Is it time to re-evaluate the Major Armor debuff after the changes to glyphs and to EA mechanics?

It's clear that the optimal source is a prot warrior tank, since it's an inherent part of their rotation and thus has no opportunity cost. The prevailing wisdom is that if you have a feral/pally/DK tanking, then the debuff should always be applied by a DPS warrior and never by a rogue, since a warrior sacrifices less personal DPS to do so. Is this still the case?

This is not a question that can be simply addressed by a steady-state analysis. Expose armor has a more-or-less flat cost in combo points / energy per time, while Sunder Armor costs 5 times as much to stack the debuff as it does to simply maintain the stack. This means that the answer to the question is dependent on fight length. For short fights, it is very likely to be better for a rogue to use EA, while for long fights a warrior should Sunder. The key question is the inflection point between EA and SA. At what point is it better to Expose than to Sunder? Is it a 30-second fight, a 1 minute fight, a 90 second fight, or what? As far as I'm aware, the analysis to date has mainly examined the steady state, which of course favours warriors sundering.

Note that it's not strictly fight length that matters, it's time-per-target. If a warrior is sundering, there is also a major re-stacking cost to be paid if melee are forced off target long enough for the stack to drop. There are many fights where you have to switch between targets regularly (e.g. Destructor and his heart, Kologarn and his arms, ground phase and air phase on Razorscale). It may well be better in such fights for rogues to use EA than for warriors to have to re-stack sunders on every target switch.

Well for the examples you gave the big thing to also account for is the rogue that will be theoretically applying EA also has to build CP on the switched target. Where as a warrior can in anticipation of the switch can build up rage and blow 5 gcds on sundering. I have played both classes extensively and its is far easier in my opinion for the dps warrior to apply sunders purely because they do not have to deal with factors as snd dropping.

There are certain situations where I would say it might be more ideal for a rogue to expose and there are situations where it would hurt a rogue moreso then a warrior. For example on Yogg's brain. A dps warrior not only has a faster way to reach the brain(charge/intercept) but also can easily stay topped off on rage due to the incidental damage by the tentacles in the illusion room. This could be done on a fight by fight basis obviously but this is just an example of a small fight duration where it would be better for the warrior to apply in my opinion.

Also another thing to account for is the fact that if you have a "spare" prot warrior as it may be. A lot of times there are situation where a non warrior class is main tanking while there is actually a prot warrior in the raid waiting to pickup adds or whatever maybe be coming. In this situation I don't think there is any time where it would preferred for the rogue to expose rather then the prot warrior to sunder on a switched mob. Example: Prot warrior waiting for adds on XT can easily drop 5 sunders on the heart before picking up the big robots.

I don't think we should deal in time length as we should purely in situations. I am sure there are situations, other then the obvious no warrior in raid, where a rogue is better exposing and these should be the situations where we should do it in. Also while on this topic if any hunters or rogues with hunter alts read this post could someone show the math behind the dps loss of switching of switching the the hunter pet that applies the major armor debuff. I believe it is the worm?

Especially while regularly target switching, a rogue throwing a 1 CP Expose, which has the full effect but just for a shorter duration is probably better.
For longer fights, the question is what alternatives do non-tank warriors have, they can surely use the rage they save, but are there other abilities available in their rotation, considering cooldowns etc.?

In a HaT rotation, weaving in Expose Armor is no problem at all, without sacrificing much personal DPS.
In a Combat rotation, it would have to replace the occasional Envenom/Eviscerate, which still has a very slight RNG factor to it. Not much, but the RNG factor can make occasional drops happen.

I guess I don't understand exactly what you mean when you disagree with discussing the length of anticipated time-on-target, Alexsiss. Is it specifically in the case where a warrior would have a very clear understanding on when a new target that would have to be sundered would become available (such as Decon's heart)? The example of the secondary prot warrior (if there is one) sundering before picking up Pummelers would work on the first heart exposure, but depending on the strat, he may be tanking Pummelers on the next exposure and with the way they cleave, it's impractical for him to have that responsibility again. On a different note on warriors, was it ever conclusively shown that Arms Warriors would also be best served sundering or was the analysis on that assuming Fury only?

We could probably derive assumptions for a balanced raid group and assume dps levels based on % physical contribution to determine the cut-off point of a target's health where actually applying the sunders / expose armor would be a productive use of time and use that as a general rule.

I think maybe this topic is intended to compare Rogue and Warrior debuffs specifically, but I thought maybe Acid Spit might be of note/interest as well.

You would need a beast mastery Hunter I believe (worms are exotic pets), but it could be the best option if available.

You could easily make the converse argument: that a Mutilate rogue can pool energy and have a 3 point EA up in two GCDs, or a 5 point EA up in ~4 GCDs. A HaT rogue might well not have to spend more than a single GCD. S'n'D dropping is not an issue with competent anticipatory play.

What's needed here is some idea of the damage cost of a single Sunder for a fury or arms spec warrior, call it S. A Mutilate rogue can approximate the damage cost of an EA as an equivalently-sized Envenom. A Combat or HaT rogue would approximate it as an equivalently-sized Eviscerate. Then, to translate that into fight duration, we can say that the opportunity cost of sundering is 5S for the first 30 seconds, and S for every subsequent 30 seconds. So a 1 minute fight costs 6S, a 90 second fight costs 7S, and so on.

It won't be exact, but we can at least get a ball-park figure.

My apologies I actually made my post under a terrible assumption(Each cp still affected the armor reduction on expose). Shows me for making posts at 9am in the morning.

Regarding the whole anticipitaed time on target vs situation is more so of situations where building up sunders can rage starve warriors or when rogues also have other responsibilities. Basically what I was saying is the fact that there maybe sometime where even though we are on a solo target a case may occur where rogue expose is better then warrior sundering if the warrior has to worry about something else. Essentially creating a discussion on a per boss basis rather then a general case for all bosses etc.

In addition to what you state here Songster, there are a couple considerations I think you may have missed regarding rogues' start up EA. While in a target switching due to an add situation, there is certainly room for anticipatory play, thus keeping SnD from dropping, how would a rogue start in cold on a mob? Would the raid benefit more from us doing 5EA right off the bat? Should we 2-3pt EA, then 2-3 pt SnD, so as not to tank our own dps at the beginning? Is there a middle ground here?

I imagine there may even be differing breakpoints depending on how much physical dps your raid has. I'm not sure how exactly to work through all those cases, but those are some of the things I think we should take into consideration when comparing the rogue vs warrior case, especially when starting in cold on a boss (which I think may be the case more often than the add-target-swapping situation which was posited earlier).

You pretty much have to make tradeoffs in some respect as to how much downtime you allow to occur, but there's not much debate that Expose uptime is far more important than Slice uptime (even for your own personal DPS).

Looking at a Mutilate cycle, you can perform a Mutilate > Expose right off the bat for 85 energy (with 10-15 refunded on average) and get 12-18 seconds of Expose uptime. You now have 25-30 energy to start with and you get another 160-240 from regen, Focused Attacks, and T8 2pc during the Expose. If your Expose was 2 CP, you have enough energy to Mutilate > Slice > Mutilate > Expose. Assuming you don't do anything else in this timeframe, you'll manage only about one second of Expose downtime after initiating the attack and about 4-7 seconds of Slice downtime. From here you should be able to reach a stable cycle without too much trouble, provided you have Ruthlessness to help you ramp up your Exposes.

Looking at a Combat cycle, you can perform a Sinister Strike > Sinister Strike > Expose right off the bat for 105 energy (with 10-20 refunded on average) and get 12-24 seconds of Expose uptime (with the lower end obviously being more likely). You now have 0 energy to start with and you get another 154-308 energy from regen (with Vitality) and T8 2pc during the Expose. If your Expose was 2 CP, you have enough energy to Sinister Strike > Slice > Sinister Strike > Sinister Strike > Expose. At this point you're counting on luck with Ruthlessness and Glyph of Sinister Strike in order to ramp up your cycle (since your Slice is only going to last 13.5 seconds if you don't get a proc). If your initial Expose was 3 CP, you have enough energy to Sinister Strike > Sinister Strike > Slice > Sinister Strike > Sinister Strike > Expose. This will be much more comfortable. In either case you suffer about 2 seconds of Expose downtime after initiating the attack and about 6 seconds of Slice downtime. Afterwards you'll probably suffer an additional several seconds of Slice downtime, but once your procs kick in you'll eventually reach a stable point.

On the other hand, looking at a Combat cycle with Adrenaline Rush, you can perform Sinister Strike > Sinister Strike > Expose right off the bat and get anywhere from 274-458 energy from regen and T8 2pc during the Expose. This makes it pretty much cake to ramp up your cycle immediately and reduces your Expose downtime to the initial two seconds, and the Slice downtime to the initial ~6 seconds.

At least in terms of ramp up, it's probably the Combat rogue who wins, courtesy of Adrenaline Rush. When Adrenaline Rush is not available, the Mutilate rogue wins. As far as the sustainability portion goes, I'm less certain about that, though my gut suggests that a Combat rogue would lose less by spending his combo points on Expose rather than Eviscerate.

Expose Armor glyph is very good right now. Especially with 1 point EA's. You gain 10 seconds out of this glyph where you gain 4 seconds on glyph of rupture.

Yes, but it's also easier for the rogue to use a GCD, some combo points and 25 energy than for a warrior to use five GCDs and 75 rage. Why are you so sure the break-even point is at 30 seconds? Maybe it's at 60, or 90, or...

I dug out this week's Kologarn parse and found that an average Envenom is worth ~9k damage - 7k directly and a further 2k from the Envenom buff. Set against that, DP will be fractionally higher damage with fewer Envenoms, and an EA costs less energy than an Envenom. That in turn gets you about 25 seconds of the EA buff, assuming 4.5 combo points and refreshing a second or so before it drops.

So, the cost to a Mutilate rogue is something like 10k damage per 30 seconds of debuff time. That's the optimal "chunk" of time to look at since it's the duration of a full length EA or a Sunder. So, what is the cost to a warrior of a single sunder, S? The first 30 seconds of debuff will cost 5S, while the subsequent cost is S per 30 secs.

Breakpoints are approximately as follows:

0 < S < 2000: Warrior should always sunder even on short fights

2000 < S < 3333: Rogue uses EA in any fight shorter than 30 seconds

3333 < S < 4286: Rogue uses EA in any fight shorter than 60 seconds

4286 < S < 5000: Rogue uses EA in any fight shorter than 90 seconds


Edit1: All attempts to improve on this calculation are encouraged - it's very quick and dirty as it stands since I didn't make any effort to check whether my Kologarn parse had normal crit rates for Envenom, correct raid debuffs etc. Better calculation of the cost of an EA would be great, also some actual data on the cost of a sunder.

Edit2: Figures for the other rogue specs would be good too. Also note that this is a plausible upper bound for the cost to a Mutilate spec. There may be more efficient ways of keeping the debuff up.