There are times prot warriors need to DPS in instances. It might be because we're on Shade of Aran. It might be because we have two prot warriors in the raid today and the fight only needs one tank (it really sucks to waste tank loot, and we can hardly run a separate Kara for each warrior in the guild).

Assume for a moment our prot warrior has a heavy prot spec, no deep talents in either arms or fury that affect their DPS more than 5% crit (if they even have that), but of course they will have every relevant prot talent that could up DPS.


This is a continuing bugbear with our warriors and always has been. Our MT, for example, insists on Aran that his best DPS is actually from going 1h/shield, using shield slam whenever it's up and otherwise devastate spamming (and shield-bashing as his interrupt, in that fight). Others of course think the way to go is more conventional DPS moves with a 2h or duel wield and using pummel as their interrupt.

What is actually the max DPS mode for prot warriors, given 2h and duel wield weapons of equal quality?

In my experience it depends on gear. Assuming your tank doesn't have any dps gear at all, but does have a set with high block value, it could in fact be true that shield slam is higher dps (at least when the mob isn't yet open to execute.)

Given good DPS gear 1h weapon spec means that it is almost a certainty that 2 weapons will do better than a 2h weapon.

i like to go with my strengths, when you're prot your main offensive ability is shield slam. so i take every piece that i have with SBV on it and then every other piece i use dps gear.

I top DMs on Aran by gearing like I'm fury and going to town with devastate and HS.

Assume for a second we have no DPS warriors at the moment (and usually only ever had one at a time) and therefore our prot warriors usually have really good DPS gear by default. Varies between them, of course.

Cool. They pretty much all have a really good 2h due to Blizzard's obsession with making sure 2h weapons drop in every instance like candy, but I daresay their 1h weapons aren't that bad either (although only 1 king's defender to date, sigh).

dios: Just to clarify, I assume that's duel-wielding?

From pre tbc farming, (as in I had pretty good fury dps gear, and very nice tank gear) I killed things far far faster by popping on my dps gear and dual wielding than I ever could by doing it in tank gear with shield slam.

Same here, I have about 13% hit and about 25% crit in zerker stance, with around 1700 AP with battle shout, other than my weapons i have no epic dps gear. I use Decapitator and that dagger from Moroes, stack sunders to 5 and then spam devestate and HS, sprinkling in pummels when needed.

It probably did help me that i cleave tank 2 elementals when we're short a warlock >.>

I am a prot warrior who has tried 2H and 1H for DPS. I have the 2h-er from Opera. Prot warriors with a 2h-er have no rage dumps. Swings are too slow for HS to unload rage. Devastate works only with 1h weapons and is a huge bonus of extra damage. Finally, prot warriors get +10% damage with 1h weapons. The very best damage we can get is dual wielding, but 1H and shield is not THAT far behind dual wielding, and in fact on Shade of Aran I use the shield for interrupts. I don't use berserker and pummel because I like the extra hit points I am getting from my shield and I don't like taking extra damage whenever I get targeted with a spell from Aran. Later I continue to need the shield while I OT two elementals.

Couldn't Slam be a rage dump for 2h?

However, I still think that DW is better

As prot Warrior, I DW whenever I need to DPS and, like mentioned above, I act as though I'm Fury spec. I just cannot find any justification or even fun in using a 2hander as prot spec. When I got Gorehowl and decided to skill it up to cap, I wanted to scalp myself not having an instant attack to spam. For that reason alone, DW wins. Devestate is an insanely rage efficient move and ensures that Sunder never drops. An extra 10% damage from both your weapons doesn't hurt either.

In regards to Aran, I usually come third DPS beneath our decked out Rogue with every Karazhan drop and a Feral Druid. If I don't have to pick up one of the Water elementals, second. I like to wear Boots of Elusion and Argussian Compass for run speed, trinket proc and a big chunk of stamina too so I lose a little DPS there. I personally cannot see why you'd want to add 2 seconds onto your interrupt ability and lower your DPS by sticking with sword 'n' board but to each their own.

Yep, dw devastate does a lot of dps if you gear up for it, but you're also a glass cannon. I stack strength, hit, and crit (in that order).

I'd never wear my dps suit farming. You'd never build to 5 sunders to maximize the devastate damage and your incoming damage + lower health/mitigation make it impractical. I have a raid dps suit, a solo dps suit (more balanced, with a shield, maximizing block) and a tanking suit.

Buffed for Aran, I have about ~22-2500 AP (varies with UR procs), 27% crit with LoTP, and 10% hit. I've got a 71dps 2.6 speed mh and a 88dps 1.6 speed offhand. Hopefully I can luck into a decapitator this week since our enhancement shaman got his last week. I pretty consistently hit about 670-700dps for the shade, but he's also got shite for armor.

I've also started messing around with Romulo's poison vial since we have so many instant attacks. It's not a great item for a rogue, but I want to do some PPM testing on it before I consider it worthless for a warrior.

When I'm soloing or drafted as raid dps while prot spec, I use a gearset designed for DW fury. Overall, I probably place higher emphasis on stamina for that set than most do, but it does make it more workable for use in places where I don't have a dedicated healer. It helps that I have a Fetish of the Sand Reaver that I can toss on if I'm assigned a pure dps role, since all the rage dumps I have access do generate extra threat. While it costs a lot more rage per use (20 vs 9 for me) Cleave becomes a very good dump if you're worried about threat and you can hit an extra mob.

While soloing, I use a Servo Arm with Fiery as MH and a Fireguard as my OH. Excessive use of devastate and procs works out quite well. However, I realize that proc dependancy is inefficient, and the resist rates in instances is somewhat infuriating. Therefore, I'm going to make a Runic Hammer in short order, which will alleviate my concerns about drops and winning.

I don't recall hard numbers for my dps output, but going DW vs 1h and shield, my white damage is a higher percentage now than it was as fury. So, besides tweaking +hit and whatnot, if you're looking to perform a bit better, finagle one or two 80ish dps one handers. Even if you have a King's Defender for tanking, OH that and get a crafted MH, like the Felsteel Longblade or a Runic Hammer, and the overall output is going to show a marked difference.

Spec is in the armory link to the left, and I can't recall if I last logged out in dps or tanking gear. Yes, I should consider Imp TC instead of Imp HS. I solo more often than not, however.

Hm. I was wondering about this myself, and from some rather poor testing (Prince DPS!), my 1h combo (Fireguard + 71dps 1.6 speed claw) is a useful bit of extra DPS over Lionheart Blade. Would I be better off picking up a slow 71dps main-hand (Edge of the Cosmos, Reflex Blades, etc) for Devastate spam, and off-handing the Fireguard?

That, or find a friend with one of the blacksmithing plans. It's more certain than a drop, and better dps that the ones you brought up.

If you can get 12 Nethers, upgrade the Fireguard and make a *new* Fireguard. MH the 88dps, OH the 81dps. Unique *per tier*, but also One Handed.

i do significant dps dressed up as a fury warrior spamming the pee out of devastate, and dropping in heroic strikes whenever my rage is up over 40 or so.

of course, it requires a fully sundered mob, and doing ANYTHING dual wield means you are going to need significant +hit to be useful. and, dont keep mainhanding your tanking sword, get something nice and slow for the instant attack spam... the aldor exalted sword does a fair job for protties who let the real DPSers pick up the real DPS raid drops.

how does a shield+block value gear fare against dual wielding and dps gear?

with 500 block value, shield slam base dps is 930/6= 155 dps.
a 72 dps offhander (level 70 blue) and 1800 attack power = 100 dps.

that gap is covered by the huge difference in rage generation. 1 heroic strike every 4 seconds makes up the difference all alone. except, the real key factor is that you will never have 1800 attack power *and* 500 block value... and when you choose that attack power instead, youre getting more white dps, more devastate dps, and generating more rage to keep up devastate spam and a healthy supply of heroic strikes.

that one nice big pop each 6 seconds from a shield slam just isnt worth the wholesale nerfing youll need to make it effective. it is more convenient for protties who only carry their tanking gear... but ive always thought that a prot warrior who doesnt carry a dps set deserves as big of a slap as a dps warrior that doesnt carry a tank set. always come prepared.

(edit)
oh... and your main tank is just being lazy. first off, slap him until he gets into zerker stance. "i need a shield to interrupt" is horseflop. second, get him to go farm up some dps gear via rep/5-mans, install itemrack, and contribute to the boss kill. him trying to dps in battle stance (or eek! defensive) is about as smart as someone trying to tank in zerker. it doesnt matter what spec you are, its just plain stupid.

huge waste of materials. there are far better main hand dps weapons than ANY tier of the 1h swordsmith weapons... they just arent designed for it, too fast. if youre going to devastate spam, you can get something with maybe a little lower DPS but much higher average damage, and you will crank out a lot more damage.

even when on tank duty, any mob that lasts long enough to sunder down and doesnt hit hard enough to rage me up for heroic strikes, i actually swap ouy my fast tanked for a vindicator's brand once its fully sundered and go to town on the devastates. im not going to top any dps charts, but it is an appreciable contribution on the dps meter, and is more rage efficient than a fast weapon when i dont have the rage to crank out lots of heroic strikes.

Even with ~650 block value I find I do much better dps in my dual wield gear than in my block value gear when specced 41+ prot. I have to admit 2500 shield slam crits on Aran is fun but in no way does it outperform you dual wielding spamming devastate.

Hit isn't that important since you don't have offhand mastery or flurry, just get about 10% or something hit and then stack ap/crit. You'll spam 12 rage devastates and 12/9 rage hs like a madman. On Aran, you should get enough rage for almost anything since you're getting nuked quite alot by magic damage and if you just pop berserker rage in a good fashion you'll have a full rage bar instantly.

Has anyone thought about using 2.1 Devastate spam?

Assumptions: 88 DPS 2.6 speed 1h weapons (Gladiator Whatevers), 1400 AP (because it's not hard to get), 10% hit, 20% crit, 0/20/41 talents for dual wield spec, target fully sundered, ignore mob armor and defenses.

1400 AP = 100 DPS, so your weapons are 188 DPS * 2.6 = 488.8 damage.

Mainhand swing 488.8/2 + 175 = 419.4

Offhand swing 183.3 + what? 0? 175? .75*175? Or do we assume Blizzard has copied and pasted code from mutilate, in which case taking dual wield spec actually UPS the damage of your offhand's static value from 175 to 218.75? I'd like some info if anyone has this build on the PTR. Let's assuming it's .75*175 = 131.25 making your total offhand 314.55

Total devastate damage 734 damage for 12r every 1.5s. That's 490 DPS from devastate alone. Now add in 1h weapon spec and 20% crits. 646 DPS.

Ballparking just dual wield autoattack to ~300 DPS (using rogue formulas, don't know if fury warriors are different) and you're looking at rogue level damage assuming that you can keep up 8 rage per second from white attacks (this should be trivial, right?).

On the downside, you need to expend 5 GCDs ramping up to this damage and after that it makes any other DPS classes optimal cycle look exciting by comparison since you literally sunder x5 and then press devastate until your keyboard breaks.

Any info or answers to my questions? I don't have a warrior; this is all theorycraft. If my math is wrong or my assumptions are wrong please correct me! It looks like 2.1 Devastate is a huge increase in prot warrior DPS.

My testing on the PTR seems to indicate that the offhand weapon in a fully-sundered devastate does (0.5*WepDmg) + 175. That is, the extra damage from the sunder stack doesn't seem to suffer from the OH damage penalty.

This should be considered preliminary, since my warrior doesn't have good gear and I haven't been able to stay connected very long at one time. But it looks like we're talking about easily another 200+ dps from offhand devastate damage if you have the rage for continuous spam.

Offhands are notoriously fast. You could, if you wanted to, save up and shell out 2.2k arena points for the slow one hander and offhand it. Most people, however, will opt to get the cheap one which does the same dps but is faster and costs half as much, or just offhand the King's Defender. Offhands do really gimped damage, coupled with being fast they have shit for top end damage. Devastate does 1/2 weapon damage on an offhand that's already at 1/2 damage. So... 1/4 damage on a 1.7? or so 88.1 dps weapon. Forgive me if I'm not rabid with anticipation.

Yes, it will help, but I don't think that much.

edit ^^^^ that's probably a bug

Also does anyone have numbers on how much threat Devastate spam while DWing will do?

I tried some devastate spam on the blasted lands mobs on the PTR. With just battle shout I had about 1700AP and 27% crit and I did approximately 600dps if memory serves me right. These mobs has _very_ little armor when sundered.

I actually made a custom spreadsheet to look into this. At 2000 ap, 30%, 10% hit crit vs a level 73 mob and the old glancing model it's about 600 dps. Add another 100 dps if you got windfury.

Edited: 100 dps from windfury, not 150. It's late.

As useless as it is without any meters or anything, myself and our other protection warrior logged onto the PTR's to play around with 0/20/41. We were definitely impressed with the power of devastate, and so I hit fraps before I hit Recklessness.

http://files.filefront.com/7235401

I'm using the Drakefist with a Vindicator's in my offhand. Neither are enchanted, and my dps gear is terrible (nothing beyond quests and 5 mans, and I generally pass any upgrades to guildies that need them).

I think I was in the neighborhood of 10% hit, 1600 AP, 25% crit

The other warrior was using a Decapitator and a lvl 60 GM offhand fist (He's usually MS when not protection, so other than the Decapitator, he's lacking in the DW department). His SWStats was reporting him at 960 dps against the fully sundered blasted lands mob, and he backed out to bandage at one point without leaving combat.

I'll go back on tonight and do a full /combatlog WWS parse. I'll also spec back to a standard Full Prot tanking spec and do a parse.