Max DPS for prot warrior? - Page 2

♦ Hotspur · 03/28/07, 9:27 PM

Originally Posted by LL

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.

stampy · 04/04/07, 3:54 PM

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.

stampy · 04/04/07, 4:00 PM

Originally Posted by Hotspur

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.

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.

Tharas · 04/04/07, 5:47 PM

I've been all the DPS and hybrid specs in my wow career (31/20, 31/5/15, 17/44, 0/48/3, 0/48/13, etc) but finally ended up prot for MT of one of our Kara raids.

Since I farmed all the +hit gear I could find on the way from 60->70 thinking I was going to be continuing as DPS warrior, it turns out that going back to DW with max hit and str is great (basically ignoring crit except where it comes naturally, no flurry to proc anymore). I can MH my Planar Edge, throw the King's Defender in OH and go to town like I used to do when full fury, just Devastate+HS, the Whirlwinds actually hit semi-hard too with that axe.

If you are very light on the +hit gear I bet the shield slam method is pretty powerful, reducing the miss rate and playing to the strength of the prot instant. Getting a slow (i.e. non-tanking) MH is a great investment for that specific situation.

Punscho · 04/05/07, 10:44 AM

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.

Safid · 04/16/07, 4:03 PM

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.

Cathela · 04/16/07, 4:24 PM

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.

LodeRunner · 04/16/07, 4:26 PM

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?

Punscho · 04/16/07, 4:26 PM

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.

Twid · 04/16/07, 4:34 PM

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.

Safid · 04/16/07, 4:36 PM

Pun, when you say you modeled 600 DPS was that total DPS or just from Devastate?

Cathela, your results make me wonder how Devastate interacts with dual wield spec. Can anyone be bothered to respec to 0/20/41 and see how much more damage the offhand does before and after the dual wield spec? Again, with Mutilate (which I imagine they are using to model this attack) the static portion of the damage is increased by dual wield spec, but never decreases from the dual wield penalty. In other words the static value might increase from 175 to 219.

I realized that there's a bug in my calculations, or at least a potential one. I included the 1h damage spec talent's bonus to the static portion of Devastate's damage. Can we safely assume that it does apply to the *actual* damage from devastate? i.e. if your mainhand + offhand combined for 500 damage, taking 1h weapon spec would add 50 damage to that?

If someone wants to wield two fast weapons and spam Devastate there's nothing stopping them. However with how the attack looks to be built it'd be the same thing as taking one of those super fast 1.5s polearms and trying to use it to Mortal Strike. i.e. not smart.

Nezralix · 04/16/07, 4:40 PM

This makes Devastate basically strictly better than Sinister Strike. And still very mediocre for tanking.

Safid · 04/16/07, 4:45 PM

I agree that it is odd that the ultimate prot talent is a mediocre tanking increase, but a fantastic DPS increase, but ... it allows prot warriors to do decent damage on fights when they're not needed to tank, and gives multiple tanks something else to do. Fair's fair after all. Bear druids can catform and do respectable DPS. Now all we need is for prot pallies to be able to do something else!

Can someone confirm for me that Focused Rage affects Devastate? And can someone tell me if 8 rage per second is sustainable from dual wield autoattack, or if that's too much? If it's easy (like I think it should be) to maintain that level of rage gain, I wonder if it would be useful to toss in some heroic strikes / cleaves / whirlwinds or if nothing really beats simple Devastate spam for pure damage per GCD.

LodeRunner · 04/16/07, 4:46 PM

edit: never mind

stampy · 04/16/07, 5:00 PM

this is going to a major difference. just offhand a slow weapon... even if you have unbridled wrath, its normalized so you arent losing anything anymore with two slow weapons.

consider a plain old off-brand edge of the cosmos from normal mechanar. 186.5 average damage; with 1700 attack power, base damage is 478. on an offhand devastate, thats 119.5 per swing... 80 dps.

if indeed we get the +175 on both hands, thats 196 dps more than main-hand devastate, for the grand total cost of ZERO. i dont care if you are full on fury... +196dps is a LOT more damage. for a prot thats a whole new world. even if we only get the bonus once, that crappy slow offhand is still 80 more dps than before... thats a big % increase for a prot warrior, and its free.

anyone prot who doesnt already have one really needs to start cooking up that fury set. i know im pissed that i let a few nice slow one-hand weapons get sharded recently.

hrm... think the rogues will get pissed if i bid on a a talon of azshara and a spiteblade?

(edit)
and yes, devastate is affected by focused rage; in semi respectable fury-ish dps gear you will be throwing heroic strikes to keep your rage from overflowing.