It's now 52%(or at least that's what I read it was, considering the test servers were down when I wanted to check).
Any other warrior feels like it'd still be possible to hold aggro without sunder on most bosses, as long as you get enough time to build initial threat? I'm thinking of like, assigning one rogue with imp expose armor to build a 3points SnD, 5points SnD, AR, 5points evisc(or rupture) then 5points expose armor. That means it'll land on average about 40secs after the start of the fight. That leaves plenty of time for a prot warrior to generate a big buffer of threat with shield slams and revenge(and sunders). Once the mob has been exposed, the biggest issue I see would be to keep a 5points Expose on top of keeping SnD up, but by using less optimal cycles(3points SnD 5points Expose 3points SnD 5points SnD 5points expose etc...) you could theorically keep it up for the whole fight, which would compensate for the loss of the dps on that particular rogue and probably give you a big advantage depending on how stacked on melees your raid is.

Personally, I only use sunder to make sure the stack doesn't disapear, but I spend most of my rage using heroic strikes/shield slam/shield blocks/revenge, so I think losing the ability to sunder wouldn't hurt much. Just wondering what other tanks think about it, and also what rogues think about the viability of the template/feasability of keeping 5points expose up the whole time without totally gimping your dps.

Edit: Please see the changes I posted on page 2.


I'm extremely curious about this ability myself, and to what level it will increase raid damage if used by a dedicated rogue. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any resources which give approximate AC calculations on raid bosses. On the Blizz Rogue forums someone claimed Nef at around 9k, and I figured out that IEA would be roughly an 11% decrease in DR over 5xSunder. On that specific fight because of OTs the MT doesnt' want to try it, but overall that seems a fairly signifcant buff, yes?

Oh, and it is worth noting that in 1.12 the buffs overwrite, but you can sunder off an Expose (finally!). I can also confirm it is 40% of armor ignored for EA and 52% for IEA.

I'd love to hear what some real number crunchers think about using this.

(btw, this is my first post here though I've been reading for a while, hope I didn't break some rule)

Wait, what do you mean the "buffs overwrite, but you can sunder off an Expose"? You mean you can still use Sunder Armor even while EA is up?

52% eh? That'll make flagrunning more interesting for sure. That'll remove about 3x as much armor as the old expose against my flagrunning kit

Yes, you can Sunder and it knocks off EA even for a single stack. Sorry I did not phrase this well. This of course adds flexibility and the ability to switch back and forth from the two.

9k armor on nefarian? Extremely rough calculations (using old parses because it wasn't something specifically looked for, etc), it looks like our last nefarian's mitigation was around 20-25%. We do not use cor on him, but we use sunder and we may or may not use faerie. Let's assume we do use faerie (because it'll make his original ac higher).

Sunder removes 2250armor, faerie another 505. 25% mitigation gives him oh around 2k ac (total estimation based on my druid).

That puts him at 2k + 2250 + 505 = 5k max. Extremely rough estimations, but that's nowhere near 9k ac. If he were at 9k ac, he'd be a brick wall even fully sundered (like 50%+ mitigation). Garr at 9k maybe. Nefarian no.

Improved Expose Armor works better the lower base AC the mob has. The percentage gain from using IAE goes down the higher initial base AC of the mob. I posed a picture of a spreadsheet in the Sustained DPS thread.

Your chart doesn't agree with my chart in several different places.

1) The break even point has to be around 4.3k for IAE. Your chart suggests that IAE > sunder at 3.7k armor. This can't be true, since 52% of 3.7k armor is less than the 2250 that sunder provides.

2) Your subtraction of %'s to find a differntial really doesn't make any sense. For a comparision like this, we want to compare how much dmg we gain from switching from sunder -> IAE.

When doing comparisons like this, then IAE absolutely gets better the higher the base ac of the mob is. (Which intuitively makes sense, the higher it's armor, the more -armor iae does, the better iae is vs. sunder). Using these calculations, a mob with 6k armor would take 12% more dmg via iae than sunder. A mob with 5k armor would take 5% more dmg using IAE vs. sunder.

All the other things are on there. Curse of Recklessness, Faerie Fire and (5xSunder or IEA), not just Sunder or IEA. Below 3.7k AC mobs will take full damage because the armor reduction is higher than the mobs AC.

I divided percentages then subtracted 100% to give a percentage increase provided by IEA over 5xSunder, not subtracted. I might have made a mistake on how to do it as I can only deal with percentage values.

EDIT: er wait, what? 52%? Does (or did) IEA change in the patch? I thought it was just a straight -2465 armor compared to 5xSunder -2250 armor.

Heh, yeah, that's why it's so hideously different now. It's a straight up -52% to thier armor. I don't know how FF/ect interacts with it (eg, it's more -ac if you get the reduction then FF, considerably). It's 40% of thier armor removed for EA, and 52% for IAE.

So the question is...how valuable is it losing that much DPS from the rogue, and the aggro from sunder, to punch through armor so absurdly well? What is the armor like on bosses, ect...

Wanna rework the spreadsheet to show the new 1.12 numbers? Could be pretty interesting.

That's interesting. Would be nice to know the order of armor reductions, someone wish to test the group duel thing perhaps? :P

I got curious myself and made a spreadsheet with the new Expose Armor.

Spreadsheet Download: http://www.reasonkt.com/wsuploads/1/...rReduction.xls

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A few things to note:

* Like you guys said above, there are two ways 5 point Expose Armor can work with other armor reducing debuffs (Faerie Fire and CoR). It can either be calculated before FF/CoR or calculated after FF/CoR. Method A in the spreadsheet assumes it's applied before, Method B assumes it's applied after. Method A is nicer for us than Method B obviously.

* The spreadsheet assumes either CoR+FF, or neither. If you want to use just FF, set CoR's armor reduction to 0 in the Config tab.

* Similarly the spreadsheet assumes Improved EA (armor reduced to 48%). If you wish to use talentless Expose Armor (armor reduced to 60%), alter the respective field in the config tab.

* Sadly this has little practical use until we know 1) how much dps a rogue sacrifices to keep 5pIEA up, 2) how much armor a mob actually has, and 3) which method WoW uses to stack IEA and CoR/FF. If we figure these out, however, we can easily determine if 5pIEA is an overall increase in raid DPS over the traditional 5 stack sunder.

---

Let me know if something is wrong with the math here. It's 5:50 AM and I could've potentially made very stupid mistakes. :(

Edit: Example of stupid mistakes, I labeled it as IAE instead of IEA everywhere on the spreadsheet out of habit from my mage days. Fixed that.

I would speculate that it's percentile reduction after flat reduction (so method B on the spreadsheet). A guildmate pointed out to me that other mechanics in the game operate this way, such as Stoneskin Totem, 3 piece Netherwind, Curse of Weakness..

Anyway, if someone can manage a group duel on test to verify that's how it works it'd be really nice to have experimental evidence.

Rogue guildie going through BWL atm, running http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...mor-redox.html

I am in no way speaking to if that mod is any good (tyring to test this now), but values it's returning:

43.71% on Razorgore.
???? on Vael
38.81 on Brood
36.91 on Firemaw

I'll edit in more. From dueling wth players it is reporting a few % lower than thier actual DR, but within a couple of % at worst.

Edit:
Rogue guildie forgot to, you know, check it. As for it reporting low....yeah, so Windfury is not an enchant to use with this mod.

Well, there are two possibilities here. You could use a SF-dagger specced rogue to keep IEA up, or you could go with a hemo setup. Since SF is effectively uncontrolled in terms of CP generation, sometimes they'll succeed in refreshing, sometimes they'll fail.

Instead, looking at it for a hemo rogue (with 3/3 Ruth, 1/1 Relentless, 3/3 Imp SnD):

4 SnD, 5 Expose. Requires 4.4*35 + 3.4*35 = 273 energy every 30 seconds, so it's sustainable long term. You lose SnD for 4 seconds out of every 30.

Compare it to the other simple hemo cycle (there's a more complex one, but my notes are at work): 5 SnD, 4 Evisc.

Essentially, you're trading ~1k damage every 30 seconds, and 30% of a hemo rogue's white damage for 4 seconds out of every 30, for the armor reduction.

I can more or less confirm that AR reports those numbers... I tested the addon a while ago, it was a pita to fix because it doesn't work for hunters at all.

I got the same similar numbers that you.. I discarded them as totally nonsensical -- I assumed it was my pet that was blowing it up (it doesn't deal with pets correctly either, errors a lot).

However if you take the numbers that it gave (38.8% mitigation) when I was getting non-crit autoshot average of 470, that implies that my paperdoll should be showing something like avg dmg 768. And that's simply not possible no matter what weapon or gear I had at the time.

I'm looking at the lua now, and I can't immediately see where the bug lies though.

Yep I'm looking at the lua right now and you're right. Also block. That explains why my pet data was so off (pets gets glancing, ranged doesn't).

Well, you could also have a pair of combat sword rogues trying to alternate points in the cycle where they expose (one does a standard 3/5/5 startup, the other does a 5/5/3 startup, should give the ~15 seconds of differential you're looking for) but then you're relying on two cycles not changing. Safer to have one rogue manage it, especially since standard combat sword builds won't take in

As to DPS loss - figure 100 weapon DPS and 1600/14*1.5 = 171 AP DPS, then modify for 30% crit and 8% miss, gets 324 white DPS (ignoring glancing). 30% is 97 DPS, and missing 4s out of every 30 implies:

271*1.3*.92*.3*(1 - 26/30) = 12.96 DPS

~13 DPS lost in addition from the loss of SnD.

So, grand total you're looking at ~50ish DPS lost, pre-mitigation, from one rogue, in order to provide more armor reduction. It's probably a pretty solid tradeoff (depending on what the actual gain for IEA vs. 5xSA is) - if the extra armor reduction gains you more than 3 DPS per physical DPSer, it should be a net win.

Magic number for Expose > Sunder depends on the stacking order of Expose with CoR/FF.

Okay, I'm a total nublet with lua (like, just learned today) but I think I've modified Target Armor so it ignores blocks and glancing blows. I'll get a rogue to run it on HuHu tomorrow night and see what he comes up with, then I'll try the twin emps (we're still working on them).

If I ever, ever, ever listen to my guildmates again while in OCD mode someone shoot me.

In any case, the mod now dynamicly adapts to Sunder/FF to provide a more accurate estimate at all times (saving the lag from UnitDebuff). Also, lua syntax can die in a fire.

So anyway, send me a PM with AIM info or email addy and I'll fire you off my now heavily modified version of this mod, which 'should' handle glancing, blocks, sunder, FF and CoR. It does not handle EA, and if you complain about that I will choke you.

98% of the code is the original person's, this was just a bit of a trial by fire for me being so overall ignorant in lua.

Edit-
Or not. I'm completely missing some basic mechanic. what I'm writing simply doesn't 'work' as intended, and my syntax is off. Anyone who wants to help me, message me and I'll pester you for a bit. Otherwise I'll have this up and running in the next couple days.

Good to know about that mod, I will play with it. Figuring out armor values is going to be my new project I think. As I said in the mod thread, but will repeat here, my general plan is:

1) Check that my formula's are correct.
2) Collect some data using Hamstring/Kick/Gouge
3) Prototype and test in a spreadsheet
4) Develop web app with monster database of armor values, allowing for community submissions.
5) In game mod that shows those values.

I know squat about writing mods, so that's lowest on the totem pole.

Step 1 - Checking my formula's
From wowwiki, the Damage Reduction formula is:

Reduction = (Armor / (Armor + 400 + 85 * Level ) * 100
There seemed to be an error simplification for a level 60 player/mob. The actual simplfied formula should be:

R = 100A / ( A + 5500)
Since our expermentation will start with the known value of Reduction (R), we want to simpilify the equation to solve for A. Since my algebra teacher isn't here, I won't show my work, but the end formula should be:

A = -5500R / (R - 100)

Double Checking the Math
Assume Armor = 6000 initially...

100 * 6000 / (6000 + 5500) = 52.17391 Reduction

-5500 * 52.17391 / (52.17391 - 100) = 6000 Armor

Kick Formula
Kick does a fixed 80 damage, unmodified by attack power. Kicking a mob a few times should give you an average damage that you should be able to plug into a formula and get armor. A few kicks are necessary due to fractional round errors. For example, I tried this on some scarlet warders and got 53, 54, 53, etc. So if I average it out, its probably 53.5 damage. Here is the formula for figuring out how much damage reduction you get from a kick.

Kick Reduction = (80 - Actual Kick Damage) * 100 / 80

Simplifies to:

Reduction = 100 - 1.25D

So unless somebody sees an error here, I should be good to go for my data collection, Step 2.

Keep in mind that the formula will need to be Reduction = [(Armor - Reductions) / [(Armor - Reductions) + 400 + 85 * Level ] for a raid. Realistically there will be at least sunders up on most raid mobs which is really what we care about. Someone had done some testing with kick in BWL a few months ago and came back with about 4k armor for most of the bosses in there.

Also, if you have a larger damage amount it will reduce the possibility of errors due to rounding. For that reason you may want to stick to kick; or better yet, use a low level weapon with no damage variability. You could probably get bigger numbers by backstabbing with a level 1 dagger (the weapon would have a low variable damage component but a higher fixed damage component from AP and the base backstab bonus), which could get you more precision.

Realistically the best way to test if EA is before or after other reductions is probably to go into an arena with a warlock, a priest and a warrior. Party with the warlock, put CoR on the warrior + priest party and then do a 5 point EA.