Heavy armor and penetration

ZarkingFrued

Wanted to get some opinions. I've been running heavy armor on my mag dk, and its great open world, but in BGs i have a harder time getting kills. Now some of this can be contributed to people spamming mages fury, reverse slice, ect. to get the kill even after you've done the work. However, the few times I've tried out light armor I've doubled my kills. I think this boils down to the base penetration that comes with light armor passives since honestly my spell damage is about the same in light or heavy.
I do use ele drain, but is that enough penetration in a BG on it's own? For one thing it takes up time spamming it on a group before I fight them, and I have absolute zero penetration on targets I haven't applied it to while I'm in heavy. How large of a factor does penetration play in no cp, and how much is enough?

VikingBerserker

I believe it makes a big difference since you can't get your pen from cp. I run spriggans or spinners on all my burst builds in bgs.

moosegod

Penetration definitely has a big impact on damage. Go to a dummy and hit it with your flame lash before and after applying ele drain and see for yourself. It's even more in noCP because you don't have pen from your CP and players are less tanky in that environment.

brandonv516

moosegod wrote: »

Penetration definitely has a big impact on damage. Go to a dummy and hit it with your flame lash before and after applying ele drain and see for yourself. It's even more in noCP because you don't have pen from your CP and players are less tanky in that environment.

Absolutely. Once I realized this I started unslotting Inner Light for Elemental Drain.

I never felt I needed ED for the magicka return but damn that extra damage is nice!

ZarkingFrued

Switched to just going 5 light 2 heavy and using ele drain, huge difference. Its just not possible to get ele drain on everything in a bg match 100% of the time, so the base pen from light helps me I've found. May use protective jewels to get that tanky feel again tho. I enjoyed the heavy armor mitigation.