Besides: Its the best tier 1 talent for a prot specced warrior.
Imp Bloodrage can give it a run for the money, TM (IMHO) cannot.
The situations where you are rage starved after a (needed) stance switch can be count on one hand in a week for a deep prot warrior.

Couple things you should be thinking about here:

1) Get a faster weapon + use HS more. It's way more important than AP. More heroic strikes means more rage dumped. If you're having a problem with the GCD and dumping your rage, you need a faster weapon to dump it or you need to spam the shit out of your HS key more. Bind HS to a key that you can use a lot. I don't usually have a problem with enough rage to fuel HS in a real raid encounter that matters. HS doesn't cost you a cooldown and is in the same ballpark for threat per rage as sunder (yes, that includes the opportunity cost of 3-4 rage too).

2) Change up your threat routine. My usual start is pull, bloodrage, shield slam, shieldblock, revenge, sunder if I have time. Sunder is crap for threat generation relative to those other 2 moves. I'd even go so far as to say that a dps warrior could set up the 5 stack in battler/zerker stance for a low cost of 1.2k threat. That's about one shield slam depending on your block/crit/hit. You can sustain the sunders after that point with devastate.

Well, I changed my opener and it worked like a charm. Talking with my offtanks about helping me debuff and building sunders made a difference as well. Also, getting into the habit of using bezerker rage just before a pull is making things significantly easier.

Thanks for the tips and the criticism. And for the record, I am well aware that attack power doesn't modify shield slam damage. My question referred to white damage coupled with a shield slam. Perhaps it just wasn't worded very clearly.

Thanks again.

2 min.

My Mistake - from what my hunters had been saying to me in raids, I had been under the impression it was a 1minute cooldown, obviously I was wrong. Sorry for the error, next time I should check the ability on thottbot before posting.

Just to go back to the topic - My findings has been that block value scales threat better than AP does point by point, but it's rather tight if you consider devastate and windfury. If threat is an issue you should ask for AP buffs in raids. And windfury of course.

There are DPS sheets on these forums but I've yet to see a warrior threat sheet. Back in the Naxx days I made a custom DPS sheet that was fairly consistent with what's on these forums and when TBC came I found myself in more of a tanking situation, so I started on a threat sheet. A detailed threat sheet could answer many questions I've seen on various forums about threat.

"Do AP really impact my TPS so I would notice?"
"Is devastate _that_ much better with a slow weapon?"
"How much TPS should I be able to produce?"
"Is talent X worth it?"
"What impact does hit have?"
"The new weapon skill mechanics looks great for tanking, is it?"

If anyone is interested I may consider publishing my sheet after some cleanup. That is, if there's not one laying around on these forums that I havn't noticed.

Cheers.