I know it depends on what I’m fighting, but let’s just say in general, is damage or armor pen better. I made 2 Gladius short swords and dropped different kits on them. 1 has 92 damage and 19% armor pen. The other has 87 damage and 31% armor pen.
So let’s say for the sake of argument that I have 10 enemies charging at me, 5 do not have armor and 5 do. Which sword would be preferred?
I always have trouble figuring out flat damage and armor pen
You pretty much answered it for yourself 
It depends on what you’re fighting and in a lot of cases you will be able to tell very easily as things will refuse to die without much armor pen if they’re heavily armored.
The thing is in PvE the game has a very sudden armor jump - meaning that a vast majority of things have pretty negligible armor (around 30) then it suddenly jumps up to several thousand for the things which are actually armored (elephants, rocknoses etc.).
In case of human NPCs they have a base armor of 10 plus whatever they’re wearing (which is usually not much, in the case of cimmerian heavy warriors it ‘can’ get close to 500-700, but most NPCs are very lightly armored.
The update also changed the armor curve around the middle, stuff that previously gave you 60% damage reduction now gives you around 45% however I noticed (at least some) crafted items with a T4 also appear to have more armor than before so that was probably done to compensate.
In any case with your weapons the damage difference between them is not that huge, but the additional armor pen is quite okay against regular armored targets, but even the higher one can make it quite tough to deal with the super heavily armored things.
So basically if you really want to min/max then I would use the higher damage one against most animals that have around or under 100 armor, the other weapon for anything that has more than that but under 1k and most human NPCs that “look” armored (like cimmerians)… and… I would probably try to get a mace with higher armor pen or the legendary katana that ignores armor completely for anything that has several thousand 
This might help, I exported the monstertable for you so you can see the actual armor value of everything sorted in a descending order: Monster Table - Google Sheets
Awesome. Thanks for the info, and the spreadsheet!
Yeah, I realize it depends on what I’m fighting, but the reason I was asking in general is for times when I just and about and who knows where I’ll end up. I’d rather just take 1 weapon. But so far regardless of which I use, clebenies are dropping like flies so I’m content 
If you just want one then it’s probably better to take the one with higher armor penetration.
Why? Because you can kill non-armored stuff very easily with either like you just said, but if you happen upon some rocknose or rhino that ignores 90% of your damage then that extra 12% armor pen is going to make a very big difference
Armor pen is always my go-to. The extra damage is circumstantially better on unarmored opponents, but you face something tanky and you’re boned. AP is always important, especially if you do only plan on packing one weapon. Personally, I use three.
Not a bad reference there. Would you be able to add a column that shows the damage reduction?
Like in row 2 you could just =C2 / (C2 + 500) and then just copy it on down.
That would do wonders for people able to see when too much armor penatration is too much.
In the OP’s example, their Gladius with 31% armor pen would be too much for anything under 235 armor (31.9% damage reduction).
Agree with the others. you are talking about a spread of 5 raw damage points but if armor is there…a spread of 12% points which to your average end game weapon of ~100 if character is built to maximize, that is 12 points. AP all the way.
There you go!
Now that is awesome.
That’s enough devkit time for one day though 
I’m going back to hitting stuff with sharp and blunt objects on my server until they die regardless of the formula 
The way I used to test it is I used a 100 dmg weapon (just used any weapon and admin’d it to have 100dmg, when that could still be done). And then watched the damage I dealt using Hosav’s UI which has floating combat numbers.
Armor Pen used to apply to armor. So 12% armor pen would make 1000 armor into 880. But sometime I think before Siptah they changed it to subtract from the damage reduction.
The damage reduction formula used to be Armor / Armor + 250, but in 3.0 it was changed to Armor / Armor + 500 (I think you knew this, just saying for those that are following and didn’t know).
I hear ya.
Yea, that’s a simple and effective way of testing it I remember way back we used to do that in PvP on each-other to try and figure out the formulas since we didn’t have a damage meter but then the other person could report back the health they lost.
I noticed that it changed simply cuz I looked at my status page ingame and saw that I was getting like 15-20% less reduction from wearing the same stuff as immediately prior to the update. I did not check or research it though so I didn’t know it was 500 until you posted it above, and sure enough as you can see on the picture above it is indeed 500 as I set a watch on the armor target constant So nope, didn’t know that until now either!
Don’t feel bad, I cheated and asked about it in Beta
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