First off, I would like to say that this thread is not a joke. At least until the dual-spec patch comes through, there seem to be many applications for theorycrafting how to get the most out of Prot in terms of damage, both for raiding and non-raiding scenarios. Especially with a number of fights that may not require multiple tanks although the instance as a whole does (e.g. Loatheb, Sapphiron, etc.) having at least respectable DPS while still being Protection is still reasonably important.
That said, there is a pretty low amount of theorycrafting in terms of optimal gear and rotation for Protection. Some of the older spreadsheets had a fair bit of this pre-3.0 due to the implications of DW Devastate, however there is very little so far in regard to integrating Sword and Board, Shockwave, the new scaling on Concussion Blow, and other possible subtleties.
So, some starting observations and talking points:
DW vs. S&B -- S&B seems more or less too good to pass up with the current scaling of block value, however I've found shield setups to suffer heavily in terms of rage generation. It still seems that S&B will pull ahead even considering these issues, but I am uncertain where the tipping point is in terms of OH rage generation vs. additional S&B procs with the risk of more rage starvation are. Even on Loatheb with the spore buff, I was able to get rage starved enough to not be able to regularly use Heroic Strike with a slow weapon.
Gear weighting -- For protection, scaling so far seems to be very heavily strength oriented as you would primarily want both Block and AP to scale all abilities if using a S&B setup--this is especially true with an 8% strength multiplier from talents that all Prot Warriors will likely have. At some point, it seems that "tank" gear itemized with a high amount of Block Value, Strength, and Hit/Expertise is better than many other pieces in terms of overall Protection DPS output. Especially given the high base crit rate of yellow attacks in the average Protection spec, crit% especially from Agility seems to be a bit hit or miss.
Cycle -- Devastate is, of course, the only spamable attack however even with the chance to proc S&B it seems to me that both Shockwave and Concussion Blow should be prioritized with their current scaling. Depending on gear setups, it's quite possibly for both Shockwave and Concussion Blow to hit harder than even Shield Slam, so they would seem to generally be a priority when off cooldown. Rend currently seems like it could be worth using in the event that all other abilities besides Devastate are on cooldown in some situations, but I have not yet figured out the tipping point of the chance to proc S&B on Devastate and how the average of that would take away from the use of a GCD on Rend. As it could be possible to work Improved Rend into a decent spec and with the presence of an Arms Warrior, I suppose this could use some discussion.
Although this thread will almost certainly become obsolete when the dual-spec arrives, finding better ways for Protection Warriors to get the most of what is available to them would be quite useful to a number of us tanks out there.
Some random thoughts:
DW Dev has the advantage of both OH rage generation and OH damage generation. Are Shield Slams really hitting hard enough to offset the white damage you're losing?
Block value is one of the weakest threat stats, point for point; I can't imagine it's much better for DPS, where you'd be SSing even less (if at all).
Base crit from talents doesn't make crit from gear any worse.
How useful is discussion of the value of questionable DPS talents when we're talking about optimizing DPS in a non-DPS spec? How much time do you spend not tanking to justify taking DPS talents? How much time do you spend tanking to justify not just biting the bullet and tanking in a DPS spec?
Using Heroic Strike is always going to rage-starve you if you have a 2h or a 1h/shield setup unless there is a great deal of incoming damage. HS eats your white damage rage on top of its rage cost.
I remember some theorycrafting for Imp. Zerk Stance/1h Weapon Specialization builds in beta; what ever happened to those? (I suspect DW and TG buffs happened to those, but it'd be worth reexamining if only to say, "Yeah, doesn't work.")
I did quite a bit of testing this morning on level 80 training dummies and found that, at least with my gear setup, I had just under 1,000 block value even without being in block value specific gear--this went up a bit higher mid-fight due to Glyph of Blocking as well. Given that BoK and Strength of Earth/Horn of Winter would raise this up even more getting high block values really isn't a problem.
At least in my tests that I did today (5 minutes on each setup, run multiple times), despite the fact that DW test with two 143 DPS epic weapons had much smoother rage generation (I could spam Devastate pretty much non-stop) the DPS ended up being 15-20% lower than using a shield for S&B procs. My normal Shield Slam crits were upwards of 4k, so strings of S&B procs led to pretty high spike DPS which seemed to offset the low rage periods as a general rule. I also found that swapping to Defensive Stance to use Shield Block when cooldowns were up led to slightly higher DPS, as at least one Shield Slam would be doing ~1.2k higher base damage (was able to get some 5.8k crits during this period at some points.)
So, that being said, I'm not sure if DW really pulls ahead now--especially as Rage is a bit easier in groups than on a training dummy. S&B being RNG makes it a bit unpredictable though.
One of the problems I've noticed with looking at gear for a S&B setup, however, are the particular slots such as rings and neck which seem to be generally itemized with Agility + Attack Power for "all classes" and have very few Strength options available. This seems a shame, especially with Vitality + BoK and the lack of shield block scaling from vanilla AP.
A quick glance at wowhead shows that it wouldn't be too hard to push 1300-1400 unbuffed strength, which translates to a crapton of block value and attack power.
As for getting strength on rings and trinkets and such, go for tanking gear - the JC ring has 50 strength on it, as does the tanking ring off of Sapphiron. The badge tanking neck is 41 strength, and the naxx 10 trash neck is 50. The new Darkmoon trinket is 90 strength with a 300 strength proc, amounting to about 160 passive strength, which seems to be a tolerable Shield Block Value trinket in addition to being an outstanding DPS trinket for warriors. You'll be sacrificing some amount of DPS stats, but a lot of tanking gear has hit and expertise on it, too.
I also found that swapping to Defensive Stance to use Shield Block when cooldowns were up led to slightly higher DPS
This touches on one of the main questions I had which is whether fighting in Battle Stance with Overpower, Rend & Thunderclap available offsets the +3% crit & Whirlwind in Berserker stance.
It seems to me that this is almost a no brainer that Berserker stance is better, even if you aren't expertise capped (which I would expect you would be) and you're getting some overpowers. Especially since the 5 min cooldown skill for Battle Stance requires that you are getting hit. (Which is silly... To me, if you're getting hit, you should be in Defensive Stance.) While Recklessness in Berserker Stance is pure DPS.
So Defensive Stance for Offtanking & DPS.
Berserker Stance for pure DPS.
Battle Stance - never.
For S&B, Berserker stance is generally only of major use for the crit as I've found I never had enough spare rage to use Whirlwind. Even if I did, I'm not convinced it would be a better rage dump than Heroic Strike--especially with Incite and Glyph of Heroic Strike in my tanking setup.
I tried runs on the dummy with both Battle Stance + Rend and Berserker stance and found their damage to be almost exactly the same. Berserker Stance is probably technically better--and a bit easier to use--due to the crit.
When soloing or if you grab a weenie add, Defensive Stance seems obviously the way to go as Enrage + Revenge far outweigh the -3% crit and -10% damage. Revenge is great, but unfortunately there is no way to take advantage of its increased damage nowadays while off-DPSing--other than somehow talking your raid to let you get some weenie to beat on you during the boss fight!
This dynamic is a bit odd, though, as I find it a little sad that my self-buffed DPS in Defensive Stance while soloing is seems higher/more consistant than my raid-buffed DPS against a boss. (Some people watching me farm in DPS gear as Protection spec have remarked as to how quickly I'm able to kill things while grinding/questing.) This would have probably been a bit different if they had stuck with shifting the extra damage into Devastate instead of Revenge as they did in the middle of beta, but alas the threat of Fury/Prot hybrid builds killed that one.
If you're running a build with deep wounds in it, berserker stance becomes the clear favorite I assume. I kind of wonder if that makes a difference in the shield/DW decision too, actually.
I'm with Jayde.. when soloing, def stance all the way, when dpsing and not being hit, zerk stance because I'm not going to get overpower procs anyways.
My dps set is built around 1h + shield and not dw because of the hit penalty. I don't feel that I'd generate enough rage while in raid gear to justify taking off the shield, and since while soloing I prefer def stance, it kind of throws DW out the window completely.
So, what are we trying to optimize and why, again? We can trade anecdotes all day, but in the meantime, the in-depth prot DPS guide consists of:
Put on DPS gear, str is good, and hit/expertise to yellow- or dodge-cap are good. Dual-wield slow weapons (although offhand speed is of lesser importance). Concussion Blow, Shockwave, WW on cooldown (or keep Rend up?), Devastate the rest of your GCDs, HS if you somehow have a ton of extra rage. Repeat until dead.
I'm not sure the 2% personal DPS we'd gain by figuring out the exact best stats, or figuring the better of Battle/non-Imp. Rend or Zerk/WW really matters, since it's all vastly overshadowed by a hearth-and-respec to a DPS spec.
Why it's important: until dual spec, prot warriors are in 10/25 man raids doing dps. If you check your WWS you may be disappointed at just how low that DPS is. There is no shame in wanting to find the best way of doing it, even if it is sub-optimal in the grand scheme. No-one wants to feel like dead weight to their raid group.
Why it's not simple: Dual wielding means dual wield hit penalty, so while you gain some in rage gen/OH damage and WW damage, you lose some mainhand white hits and of course shield slam (not to mention the situational benefits of shield bash or imp spell reflect). Gear for hit to offset the DW penalty and you are implicitly sacrificing other DPS stats. If you are in this offtank role, chances are you'll be wanting to keep up debuffs like TC and DS, so zerker stance may not even be an option.
My "DPS" style:
Yesterday I missed the jump to Thaddius (I jumped at an angle because I am an idiot that was trying to rush needlessly), so the feral druid picked it up. My dps wasn't terrible, and it consisted of pretty much just building rage to around 70ish and keeping TC and Demo up, then spamming SS and Dev whenever I got a 3 or 4 stack of the charge and pop SB and an SBV trinket.
Pretty much the only time to D/W is the last 20% for rage for execute/recklessness spam.
So, what are we trying to optimize and why, again? We can trade anecdotes all day, but in the meantime, the in-depth prot DPS guide consists of:
Put on DPS gear, str is good, and hit/expertise to yellow- or dodge-cap are good. Dual-wield slow weapons (although offhand speed is of lesser importance). Concussion Blow, Shockwave, WW on cooldown (or keep Rend up?), Devastate the rest of your GCDs, HS if you somehow have a ton of extra rage. Repeat until dead.
I'm not sure the 2% personal DPS we'd gain by figuring out the exact best stats, or figuring the better of Battle/non-Imp. Rend or Zerk/WW really matters, since it's all vastly overshadowed by a hearth-and-respec to a DPS spec.
The Fury DPS thread is--rightfully--full of tweaks to gain 1% or less in terms of personal DPS. If a Fury Warrior can make a tweak to add 100 DPS and a Prot Warrior can make a big change to add 100 DPS, it's still 100 DPS for the raid. To simplify is as you said is akin to going into the Fury DPS thread and saying "Dual-wield 2-handers, BT, Slam on Bloodsurge, use HS when having excess rage. Repeat until dead." No point in doing that really.
Good example: my first week on Loatheb I did pretty pathetic--I think I did around 1.6k DPS. I was rather annoyed with that performance, so next week I changed my gear around and worked on my rage usage and managed to get up to around 1.9k DPS. This week I was able to reach 2.5k DPS with some more changes to my gear and rage management.
Is this as good as the Fury Warrior doing 4.8k DPS? Obviously not. Did I still add 900 raid DPS compared to being lazy with my original results? Yeah, I did. And that's going to help the raid without me having to spend time to HS back to IF twice to respec and waste a lot of raid time. I'm still going to try to improve my DPS every week on the fights that multiple tanks are redundant, within the confines of not respeccing four times per dungeon.
I certainly don't think it's bad to have a discussion about gear/stat weighting, rotations, DW vs. S&B, etc. at least until the dual-spec patch comes along to make life much simpler.
Tharamis, interesting you pointed that out. I was thinking of trying that after observing in Recount that my DPS with 1H+Shield while trying to work in Execute was substantially lower than my normal Shockwave/Concussion Blow/Shield Slam cycle. With 5.8k-6.4k Shield Slam crits, it gets a bit hard to pass them up. It would be interesting to see if DW + Execute pulled ahead in terms of DPS sub-20%. I have two pretty quick weapons I could try, so I will give it a go next time I have a chance.
So far in my experience, SS and Sword and Board is the way to go for dps'ing while prot. We're just doing our first week of naxx25, so I don't have a lot of raid-level dps gear. I've been doing ok dps as prot, at least enough to not feel like a total drain on the raid.
My question is whether we should switch to DW execute spam at 20%, or keep up the standard prot dps rotation (SS, HS, Conc, shockwave). Looking at a really small sample size WWS, it looks like the average hit for my execute was ~4k, while SS + devastate was about 2.5-3k. That suggests that DW execute is better, even with my crappy dps gear.
I'd love to see more folks post wws links to them doing the standard prot dps rotation, and them switching to DW Execute spam. I was doing standard dps on Thaddius this week, and will try DW execute spam next week, so hopefully there will be some data to compare.
The Fury DPS thread is--rightfully--full of tweaks to gain 1% or less in terms of personal DPS. If a Fury Warrior can make a tweak to add 100 DPS and a Prot Warrior can make a big change to add 100 DPS, it's still 100 DPS for the raid. To simplify is as you said is akin to going into the Fury DPS thread and saying "Dual-wield 2-handers, BT, Slam on Bloodsurge, use HS when having excess rage. Repeat until dead." No point in doing that really.
Any such advice this thread might have will be completely overwhelmed by "Hearth and respec." In the fury thread, you're talking about pushing a DPS ceiling just a little bit higher. Here, you've got a much, much lower DPS ceiling, ever since prot warriors were redesigned to do much more damage with abilities that rely on the warrior having aggro (Imp Def Stance, Revenge, etc.), so pushing to the limit of that ceiling accomplishes little.
The advice that goes beyond "Wear DPS gear, WW/SW/CB on cooldown, Devastate spam" can only be resolved by sitting down with a spreadsheet or simulator, neither of which currently exists. No amount of anecdotal evidence is going to say Rend is better than WW or vice versa, and no amount of anecdotal evidence is going to say that DW is better than S&B or vice versa.
Unless and until someone writes that spreadsheet, all we have is the rough shape of how to gear and DPS. And, honestly, I doubt anyone is going to do it, because if your DPS really matters that much you're going to hearth and respec.
Last edited by A Man In Black : 12/07/08 at 8:32 AM.
I disagree A Man In Black, my position is either main tank or off tank. While hearthing and re-speccing will increase my DPS output far more than tweaking my current use of abilities, it changes my role in the raid and I would no longer fill the position I was selected for. In regards to Prot DPS, this discussion is only of use in an Off Tank situation.
I have found myself rage starved on occasion when spamming Heroic Strike, if I hit it once every two to three attacks instead of each, my rage bar is often above 50%. I have always used Beserker Stance as I have a very crit heavy build (2/2 Impale and 5/5 Cruelty) and similarly to proper tanking I have found that I need a priority list rather than a rotation. My priority is below, the higher on the list, the more we want to use it.
Execute
Shield Slam
Shockwave
Concussion Blow
Devastate
Heroic Strike
I have put Devastate above Heroic Strike for the S&B procs, figuring that, on the mean, each Devastate "deals" 30% of my average Shield Slam damage as well. I haven't thought of quick switching to Defensive Stance and popping Shield Block when it is available, but I likely will try that.
Last edited by Ablimoth : 12/07/08 at 10:04 AM.
Reason: Correctly named Cruelty talent
More anecdotal "contribution": on reading this I spent some time on the Dummies using my 4 different weapons in different configs. of DW and 1H+Shield.
Ultimately the differences were minimal (as others have stated) so given my current Hit Rating I'd probably stick to 1H+Shield should I find myself DPSing, switching to DW for the Execute phase.
Certainly seems the way to go if you have Improved Spell Reflect and are DPSing a Boss like Malygos.
In terms of moves I'd always prioritise Devastate over HS as it's Devastate + White damage and rage gain vs HS damage alone.
The HS Glyph may tip this balance somewhat but I doubt HS comes out ahead.
Every other tank has thunderclap-ish skill or talent now, so staying in battle or defensive is no longer necessary. Also, you don't lose shield block if you switch out of defensive, so it's worth it to keep it on cooldown, or at least use it whenever bloodrage is available (maybe tactical mastery is worth taking if you offtank a lot)
Another consideration is intervene, if you have safeguard, or just want to reduce someone's threat by 10%.
I have put Devastate above Heroic Strike for the S&B procs, figuring that, on the mean, each Devastate "deals" 30% of my average Shield Slam damage as well. I haven't thought of quick switching to Defensive Stance and popping Shield Block when it is available, but I likely will try that.
Just like S&B isn't a "free" Shield Slam when you're tanking, it's not a free Shield Slam when you're DPSing, either. You're getting a Shield Slam an extra 4.5, 3, or 1.5 seconds early and saving its rage cost. This amounts to considerably less than a shadow 30%-of-SS-damage attached to every Dev.
Just like S&B isn't a "free" Shield Slam when you're tanking, it's not a free Shield Slam when you're DPSing, either. You're getting a Shield Slam an extra 4.5, 3, or 1.5 seconds early and saving its rage cost. This amounts to considerably less than a shadow 30%-of-SS-damage attached to every Dev.
While true, Shield Slam is our biggest damage hit. Any S&B proc is a cooldown that is spent on Shield Slam rather than Shockwave/Conc. Blow/etc.
I would also disagree that 50% of your offhand weapon white DPS is less than Shield Slam damage and will go on to calculate below for my main character.
Lets assume that my off hand weapon would be precisely the same as my main hand, the best weapon I have accessible to me currently.
297.9dps/2 = 148.95dps
Is the pre-mitigation dps increase by wielding an off hand weapon (less the attack power loss from AttT and losing 1/3 of my armour value. Lets ignore that since Shield Slam is not affected by attack power and ignoring it will overstate off hand weapon damage).
Average pre-mitigation Shield Slam damage accounting for the 15% increased critical hit chance from Critical Block, the 10% increased Shield Slam damage from Gag Order and the 20% increased critical hit bonus damage from Impale (the 2.2 multiple below 100% + 120% damage on a critical hit)
(.85 x (890 block rating + (990 + 1040)/2) + .15 x (890 block rating + (990 + 1040)/2) x 2.2) x 1.1 = 2472.69 damage per hit
I have ignored the normal critical hit percentage, 1-Handed Weapon Specialisation, Improved Defensive Stance etc. damage and only taken what is different between the two attacks because they a) make this more complicated than it needs to be and b) should scale evenly in both situations.
From my previous post you can see my priority list and note that there will not be a perfect 30% of all GCD's are S&B procs, so let us work out how many procs there will be and use the average damage above to calculate the DPS increase from S&B.
We will be usng a 60 second time period (and assuming perfection, i.e. no latency). This period was chosen for being the lowest common denominator to allow us whole CD's on Shield Slam, Shockwave and Concussion Blow, the abilities abilities which will be used that do not proc S&B.
In this 60 second window we will spend 2 GCD's on Concussion Blow and 3 GCD's on Shockwave out of the 40 available to us, 10 more will be spent on normal Shield Slam's, regardless of S&B, leaving 24 GCD's cast in the 60 second window, on average 18 of which will be spent on Devastate and 5.4 on S&B proc Shield Slams (for the purposes of this discussion, 19 and 5 will be used), giving a total of 15 Shield Slams over the 60 seconds at a cost of 15 Devastate's that a duel wielder would cast taken from the period where Sunder is fully stacked.
(15 x average Shield Slam damage - 15 x average Devastate damage)/60 = DPS increase by using a Shield for Prot DPS
(37,090 - 14,280)/60 = 380.17
Since 380.17 > 148.95 it is more beneficial to use a shield when DPS'ing as a Protection specced warrior.
A few notes on this analysis
1) It is theoretical. I want to see some data from someone who has attempted this on a dummy for 5 minutes with each type (I am on holiday until Sunday night, and will not have the time to do so until then).
2) I did ignore bonuses such as 1-Handed Weapon Specialisation and other abilities that provide a ratio bonus to both. The inclusion of these will merely increase the difference between the two (10% of 380 > 10% of 149).
Please feel free to comment on any flaws you pick up, but not on the power (or lack of it) of my toon.
Last edited by Ablimoth : 12/09/08 at 9:35 AM.
Reason: Added the name of a Talent
If you aren't ragecapped, shouldn't you take into account the excess rage between using a shield and dw'ing, since it can be used towards heroic strikes? In your example, a shield slam cost on average ~12.3 rage, and devastate costs 15 rage however more rage is gained by dw'ing which might tip the balance. (Although I have no idea if this is the case)
EDIT: As far as I can tell, the 148.95 dps that you post as the increased autoswing dps from dw'ing isn't taking into account the increased missrate by doing so, which further proves your point, however it would still be nice to account for heroic strikes.
Well, let's look at the chance of S&B... say you have enough rage to maintain a normal rotation. Of course, you have a 30% on the first Devastate following a Shield Slam that it will trigger S&B. You have roughly a 51% chance of it being triggered within two Devastates, and a 65.7% (1-(.7^3)) chance of it being triggered within 3 Devastates.
Presuming you were to keep the cycle simple to model and always use CB/SW on cooldown prior to SS/Dev, that still means that doing a SS/Dev x3 rotation is, on average, going to yield a rage cost on Shield Slam which is in the neighborhood of 6 rage by the looks of it. (While a S&B proc on the 3rd Devastate won't have any impact on DPS due to cooldown, you still get the rage cost reduction.)
In regard to the cooldown, provided my brain is working this late in the evening you would have a 30% chance of it being 3 seconds, a 21% chance of it being 4.5 seconds, and a 49% chance of it being 6 seconds. That puts the average cooldown at 4.785 seconds.
Presuming Devastate costs 12 rage (going to go with this as Puncture is not a prime talent for Protection builds anymore) that would seem to give a rage requirement of around 6.6 rage/second to maintain that rotation.
On the other hand, a Devastate spamming situation will require 8 rage/second with the same build. Therefore, you are going to lose a fair bit of the extra offhand rage simply due to the lack of S&B procs. (I believe 1.4 rage/second from white attacks is roughly 120 white DPS, if I'm remembering the formula correctly from the fury spreadsheets.)
Either way, I don't really see DW pulling ahead given the current damage of Shield Slam, but I suppose the factors would have to be plugged in to some formulas in order to see how the scaling worked out at various gear levels.
Keep in mind this is a bit of napkin math... so if I made a glaring error feel free to yell and I will correct it!
Yesterday I was dpsing on Thadius and managed to get my DPS up to 2000 in tank gear with S&B procs. Now since I was tanking the adds I couldnt change out my gear but I had range enough to Heroic Stricke after each of my SS and Dev's. I kept Shockwave and Concussion blow on cooldown the whole fight as well with Shield block. If I switched out some of my gear for the tank throw part of it I'm sure I could get it higher than that but I feel with the S&B procs that you'd out weigh going into DW with the miss % added to it.
A few nits to pick on top of what Jayde said. You seem to have taken your 297.9 dps from your character sheet in your tanking gear. However, my understanding is that we're trying to maximize our dps on fights where we're not tanking at all--i.e. we can wear whatever gear we want, so you'll actually be doing much more white dps due to having higher AP in DPS gear. However, character sheet white damage on the armory appears to include 1H spec, which you don't seem to have factored into shield slam damage. Rage generation aside, white damage will also scale significantly better with raid buffs since there are many that affect it (talented might, unleashed rage, windfury, heroism) but only kings, motw, and SoE will increase your shield slam damage, and of course both of those increase white damage as well, if not as much--each point of str is .5 shield slam damage and only 1/28 offhand white dps. Crit buffs (LotP, Heart of the Crusader) will give a nominally higher relative bonus to white damage because shield slam/devastate already have +15% crit from talents, though of course impale will tip these back in favor of shield slam, and I don't have a clue how they interact with deep wounds, though I suspect offhand deep wounds damage would be a nontrivial increase to dual-wield damage. My final nit is that when dual-wielding, whirlwind does decent damage compared to not even being worth pushing with a single weapon and isn't factored in.
All in all you provide a decent ballpark and the huge discrepancy you've come up with strongly suggests that, even considering the many things that were hand-waved away, sword and board will outperform dual-wielding.
Originally Posted by PvtCaboose
Yesterday I was dpsing on Thadius and managed to get my DPS up to 2000 in tank gear with S&B procs. Now since I was tanking the adds I couldnt change out my gear but I had range enough to Heroic Stricke after each of my SS and Dev's. I kept Shockwave and Concussion blow on cooldown the whole fight as well with Shield block. If I switched out some of my gear for the tank throw part of it I'm sure I could get it higher than that but I feel with the S&B procs that you'd out weigh going into DW with the miss % added to it.
Thaddius, like all gimmick fights, is a pretty bad example from which to make generalizations about rage generation. Analyzing a fight in which you spend most of your time doing more than double damage is not particularly interesting.
I spent a bit of time trying sword+board on dummies today but was generally too rage-starved on boss level dummies to spam specials, sometimes not even being able to shield slam a few seconds after hitting concussion blow or shockwave if I had been aggressively devastating. I didn't do long tests because this conflicts with my experience in raids where I have generally been able to devastate on every free GCD along with the occasional heroic strike on fights where I have moderate rage income from damage (loatheb without getting spores, sapphiron) as well as a full set of raid buffs.
All in all you provide a decent ballpark and the huge discrepancy you've come up with strongly suggests that, even considering the many things that were hand-waved away, sword and board will outperform dual-wielding.
I agree, if the results were closer I would be inclined to complete a more thorough investigation. As it is I foresee Shield Slam scaling better with improved gear than off hand damage, particularly the T7 2 piece set bonus, which should not be hard to obtain and at least 2 pieces of which will be worn for the foreseeable future.
I have to say -- stupid as it seems at first, I am actually pretty interested in this subject.
A few weeks ago, I made a custom build of Rawr! to give me a set of stat weights for leveling. Essentially, I expanded the classic tank stat weights (dodge, stam, strength) with classic dps weights (crit rating, haste, etc). Perhaps I'll see about moving this to a separate report, so you can get some idea of the best gear for Sword & Board DPS. Results were, as expected, Expertise > Hit > Str > 2 AP > Block Rating. There was a surprisingly high value for Agility, however -- something I haven't researched yet.
I too have found that S&B is dramatically higher DPS than 'zerker stance DW, Devastate & WW, even with slow weapons. I could balance the equation if you like, but the L&S is this: S&B means average SS CD of 3.8. If your slams, like mine, average around 2500 damage, that's more than 600 raw dps (raw meaning unmodified by armor, miss, etc) you need to make up through offhand damage and whirlwind DESPITE having a 17% higher miss chance. It's not likely to happen.
However, a prot warrior does his best damage in defensive stance, where he also does his best threat. If the other guy's in his mitigation set, it is very likely you'll be the one who pulls aggro. Thus you should be prepared to dance stances and weapon configs.
12/03/08, 6:38 AM
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