Can you explain the former please? If that's true then I'm not sure how devastate or sunder work anymore.

For the latter are you assuming puncture? If so, I'm seeing a great many people even here skipping puncture since it's a rage only talent which seems to be increasingly less desired these days.

It just means that Devastate isn't getting the SA threat bonus on the first 5 applications. Devastate threat still increases for every SA (and it still does put SA up on the mob, just doesn't give the threat for it).

PS: Solifer, what's up with your apostrophes? Even on a German keyboard it's easy to do with Shift + #. <_<

Satrina's testing has so far shown that Devastate works the way I said i.e. it still applies Sunder Armour but not Sunder threat (previously you got the Sunder threat up until you had stacked 5).

Damage is now 50% Weapon + 101 per Sunder - so there's a large increase in the damage based on Sunder count there.
Threat is that Damage + 5% of AP - no Sunder threat bonus per se.

It's due for more testing but that's how it appears to work now - note with the AP I used (2,500) the threat of even the first Devastate exceeds that of Sunder anyway.

Are we sure the lack of sunder threat is intentional? I don't doubt it is given the numbers but I can't recall seeing that change anywhere in blue posts or patch notes. I may have just lost it in translation somewhere.

I am looking at this build at 80: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Max out 1hs spec for sure. Pull a point from Cruelty if you must because 2% more damage for all your attacks > 1% crit. I'd also not take Imp Revenge over Shield Mastery. The threat increase is most likely wash but Shield Mastery increases your mitigation on top.

So Blizzard keeps raising Shield Slam, and now that it is usable in all stances... how viable would it be to make a macro while in going full out DPS with TG to:

equip shield
slam with it
requip OH

Put that on a 6 second reset, use it when you need to burn rage, and when rest of your stuff is on CD. With our already gearing for STR and base shield slam now raised over 1k@80, those could be some pretty sweet instant hits. Just not 100% sure on how it might play with the OH swing timer. Anyone thought about/tried this?

It's actually just multiplicative. 1.1*0.9 = 0.99

The Improved Defensive Stance enrage is most likely tuned keeping that fact in mind and gives 11% extra damage. Which when multiplied with the base defensive stance modifier would put you at 99.9% damage, which gets rounded up.

It all depends on your baseline threat generation. 100 tps isn't much if you're already cranking out 2.5k.

Unless I'm missing something, Impale is an effective damage increase of 10% to your crits (20% increased crit damage). Your crit rate is 30%.

I do a base of 100 damage when I hit:
With Impale - [(100*0.3*1.1*2)*2.07] + [(100*0.7)*2.07] = 281.5 threat
Without Impale - [(100*0.3*1*2)*2.07] + [(100*0.7)*2.07] = 269 threat

4.5% threat increase, and that's only on certain high-crit yellow attacks. It's far less than that for abilities like revenge. You're getting less than a 1% threat increase for every talent point spent. Parry is an expected talent, but then you need to spend 5 talent points to get to impale, and another 2 to get it. Imp heroic strike isn't a complete waste, but it's subpar compared to most of the stuff you're giving up in prot and fury.

I was on the impale bandwagon back when it didn't have such a high opportunity cost (part of the cost to get there was imp thunderclap, which is a must-have talent), now I'd never take it for tanking. The cost to get it is way too high for the benefit you receive.

It's an interesting idea, I'm not sure how it would play out in practice.

My immediate concerns are squeezing it in. In the theoretical Fury cycle you have time to pull this off between most Bloodthirsts so long as you don't crit. It's really a hairline operation, leaving no room for error. Also, you lose between 3-6 seconds of OH DPS (the latter number when you unequip the OH just before a swing). It becomes a question as to whether losing that rage generation and damage is worth the damage of Shield Slam versus just using Heroic Strike.

While it might be interesting if this was indeed a DPS increase, I'm inclined to think that the difference between the proposed macro and using Heroic Strike is very small. We'll have to see if my supposition is correct via testing.

Impale is an increase dependant on your crit chance:

On 100 damage (on average):
0 crit = 100 damage
0.30 crit = 130 damage (70 normal, 30*2.0 crit=60 crit)
0.30 crit w/ impale = 136 damage (70 normal, 30*2.2=66 crit)

Without it you deal (1+crit)*dmg, with it you deal (1+(crit*1.2))*dmg. So the higher your crit, the better it gets (obviously).

It really depends on how much crit raid buffed tanks will be sporting (cruelty, LotP/rampage, SoE, all of these add quite a bit of crit, but with no agi in our gear I wonder how much more besides these we'll have), but, yeah, I don't think it'll be worth it.

Given that does AttT become an attractive alternate to you or do you see yourself just dumping even more points in prot and caring less about +threat options from the other trees?

Not true, two other reasons why it's so good is because it's affected by Impale, and because yellow attacks don't suffer from glancing blows.
Heroic Strike, with the new glyph, will still be a very good way to dump rage for extra damage, and I doubt very much weaving in Shield Slams will be more effective, specially considering you're losing OH damage and rage for it on top of less HS.

Peculiar thought just struck me, and I literally mean just. Would it be feasible to dps with a 2h weapon in your main hand and a shield? I mean, you can still use Bloodthirst, you could weave non-Bloodsurge Slams in just about every free gcd and you have Shield Slam as an added attack. Your Whirlwind wouldn't hit as hard as Titan Grip, and you'd lose some white dps, but you gain Shield Slam and the ability to weave Slam wherever you please without worrying about impacts on the offhand.

I imagine threat might be an issue but without having a way to test it right now I'm left wondering if it might actually work. Any ideas?

I try to be pretty all-inclusive with my spreadsheet, and I'm now showing Imp Revenge better than Cruelty, point for point. Before yesterday's damage buff, I showed the opposite.

Voxx, I tried that this morning, and I hardly broke 1100 DPS over 3-4 minutes. 1 extra attack every 6 seconds isn't going to outdo your off hand white damage alone. Factor in dual wield spec, WW damage, and the rage gain, using a off hand is a no brainer.

Edit: @ Bababon below me, read post http://elitistjerks.com/917620-post2685.html on this very page about some math and info on Impale.

I'm having an issue with Shield Block.

In this level 80 PvP premade gear with a few mediocre tanking items, I've got 1031 block value (with the new blocking glyph active). Now, when I hit Shield Block, I expect to get 2062 block value; instead I get 1735 (in the character panel). Is there something about this equation that I'm not quite understanding?

Some modifiers apparently don't effect it. Try using shield block without any modifiers such as Shield Mastery.

Point for Point Impale is the better threat talent; because of filler though wouldn't 3 more points in Cruelty, 3/3 Puncture and 1/3 Imp.HS be better threat? Especially considering that Impale won't boost the new Revenge nearly as much as it boosts our other yellow damage.

While weaving shield slams doesn't benefit Fury dps, for an OT Prot warrior trying to dps would this be advisable? Always using a shield seems like it would have rage issues, does the increase in damage from SNB procs make up for the loss of Heroic Strikes? If not would gear swapping to take advantage of the SNB procs put you in GCD too often while clipping too many OH attacks?

I'm a noob warrior, so bear with me on this, but say in your rotation you do WW then BT right away and BT doesn't crit, what do you do until BT comes up again? I see it's either HS/cleave + offhand damage or try to fit that SS in. Granted you must have the rage for this, my gear has been far away from this sort of thing.

Another thing, I copied over and gained some mysterious crit, about 4% a bit more (before rampage). Most of my crit from gear comes from agility, have they changed agi->crit ratio? I'm level 60, I forgot to look at the paper doll agi and crit popup.

Right now, I'm leaning toward armored to the teeth (5/8/58 build), but I may change that. I need to do some more testing on beta before I'm sold on it.

If our mitigation % from armor approaches what it is in TBC, we're looking at ~30K armor in endgame gear (~500AP). In 10 man nax gear the talent gives about 350 AP, which is a 10% increase from a raid-buffed total of over 3k. While that doesn't affect shieldslam, it does affect everything else. Revenge gets ~25% of that AP increase as damage, tclap gets a little under 16%, conc blow and shockwave get 75%, etc. It's not incredible, but it's pretty good.

It's out for PvE DPS, but would it be under any sort of consideration for PvP? The white damage isn't as much of a consideration (although WW is), and the gain of AC and a dispel has some benefits.