So some of the badge gear and Pv P? gear has a value on it that allows you ignore X amount of armor.

That's nice, but the question then comes up: how much armor do you have to ignore before it does any good?

And the answer for Pv E? is: not that much.

Thanks to this post over here (http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2007/12/filling-in-blank-for-brk.html) we can see that most of the raid bosses in the game have a surprisingly low amount of armor (roughly comparable to that of a level 70 hunter, actually). Void Reaver tops the charts at around 10k armor, and folks like Aran have relatively low values. Based on THAT, the ability to ignore armor can actually increase your damage without gathering a ton of it.

Again, that's nice, but wouldn't it be cool if someone did up a spreadsheet where you can punch in your current armor penetration value and SEE how much your damage output is going to be increased against the raid bosses?

Yes, yes it would: http://www.mediamax.com/someone_wildhammer/Hosted/Armor_Penetration.xls

That's just neat isn't it?

So, to use Grezzk as an example; I have about 336 armor pen. I haven't gone out of my way to acquire any armor Pen stuff -- that's just the value that's happened 'by accident' when I've picked up two badge items and one Pv P? Battleground Honor item that I was going to get anyway. Plugging those numbers in, I can see that, just paying attention to my Armor Penetration, my damage output against a raid boss will go up by somewhere between 1 to 1.8 percent. When I pick up the S3 hunter axe, it'll jump up a bit more.

Of course, the spreadsheet also shows me what a HUGE benefit stuff like Faerie Fire and Sunder Armor is. Wow. Holy wow. I'm a noob. I had no idea.

Anyway, thought folks might find the information useful.