It’s been proven time and time again that for every PvE rogue spec (Combat and Mutilate), the rogue could get better personal DPS by using some other glyph but the Glyph of Tricks of the Trade actually results in a much higher raid DPS. A rogue that is willing to take a personal hit on the meters while at the same time pushing somebody else ahead by another couple percent or more is more likely to be the same rogue who spends energy on interrupts, defensive cooldowns and debuffing.

And if you do ever run into a rogue who doesn’t have Tricks of the Trade glyphed? Shun the nonbeliever! Shuuuunnnnnnnn!!!

Patch 3.3.3 is now on the PTR and with it come some changes to rogues. These changes are very likely to be the last we’ll see before Cataclysm. Blizzard says that they’re never truly satisfied with anything but the fact remains that rogues are in a pretty good place right now. Since the last round of nerfs, the caterwauling about our damage being OP has subsided to it’s usual low rumble and while there are a few fights that penalize us more than other classes (*cough* Sindragosa *cough*), it’s not anything we can’t learn to just deal with.

The changes are pretty interesting, let’s take a look.

• Rupture: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes.

This is the only real change for raiding rogues; it’s the 4-piece tier 8 bonus now made baseline. (For those wondering, the 4 piece tier 8 bonus is being changed to give +20% damage to Rupture.) Feral druids have had this for some time and rogues were jealous. During T8 content rogues ran with as high of a Rupture uptime as possible but as gear levels increased we all saw the writing on the wall. Once we were out of T8 content our other abilities which scaled better than a crit-less Rupture would force Rupture out of our rotation. Anyone who was reading my ranting in the LoD forums will remember me talking about how I’d be dropping Rupture from my talents/glyphs/rotation as soon as we were out of Ulduar. And I did.

Now that a crit-ing Rupture could become baseline we have to look at it again. If you’ve not been following the discussion on the web, I’ll sum it up for you.

1. Assassination builds have become far too dependent on the Envenom buff for DPS to lose any of it’s uptime to Rupture. Blizzard would have to buff the hell out of Rupture’s scaling and likewise nerf Envenom for Assassination to take the talents and use it.
2. Combat builds aren’t as cut and dry. Keeping the same strategy of gearing and gem’ing for Armor Penetration but changing talents and glyphs to support Rupture, Combat builds can get a 3% or possibly greater buff on fights where you can use Rupture, i.e. static fights with long lived mobs. On fights that aren’t as static and you can’t use the Rupture talents and glyphs it’s only about a 1% loss. Basically, giving up a small about of burst damage for some sustained damage. Is it worth it? I don’t know, but since the gearing is almost identical and each character can run two specs and glyph sets… well, you do the math.

The rest of the changes have to do with the perennially neglected Subtlety tree. Even GC himself says that no tree in all of WoW has it as bad off as Subtlety. It’s been a running joke for years and that’s sad. Subtlety is a lot of fun to play. In fact if you look at Subtlety, you can get a feel for how talent trees in Cataclysm will look. There are lots of talents in there that don’t just bump your damage by X%. A lot of the talents in Subtlety are just fun and unique.

And there-in lies the problem. The Subtlety tree is too much fun. There, I said it. If Blizzard buffed Subtlety to be even close to raid viable, every rogue without exception would flock to it, no question in my mind about that. And with all that said, they’re buffing Subtlety… slightly.

• Slaughter from the Shadows now adds 1/2/3/4/5% damage to all attacks and reduces the energy cost of Backstab and Ambush by 4/8/12/16/20, up from 3/6/9/12/15.
• Filthy Tricks now reduces the cooldown by 5/10 sec and energy cost by 5/10 of your Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 3 min.
• Waylay now affects your Ambush and Backstab hits (Old – Only Ambush critical hits). Movement speed bonus reduced from 70% to 50%.
• Hemorrhage now deals 160% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.
• Ghostly Strike now deals 180% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.

First off, the Hemorrhage and Ghostly Strike changes are long overdue. Subtlety has always had an identity crisis about what kind of weapon tree it is and this is just to make it clear. Subtlety is a dagger tree. There’s also a straight up damage increase as well as some energy cost and cooldown reduction in there.

Honestly, this looks like Blizzard’s attempt to give rogues a PvP tree again. Blizzard might love hybrid classes but they hate hybrid specs; Blizzard wants everyone to go 51 points into a tree in both PvE and PvP. Contrary to this, rogues have been running a Mutilate/Prep build for PvP since the dawn of time. Everything in rogue PvP is balanced around it and Blizzard can’t get us away from it.

Is Subtlety PvP viable with these changes? Probably. Subtlety has been on the fringe of breaking into PvP for some time and this looks like it might push it into the mainstream. I highly doubt it will de-throne Mut/Prep but stranger things have happened.

Is Subtlety PvE viable with these changes? Ask again later. Right now the general consensus is “no” but things on the PTR change all the time and there are some hidden benefits to Subtlety. First off, it has the ability to change targets as well as Combat and it’s mobility is unrivaled by any class/spec in the game. Talented with the new Filthy Tricks, Shadowstep becomes a 20 second teleport that costs no energy and give a 20% damage boost to your next attack. Right now all eyes are on 10/10/51 to be the best shot at raid viable Subtlety but for all that mobility and fun the damage is still sub-par and the rotation would make a feral druid want to tear their hair out.

Honestly though? I’d love to see Subtlety make it into raiding. That would be awesome. I’ll be on the PTR as much as I can this weekend to try it out and will report back what I find.

I’m not going to debate which fight is better for melee and which is better for casters, I want to talk about what melee (and specifically rogues) can do to make the most out of a fight with heavy movement and/or target swapping.

Move Faster

First things first, either take the talents to increase your run-speed or get a boot enchant to give the same effect. Yes, something like Icewalker is modeled as a larger DPS increase and on a fight like Deathbringer Saurfang (and it is), but the reality of the situation is that there are very few fights like that. If you’re a Mutilate rogue, pick up Fleet Footed (you’ve dropped Blood Spatter anyway), retnoobs should get Pursuit of Justice, engineers should already have Nitro Boots and if your class/spec can’t pick up run-speed, there are several enchants. Pick the one that’s best for you, get it and don’t look back.

In todays Warcraft raiding environment, movement is key and being able to move to the right place a the right time is vital. It allows you to stay in just a bit longer before the boom and get back just a bit sooner after the boom. Even ranged classes are doing this. If you head over to EJ right now and ask, “What’s the best boot enchant for a Shadow Priest?” you’ll be given an infraction for not reading the guide which says to use Tuskarr’s Vitality.

I really cannot stress enough just how important this is for melee to have this. You need to move faster. Do not, however, use a meta gem with run-speed; I have never found a situation where this is better than a boot enchant.

Hit Things Sooner

There are a couple things here you can do to help you. First off, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen a rogue swap targets like they’re supposed to but just stand there like an idiot for 2 seconds looking at the new target before attacking, I’d be a very rich man. I can tell you what’s happening. That player is at his keyboard, furiously pounding on Sinister Strike or Mutilate… with no energy. As much as you mash that keybind, you won’t start attacking until you’ve reached 40 or 55 energy. The key here is the key with all classes: make a macro and bind it to your combo builder or your first attack. Here’s what yours should look like as a Mutilate rogue:

#showtooltip Mutilate
/startattack
/cast Mutilate

This leads right into my next tip.

Know Your Targets Ahead of Time

Let me tell you a little story. Back in TBC, just before I joined LoD I was in another guild which was doing quite well but by no means competing for top honors and kills on my server. Sporting my T5 and a good mix of SSC gear (Talon/PvP, lol) I got invited to run Zul’Aman with some of my friends and their friends from the top guild. It was a bear run and I was really excited to be going. It was hardly my first bear run but at the time it was pretty rare for me to run with a crew of that caliber of both skill and gear. And also to my delight I would be running side-by-side with arguably the top rogue on the server. In the end, one of my shaman friends won the bear that night but I walked away from the whole run scratching my head in disbelief.

In my SSC gear I had kept up with a T6 rogue with a Glaive in nearly every fight and in at least one fight I had even edged him out. I was a bit heartbroken to say the least. At the time I really didn’t understand why or how that could happen. Was my gear better? Certainly not. Was the other rogue not really trying? Well, maybe, but it was a timed bear run so I’d like to think he had tried to do his best. We were both fully buffed (I checked). For the longest time it was an enigma that I just couldn’t get out of my head.

That is until a while back when I updated my macros for an upcoming fight in Ulduar. Looking at those macros I got an idea just what had happened and went back at the logs from the Z’A run to see (yes, I have a log of every raid I’ve ever been in since sometime in 2006). As it turns out, I was just playing a different game. While he was likely using tab or some other method for finding his new targets when they came up, I had planned ahead and put those targets into my attack macro above and was getting to the targets a lot faster than he was. In a fight like Halazzi that can make all the difference. When the totem comes up you need to get right on it and then back on him as fast as possible. If you’re slow in switching targets or smack the Lynx a few times first you can end up with a difference in damage done to your primary targets. Over the course of a run something as small as being prepared like that can really add up.

So how do you do that? It’s actually very simple. Just add a few more lines to the macro like I’ve done below and put the highest priority targets at the bottom. When you get the warning that one of those targets is up, hit the alt key and your attack key (I have it set up so I can just tilt my hand slightly to do this).

#showtooltip Sinister Strike
/startattack
/stopmacro [nomodifier:alt]
/target Halazzi
/target Corrupted Lightning Totem

On a fight like Jaraxxus hard mode when the portals come up this isn’t a huge time-saver, after all there’s only one other target. But when you get to fights like Lady Deathwhisper where you have multiple targets all standing near each other it can make all the difference in the world. While they’re not all out yet, I guarantee that more fights in Icecrown will have high priority targets that need to be hit quickly.

Use All Your Abilities

You know all those PvP skills you have? Yeah, they work in PvE too. It really isn’t all about attacking. For instance, just like in PvP if you disarm a mob, nine times out of ten he can’t whirlwind or cleave anymore and that means you can stay in. Rogues, Feint is your best friend in ICC. Pallies, use your bubble, 50% damage is a hell of a lot better than the 0% you get when you move away. Hand of Freedom through the slows, Cloak of Shadows for debuffs that force you to move away (although you should be aware that this isn’t always the best idea). Charge, Intervene, and Ghost Wolf (especially the sexy instant kind) should be at the ready when you need to move.

The list of abilities players should be using but aren’t is just staggering. Remember, just because an ability doesn’t directly increase your DPS directly doesn’t mean it can’t be used to.

Make Sure You’re Doing the Right Job

Raid leaders aren’t perfect. They lead the raid, plan strategies, make sure all the important bases are covered, do their best to keep everyone motivated and a huge list of other tasks. I did it for a short while and at some points it was almost soul-crushing. One thing that isn’t on their list is the optimization of the way you play. If your raid leader assigns the you (a rogue) to one target and a kitty to another but you and the kitty think you could do more DPS if you swapped targets, tell him. Every class has different skills and if each of you has skills that favor the others target, then it would behoove you to bring it up. I guarantee that if you aren’t a dick about it he’ll gladly swap your jobs.

Where we came from:

First off, when WotLK was in development, rogues were buggy as hell. We finally had what looked like two viable raiding specs but there are always problems. Bugs that gave extra poison procs, talents that gave 15% crit instead of 3% (stacking 5/5 Deadly Poison for a 3% raid buff should give me 15% crit, right?), etc and a few others meant we were blowing everyone away on the 3.0 PTR. Of course these things were fixed when 3.0 went live but the problem was that several abilities were balanced on those bugged numbers. Then 3.1 and 3.2 brought PvP changes that directly affected PvE; most nerfs were compensated for by buffs but it really wasn’t as equitable as we’d like. The long and the short is that we became even more dependent on auto-attacks for damage and spending time-on-target which, as a melee class, isn’t often realistic. Many other melee classes have specials that hit hard enough that after coming back to a target they can frontload some damage to make up for at least a little time lost. Because most abilities have a fairly high energy cost we only get one or two attacks and often we have to make sure that those lead back into our “rotation.”

By mid-Ulduar and through ToC, Combat was taking a front seat in the rogue world. The two raid buffs (4% increased physical damage and an MS affect) were vital to progression and the fights were set up in such a way that short periods of DPS burst were timed very well with Combats cooldowns. Mutilate was still competitive in single target fights but there weren’t any of those to speak of in 3.1 and 3.2. Just like in TBC, Combat was King.

Where we are now:

Patch 3.3 has really shaped up to be a much better patch for rogues though. We got some much needed buffs, most of which are for Mutilate but they do bleed over into Combat as well. The first being my long-standing problem with Murder. I mentioned it in my own Q&A post back in June ’09 and Blizzard finally responded in 3.3 with, “Murder: This talent now provides a flat damage increase of 2/4% against all targets, instead of only targets which do not appear in Icecrown.” Blizzard knew the score and they knew it wasn’t fair.

The other major buff was to Deadly Poison. Deadly Poison was in danger in going the way of the dodo. Actually, that’s not quite true. Because Deadly Poison was the only pure DoT, rogues were using addons and macros to weapon swap. Invoking a forced weapon swap that denied a dual wield class the use of both weapons for one out of every six seconds was higher DPS than simply using the poison Blizzard gave us. I think Madsushi said it best with:

If you Lacerate when you already have a 5 stack on your target, they take some amount of damage instantly, in addition to refreshing the effect. If you proc Deadly Poison when you’re already at 5 stacks? Nothing but a stack refresh and a nice pat on the back for being a good rogue and remembering to use the right poisons.

Blizzard has now added a secondary effect to Deadly Poison and has also blocked/disabled the addon that allowed rogues to weapon swap. In the end, this was a big buff to Mutilate and a minor buff to Combat (which changed it’s default build to take full advantage of this buff). The buff to Mutilate through this change was actually strong enough that Blizzard nerfed Hunger For Blood by 5%. When a buff is big enough to warrant a straight-up 5% nerf on all damage in the next build, you know it was a big buff.

Mutilate vs. Combat

The question then becomes, which is better, Mutilate or Combat? The answer, to no ones surprise, is one of much heated debate.

In theory, Mutilate is estimated to be somewhere on the order of 1500-1800 DPS ahead of Combat in BiS gear. That means on stationary, single target fights, Mutilate will dominate. And I believe it! My first week in Icecrown (which wasn’t actually week 1) during the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter I played Mutilate and messed up my positioning horribly (during Heroism no-less). My DPS dropped by half for at least 30 seconds and I still came out on top and with as high or higher DPS than any class we’ve seen on non-gimmick fights. If I had had more than a single try at that fight, there’s no reason I couldn’t have broken 11K DPS in only ToC gear. No gimmicks, no weird buffs, just full-on rogue. And because there are more than five bosses in Icecrown, this is a real boon. Deathwhisper and her shield, Saurfang, and more to come will play very well to Mutilate and you can expect to see Mutilate rogues crushing many other DPS classes in single target fights.

So does that mean that Combat has been de-throned? Not at all! Combat is all about burst, cooldowns and smacking things hard and fast. Mutilates biggest weakness is target swapping. Ask a Mutilate rogue to work on adds and he’s going to fall flat when compared to any other DPS. It takes Mutilate a good 10 seconds to ramp up their DPS and in 10mans will often have to put up their own bleeds which delays things even longer. Combat, however, turns on the heat right away and can swap targets as well as any other melee class. Couple that with some very great cooldowns like Adrenaline Rush, Blade Flurry, and Killing Spree and you have some really good burst capabilities that Mutilate will never be able to match. ICC fights like Marrowgar, Deathwhisper’s adds and the Gunship Battle play right into Combats burst and cooldowns. Because of cooldowns and Combat Potency, Combat also has a much stronger potential for Fan of Knives (the rogue AoE).

This also brings up another big difference, both Mutilate and Combat are blended when it come to damage, some of it is physical and some of it magical (poisons/nature) but the proportions of each in both specs is quite different. Mutilate is now somewhere around 55% magical damage with the remainder being physical while Combat is only about 27% magical with the vast majority being physical damage.

Pick One Already!

I wish it were that simple. The problem comes in the fact that while both specs will use a lot of the same pieces of gear in ICC, their gemming strategies are quite different. You can try to blend your gemming for both but the end result is that you’re not going to excel in either. Couple that with the fact that rogues are a dual wield class which opens up another problem when it comes to choosing a spec and gearing. A lot of guilds run on DKP and just assign a single value to weapons and won’t let rogues get “offspec discounts” because hey, offspec’ing sounds like cheating when you have three DPS talent trees. So if weapons cost 100 DKP, the paladin gets his 2hander for 100 and can offspec that tank weapon and shield for nothing while the rogue pays 200 for his daggers and another 200 for his swords (nevermind the fact that we need two matching drops and not just one).

So, because of potential gem issues and gear issues (don’t forget that feral druids want combat’s gear!), we have to pick one. There are two schools of thought on how to pick. You can either pick the spec that is favored by the most fights in the instance or you can pick the one based on the hardest fights in the instance. But with only four fights available right now and no hard modes we have no idea what the ideal spec for either of those is.

Another idea is to say that raid buffs are going to play heavily into the answer and if we look at other classes we might be able to make some inferences. Let’s have a quick look:

Mutilate brings one raid buff in the form of 3% additional crit to your target. This buff is also most notably brought by retribution paladins (and both holy and prot can bring it as well if needed). With ret being so prevalent it’s highly unlikely that even a 10man raid won’t have a ret paladin (or an elemental shaman). In fact, earlier in WotLK it was common for Mutilate rogues to not even take the talent as it was so common and they could get better DPS elsewhere.

Combat brings two buffs in the form of a 4% increased physical damage (the default MS effect is now defunct in 3.3). The only other source for this buff is the now dwindling number of arms warriors. Arms was very powerful in early WotLK but as gear levels have increased, Fury has climbed up top in most warriors minds. That makes Combat very desirable for both it’s burst and it’s debuffs.

Honestly though, while raid buffs are important, having an off-spec with non-optimal gems and so-so weapons is usually perfectly acceptable.

Enough chatter, pick one!

So what do I say and what am I doing? Well, I’m playing Mutilate in 3.3. I’ve played Combat all through Ulduar and ToC and now I want back into Mutilate. For all the rest of you out there, pick the one you want to play. I don’t know for sure but it appears there are fights that cater to both in ICC and if a certain raid buff is really that vital to downing the boss then it should be acceptable to off-spec the other with less-than-optimal gear and gems.

In the end it isn’t a player who conquers the encounter with his leet deeps (or whatever the kids call it these days), superior burst, fantastic tanking or clutch healing. All these things are great but you can have these things and still fall flat when it comes to encounters in Warcraft. When played well, both specs are perfectly capable of putting out the necessary DPS to complete the encounters and when you play the spec you enjoy, I found it tends to do better. =D

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, they could remove the one-second global cooldown from rogues tomorrow and our PvE DPS would not change much at all, there might be some burst problems in PvP but only slightly more than what is capable now. I would imagine that the only reason rogues actually have a GCD is because the outright removal of it would cause unimaginable QQ from classes who have no idea what’s going on.

Back to the subject at hand. Many classes use some sort of simulation to determine the ins and outs of their class. One of the most popular is RAWR which is a very good simulation tool that was originally started for Druids and later become one of the main standards for many other classes. More recently SimulationCraft has also become one of the standards for determining gear and spec choices for a multitude of classes. Both of these tools now support rogues but this is actually a very recent development when compared to what has been the longest running and most reliable form of theorycrafting available to the rogue community: spreadsheets.

Even though rogues have talents that may alter our energy regeneration (Focused Attacks and Combat Potency), our energy regeneration is basically constant. Before a fight begins we can figure out exactly how many of each move we can do in any give time period. (It’s actually a bit more complex than that but thinking of it that way is close enough.) All you need to do then is add in the gear, the buffs and debuffs that modify that gears damage, figure out what combination of those moves puts our the most damage for that gear and voilà! You know know exactly what your max DPS for that setup is and can determine what gear and/or spec changes will improve that DPS.

This sort of theorycrafting lends itself very well to spreadsheets and there have been many spreadsheet authors who have done amazing things. Such rogues as Chalon, pf, Ellos, Dontmindme, Vulajin, Aldriana, and Mavanas have done some amazing things with spreadsheets and contributed more to the community than many of us could ever hope to. (Ok, I’ll admit that Mavanas’ sheet is actually a simulation but I’ll talk about it later.)

Most of these sheets were made for personal use by their respective authors and later released to the rogue community. Let’s take a look at some of the current spreadsheets for Wrath of the Lich King.

Aldriana’s Combat Spreadsheet

Aldriana is one of the top theorycrafting rogues in WoW right now. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the rogue community that holds as much clout as he does. When Aldriana talks, rogues listen. At the start of WotLK, Aldriana made two spreadsheets for his own use; one sheet for mutilate and one sheet for combat.

Currently the Combat sheet is in version 1.4 and it is the penultimate of spreadsheets. Only one other sheet has carried more sophistication and that was Vulajin’s sheet from The Burning Crusade which would even go so far as to collect your data from the armory. Aldriana’s sheet stops short of this because he has opted to keep it compatible with OpenOffice.

You can find Aldriana’s Combat sheet here. If you’re gear isn’t in the spreadsheet, don’t ask about putting it in as you’re likely to get a ban. The top 2+ tiers of gear are already in there and there are instructions on how to put your own gear in for those that take the time to look.

Aldriana’s Mutilate Spreadsheet

The first incarnation of the original Mutilate sheet didn’t look like it bore the same sophistication of the Combat sheet. It was a bit harder to use and understand and caused more than just a few headaches on the EJ Rogue Forums.

The truth though is that the math inside the Mutilate sheet is quite a bit more complex than that found in the 1.0-1.2 Combat sheets. Early on, Aldriana decided to devote his time to the Combat sheet mainly due to the changes in WoW 3.1 and 3.2 having greater impact on Combat than on Mutilate. At his point Thaela took over upkeep of the Mutilate sheet and did an excellent job.

Near completion of the Combat sheet though, Aldriana decided to come back to the Mutilate sheet and give it the same treatment. The result should was similarly astounding. You can find it in the same thread as Aldriana’s Combat sheet.

Mavanas’ Simulation Spreadsheet

Yup, it’s actually a simulation and it’s pretty darn complex. First off you can find it here.

The way it works is that you feed in your gear and any raid buffs you do or don’t have, then enter a priority of abilities you’d like to use as well as any buffs/debuffs you need to keep up. Mash the magic button and it runs through the selected number of simulations. After that it’s just a matter of making changes, running it again and comparing the results.

Now, there are some advantages and disadvantages to Mavanas’ sheet. Firstly, it takes a long time to compare gear options but Mavanas saves everyone a lot of time by continually running various comparisons and posting the results to give you good benchmarks and places to start. The big advantage that Mavanas’ sheet gives is that he supports a lot more specs and options than Aldriana. Most notably is his past inclusion of HAT simulation and current support for weapon swapping.

A Word of Warning

All of these spreadsheets are great tools for determining what gear and what spec will give you the best bang for your buck but any good rogue will use their brain as well as these tools.

A favorite thing for new rogues to do with these sheets is to use them to determine “best in slot” gear sets. BiS gear sets have their place but many rogues often make the mistake of thinking that if it isn’t on the BiS list, it’s not worth getting. An experienced rogue knows to take upgrades when they can, even when it isn’t BiS. A better idea is to use the sheet to determine what weapons and gear are upgrades for you personally and use that as an upgrade list.

There’s also the issue that all spreadsheets and simulations assume a “Patchwerk” style fight which is the exception and not the rule. A lot of rogues really struggle with this and have trouble determining how to alter they play style, spec and other things to account for this. That’s a topic for another blog entry though.

That’s 20% armor reduction on the target (the same as 5 sunders) and the duration is based on the number of combo points used. Whether from Expose Armor or Sunder Armor (or even that fruity hunter pet), armor reduction benefits almost everyone – all melee and hunters anyway. Now obviously some classes benefit more than others but having a fully armor debuff’d target is good for the raid. For the classes that it affects, it can be as much as a 15% DPS increase depending on spec and it increases threat generation for the tanks as well.

So where should the armor reduction debuff come from?

Now, if you have a prot warrior, Sunder Armor is free and (more importantly) fast. Like the best defaults for so many buffs and debuffs it is part of their normal tanking rotation because it’s tied to one of their high threat moves. Things like Heart of the Crusader, Misery, etc fall into this same category. They come by default and they have zero opportunity cost to the player. In an ideal world they would all be like this but that is not the case. If you have a prot warrior in your raid group, congratulations, you win some of the time by default.

Ladies of Destiny has been raiding without a prot warrior main tank for a while now but it hasn’t really hindered progression at all. Paladins, Druids and Death Knights are more than capable of tanking anything in the game. But it does mean that the role of “armor debuff-er” isn’t always as clear cut as it used to be. Honestly, I’m not sure this is a bad thing; I’ve learned a lot from it already and hopefully we all will.

The question then becomes, “Who should apply the armor debuff when there’s no prot warrior?” (It should be noted that this applies for those that do have a prot warrior on their current target as well. Just because you have one in the raid doesn’t mean he’s on your target.)

The answer goes back to what I mentioned earlier about opportunity costs. Putting up the armor debuff is going to cost whoever does it some DPS (sometimes more than just a little). Don’t worry, Blizzard isn’t picking on melee. That warlock that puts up Curse of Elements instead of Curse of Agony is losing DPS, the mage that Scorches is losing DPS, and yes, the rogue that uses Expose Armor is losing DPS (sort of).* The end result though is that while your DPS goes down by some percent, 4-5+ other players are having their DPS increased by an equal amount (possibly greater).

So who loses the least amount of DPS when putting up the armor debuff? Well let’s look at our choices:

• Hunter Worm – Okay, seriously, have you ever even seen one of these things in a raid? In the game? … I didn’t think so. I don’t really feel the need to explain why; just realize that this isn’t an option. Moving on.
• DPS Warrior – It costs the warrior quite a bit of DPS and time to put up a 5-stack of Sunder Armor. Unlike a prot warrior they don’t get extra stacks from a glyph or any of the other nice benefits. But once that 5-stack is up, it is fairly trivial for them to maintain it. Spending 15 rage every 30 seconds is a pittance to a well geared DPS warrior. At that point it’s usually more about the lost GCD than the rage cost. =P
• Rogue – Unlike a DPS warrior, there’s no huge upfront cost to a rogue putting up Expose Armor. Since it doesn’t need to stack to reach full benefit it is much more like a constant drain upon both Combo Points and Energy. It does have the advantage though that it’s fast to put up. Any rogue can have Expose Armor up on the target in two GCDs (provided they have the energy). A few seconds is plenty of time on most occasions.

Now through a little critical thinking it becomes obvious that the answer the question, “Warrior or rogue?” is, “Both.” In long fights where the target lives a long time, the warrior will take the big DPS hit upfront but the DPS cost afterward is trivial. The time spent at the beginning of the fight under <20% armor debuff is comparatively short and becomes less important as fight length increases. In a long fight the rogue’s constant DPS drain will never diminish as fight length increases.

In short fights where the target doesn’t live that long, the rogue can get the full armor debuff up very quickly while the warrior may only get to a 5-stack of Sunder Armor after the mob has lost a major portion of it’s health.

Therefore the real answer is that warriors should do it on long-lived targets while rogues do it on short-lived targets. There’s actually been a lot of math on the subject and it comes down to this in most cases:

• If the target is going to live longer than one minute, warriors should sunder Armor.
• If the target is going to live less than one minute, rogues should Expose Armor.

Now, that may be a good rule of thumb but who times mob life? Perhaps some real life examples can help us out:

Razorscale (tied down) – Expose
Razorscale (free) – Sunder

XT-002 – Sunder
XT-002 Heart – Expose

Freya – Sunder
Conservator – Expose

Leviathan MkII – Sunder
VX-001 – Expose
Ariel Command Unit – Expose
Assault Bot – Expose

General Vezax – Sunder
Animus – this could go either way probably

Yogg-Saron – Sunder
Brain – Expose

Now, most of that should make sense but lets look at some of the less familiar fights coming up in ToC:

Gormok – Sunder (obvious)
Snowbold – Expose (obvious)

Acidmaw/Dreadscale – This one isn’t quite as clear cut. They burrow at regular intervals and it’s possible that Sunder will drop while they’re down there (it may even be cleared to prevent funky death glitches). If the DPS warriors can keep it up through burrows then Sundering is the way to go, but if not they’re going to keep paying that cost to stack over and over again. If that’s the case, Expose is the clear favorite.

Icehowl – Sunder… or is it? This is a case where, like the worms, sunder may fall off after a whirl/knockback/charge. Since he takes extra damage after knocking himself out it is supremely vital that he be fully debuff’d during that time. If Sunder has fallen off, it is imperative that he be debuff’d as quickly as possible. If Sunder isn’t at full strength when he takes extra damage, put up Expose. Even if you see the DPS warriors stacking it, overwrite it. They’ll miss a GCD from that first “more powerful spell” error and they may even hate you for it but in the end everyone will be better off.

In any case, getting a full armor debuff on the target quickly is more important than anything, don’t be lazy about it. If it’s your job as a rogue it should take priority over Slice and Dice; if it’s your job as a warrior it should take priority over your moves as well. Debuffing is never glamorous and it rarely gets accolades. What it does get is kills.

So, if you’re a rogue or a warrior, do what I do. Keep track of both Sunder Armor and Expose Armor. And in the event the other isn’t being put up, put yours up even if it isn’t ideal. Any debuff is better than no debuff… always.

* I’m going to use the term “lose DPS” but this isn’t really true. A rogues DPS is actually going to be higher when they use EA on a target than if the target had no armor debuff and the rogue used a normal rotation. Anyone who complains about having to debuff a target is usually just a whiny little baby who doesn’t understand game mechanics. Any debuff is better than no debuff… always.