from their rotation entirely. With high enough armor pen rating and the steady shot glyph, your steady shot can actually do more damage than arcane shot. But even before that point it can be worth dropping arcane shot because of the extra advantage the additional steady shots give to piercing shots and through the improved steady shot talent.

The point at which you’ll see benefit to dropping arcane is again around 400 – 450 passive armor pen rating. And again, we’re assuming that you have good crit and plenty of attack power at that point (which you will as long as you aren’t doing silly things like massive downgrades in search of more armor pen).

Note however that you’ll still want to use arcane shot in the following situations:

• Shooting on the move when aimed and chimera shot are not available
• Shooting adds that don’t have sunder or expose armor on them
• At the very beginning of a fight, before the sunder stacks have been applied

 

The Movement Factor of Armor Pen Builds

 

Armor pen boosts physical damage only, and most of the physical damage we do comes from steady shot and auto shot. As a result, armor pen builds are very sensitive to movement.

Most boss fights require movement; however, the movement in most of those fights is predictable and can be planned for and mitigated. This is the big area where the armor pen builds really favor skilled players.

Without question every hunter of every spec should be planning and limiting their movement as much as possible. You want to shoot & scoot — pausing while running to let your auto-shots fire. You want to use disengage to cover larger distances quickly. Managing movement is one of the biggest differences between a competent hunter and a skilled hunter. Hunters with poor movement skills can still do just fine and show nice dps numbers under normal builds, but an armor pen build will brutally punish you for poor (or average) movement skills. The vast majority of hunters to not have good movement skills, as a reference.

This is a big deal, so think long and hard about your movement skills before pursuing an armor pen build.