Meh. OK, putting in feedback on the EU PTR forum suggesting that EA should count as a 5-stacked Sunder for the purposes of calculating Devastate damage+threat. As far as I can see, that would allow rogues to put up EA once the initial "buildup" was done, without any negative impact on tank threat, and without allowing SA and EA to stack (which would be OP).

I actually toyed with this idea while doing my testing but as another has mentioned once you remove Sunders the Devastate is reduced to doing 50% Weapon Damage - losing 175 damage per swing. So on top of the drop to the innate threat values (which now scale based on Sunders) you lose 175 damage and the associated threat (actually comes out as a 175 TPS loss)

Any marginal gains to DPS for the raid would be probably be lost hitting the now lowered threat cap.

I have to agree that 175 sounds very low.
Looking at some WWS combat logs I can see that our prot warriors seem to do between 260-300 on average with devastate when tanking.

The 175 I was quoting was the lost + damage from Sunders (5 x 35) if you replaced those Sunders with Expose Armour.

I was using 175 because that's about half damage of a normalized T5 weapon hit; I was overlooking the innate damage that Dev was doing though, which is why my results weren't accurate and have been removed from the previous post. 175+175 will end up being around the stated values after AC. Adding in the innate damage that Devastate does shows a 50-100 threat per attack improvement on a high AC boss over Sunder depending on your level of gear -- there's no question it's quite good.

And you know this how? I would have figured the point would have been to make devastate actually worth being a 41 pt talent.

I don't see how it frees up a key binding, when I can just make a macro that does Devastate by default, or Sunders when I combine it with <ctrl>.

With these changes, Devastate is certainly worth being a 41 point talent. It is now a great deal better than Sunder Armor.
X and ctrl + X are also two different keybinds. I'm happy that I don't have to use the shift key (or whatever else) anymore to switch between the two. It was kind of silly to begin with.

Awesome new data! I'm very happy. I was worried they had made tanking a completely mindless activity.

Plus, we all get +1 button slot.

I think the changes are all quite good. Adding sunder threat only to the first 5 hits makes perfect sense, for a number of reasons:

First, it makes devastate viable as a complete replacement for sunder -- there will never be a reason to sunder instead of devastate. If the sunder threat wasn't added to the early sunders, then it would still make sense tun sunder five times then devastate.

The additional snap aggro from getting sunders up is great as well... it will likely become much easier to get sunder stacks up on trash in time for it to count, without throwing your threat generation out the window... it may be safer to open with devastates, rather than really needing to start with a shield slam and revenge; possibly giving a marginal boost to melee dps on quickly-killed mobs.

Maintaining the extra 301 threat for all devastates would indeed be overpowered. Doing close to 1161 threat on a 300 damage devastate (for 9 rage!) would be quite broken. Counting crits and a moderate dose of +hit and expertise, devastate spam would likely generate 1100-1200 TPS in tier 5-ish gear, and that is on top of threat from white damage/heroic strikes.

Finally, the 30 second duration of sunder or expose armor, added to the strong viability of devastate past 5 sunders, should eliminate any goofy tricks for applying 5 devastates with added sunder threat, and then getting the buff off with EA or letting it expire. I would think that the extra ~2250 threat from those first 5 will be far overshadowed by the loss of not using devastate for 30 seconds, or using crappy unstacked devastate for 30 seconds after a rogue uses expose armor to wipe the sunder buff.

Assuming you were a undergeared tank and Sunder made more threat than Devestate, you could always use Sunder after 5 Devestates.

Totally agree. Before, I used devastate only because the theorycraft I've read said it was slightly better than sunder in the long run, and used it instead of disregarding the small extra TPS because it was on the raid's best interest for me to build as much threat as possible. The truth is that using sunder and switching to devastate was a pain, specially if you lost the sunders (happened a couple times for me by using shield slam/revenge only while focusing on stance dancing for a fear that came late, for example in Nightbane).

The merging of Devastate and Sunders, so Devastate would perform the Sunders and leave it at that, would've been good, but just in order to make things more comfortable for us. It would still be a lame talent compared to other 41 talents, which needed fixing far beyond the “oh it’s a pain to put Sunders and switch to Devastate”. Now the threat it builds is more with each Sunder, which is what’s supposed to be doing in the first place, you only have to push one key, giving Devastate the position of an upgrade to Sunder that it was always meant to be (at least its how I see it), and also get a nice threat boost while building up the Sunders, which I believe it’s a nice little gift to make up for the time we’ve had to endure with an ability that could easily be in the top three of the worst 41 talents in the game.

Even if not getting the extra threat of Sunder past the 5th one, as it was originally thought, it’s still a pretty decent buff for sure. Devastate escalates in threat with sunders, initial boost with Sunder threat, and also Devastate gaining the benefit from Improved Sunder Armor. This is a very happy Tank, I can tell you guys that much. ^_^

Sure does, it still refreshes it. The fact that it actually combines SA into Devastate the first 5 times seems to only be an easy way to adjust the threat value.