◊ Fellwraith

You're absolutely right. Unfortunately this is true of just about every single boss. What you can do is look at the parse and start working through what statistically makes sense. If you're finding a result close to 15% gross parry *and* you know that the boss has a turn to cast/hateful/channeling mechanic, that should tell you something - especially if the sampe size is large. As a tank you're probably using almost every single global cooldown to attack with an instant and you're probably using a fast weapon. That should mean that more of your attacks will be outside of the special "boss turns from me" mechanics than most other classes. With a large enough sample size you should start to approach the "true" value for the boss' parry.

I'd echo Quignon's comments regarding improved taunt. There's lots of situations where you can't possibly build enough threat on every aoe'd mob to keep them under control. A good tactic is to throw your rage into two to three of the mobs you're assigned to, build a big threat lead, then taunt + shield slam the third or fourth mob that aoe pulls off of you and focus on it for a while. This way they give you free threat and you can be 100% certain the mobs you focused on earlier don't attack them. Protecting your mages and warlocks makes a very big difference in how quickly you'll clear the zone. I can't tell you how many times my taunt has literally just cooled down and it saved one of them. In addition, this talent is very useful for Al'ar or the ZA bear boss, where a resisted taunt is only countered by mocking blow and challenging shout. Neither of these abilities last long enough to protect your offtank for 10 seconds waiting on the next cooldown.

Re: protection dps - I think your optimal weapon use is slow MH / fast OH. Your MH should have a high average damage (not to be confused with DPS, which measures your damage range and the weaponspeed). With 1H spec, you only get 60% of the MH's higher damage, but you're doing it every 1.5 seconds. It will vary a bit by encounter, but I usually find that I'm heroic striking to dump rage more than I'd like when I'm dpsing. I rarely ever find a situation where I need rage to devastate, and if I do, bloodrage can help smooth it out. The one thing I'm usually concerned about is how much TPS I generate when I'm not supposed to be tanking. It gets dangerously high if I'm using Heroic Strike too much, so I usually try to make sure all I'm doing is devastating and heroic striking only when I'm over 40 rage. We want to make sure we have a big threat cushion at 20% when we begin executing (I've seen omen go over 1k tps for me during execute phases).

It should be obvious, but your dps gear should be heavily weighted toward strength rather than +AP. Because you have so many instant attacks, items with a proc like Romulo's poison vial are very good on non-nature immune mobs. I also tend to weight my gear pretty heavily toward str > crit > hit (after 9%).

The one thing I'm not entirely certain of is if I should start collecting more armor penetration gear. If I'm soloing, I'll be sundering automatically, which means I'll get outsized returns from it and I'll get more out of devastate's +35 damage per sunder. I also look at fights where we frequently dps like Shade of Aran and Teron Gorefiend where protection dps actually performs very well because it's a low AC target and you've got a fair amount of raid damage going around. The question is whether or not you can create those types of situations in normal encounters by stacking a bit more armor penetration.