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The Queue: In your city, stealing your mailbox


Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

Today's edition of The Queue is going to be short and sweet, but it's a Sunday and nobody really has much to say on a Sunday! So let's dig right in, starting with actodd's question...

Can you explain armor penetration a bit? Is it designed more for tanks or DPS (or even heals)? Where should it fit into the 'hierarchy' of stats say, a feral tank has?



Armor Penetration isn't especially good in Wrath, it's been gutted since The Burning Crusade. It used to be amazingly good, but made certain things downright imbalanced. Each point of Armor Penetration used to reduce 1 point of Armor, straight conversion. It was absurdly good in PvE, and it made PvP pretty broken. Melee classes stacking Armor Penetration ruined casters more than ever before because it had a much bigger impact on cloth wearers.

In Wrath, they changed the straight armor conversion to a rating and percentage system to try and fix that. So you don't pierce 125 armor or whatever, you penetrate 3% or 10% or 0.5%. Because of that and its weight in the item budget, it isn't worth it. For anybody. I was talking to some very, very good Melee players in my raid about Armor Pen, and the most positive thing said about it was, "It's least terrible for Warriors."

There are other factors in play, such as how it's affected by Sunder Armor and abilities like that, but that's a bit unnecessarily number crunchy for now. Basically, it isn't any good anymore, especially not for a tank (or Healer). Avoid it.

Xtian asked...

Why did they remove the western mailbox in SMC? My guild's current theory was that it was a Retbox, and so needed to be nerfed. Any confirmation?

You know how the Blood Elves stole Tempest Keep and M'uru from the Naaru and Draenei? Well, Aldor Rise needed a mailbox awhile back. Vengeance is ours!

Tib asked...

Is it possible to get the Icecrown quest acheivement without doing lots of 5 man quests? I seem to be stuck at around 119 quests done and can't find any more yellow exclamation marks - lots and lots of blue ones though.

You won't have to do all of the group quests, but you will have to do a lot of them. There are a massive amount of 5-man quests in Icecrown, but they're worth doing anyway. Very cool quests.

Ian R. asked...

How come all of the WoW Insider bloggers are so incredibly handsome?

I don't have an answer to that other question you asked, I haven't heard anything about it. But this one? We shower.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!