Super DPS tanking

Hey, im in the process of experminating with some specs, to see if i can increase my dps or not, I done all the normal prot builds and love the deep wound the most. However its pretty clear to me that revenge can hit very hard, and if i could use that every second, it would be nice yes?

Well getting unrelenting assaults is no mean feat, while still trying to keep the defensive stuff, and even harder while trying to keep the dps/tps genrating talenst in prot.

I messed around a bit last night and have this spec, that i been testing that skips attt and cruelty for more prot loving, and im really not sure about it now, I just felt i wasnt doing much dps.

So to wrap up, the point of me making this topic, is to find out is there any other tanking spec out there that can increase our dps by a measurable amount? Please show me your spec, then how you got on with it, or perhaps just your theories on how you thinj it will work.

Check out my build too, its a bit crap though.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Im sure u can do better.

Im also greatly interested in bloodthirst tanking.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

anyone tried that yet?

I tried tanking heroic UK a while ago as arms, and even though I was in mostly blues back then, it didn't seem like I had any issues staying alive. The real issue was threat. I was severely lacking in AOE threat, missing the dmg increase to TC and no Dmg Shield. Nearly every pull with 4 elites ended with the fury warrior dead, and the moonkin and hunter running around.

And also, my dmg was significantly lower (around 2/3 the dmg) than when I was prot spec since I had to spam sunders to keep threat on mobs. I wasn't left with many GCDs for anything else. Also, those abilities in the other trees, while they do significant damage while you're DPSing, the dmg does not scale down well at all, meaning they're weak with tanking gear on.

The bosses weren't that difficult, but my dps being lower slowed the kills. Honestly, you will be suprised at how ineffective most hybrid builds are for tanking (or upping your dmg while tanking) since it seems that blizzard spent a significant amount of time making it so we can do good dps while in standard tank gear/specs. It all but eliminates the old classic arms/prot offtank builds.

Increasing your dps while prot spec is a tricky beast. You have to work within the limits of the spec. You need to keep a shield on, or make up the loss of SS with your new weapon choice. You can't put more than 20 points in another tree or you have to make up the loss of shockwave with them. You can switch out to DPS gear, but then you can't tank anymore.

If you're in a position where you're not tanking (OT duties aren't needed on this fight for example), then switching to dps gear may increase your dmg, but if the tank dies, you can't pick up the boss. Also, you're already rage starved if you're not taking dmg, so doing more dmg is limited severely by this fact.

The Unrelenting Assault protection specs are gimmicks, at best. They may, marginally, increase your DPS vs a single target mob that attacks quickly enough to trigger Revenge that frequently. However, it severely nerfs your abilities in every single other situation a warrior can do. I also have yet to see a high Unrelenting Assault parse (it has to be at least a fair bit higher than 3.4k DPS, as those are the numbers on Patch now with a 15/5/51 spec). I would spec Unrelenting Assault if I genuinely thought it would even be useful, but I don't, so that's why I don't care to experiment with it, either.

yeah expanding on what xav said, i played around with that spec on beta pre WOTLK and even a bit on live, the best way to look at it is like this, yes it works and if you can get revenge lit up on every GCD(couple that with the heroic/revenge glyphs) its decent sustained threat/dmg and an EZ mode 2 button tank spec on 1 target, but it has a lot of glaring weakneses, you lack burst and AOE threat which has become increasingly more important these days, more importantly is your wasting A LOT of points to get down that far in arms for UA and giving up all your practical utility in and out of raids(pretty much everything that made prot good with WOTLK), your basically a single target tank machince, and the game has evolved beyond that scope and tanks need to be more useful throughout instances, oh and its really boring after a while :p

edit: i think Unrelenting Assault was primarily put deep into arms to make tanking a bit more manageable as that spec so you didnt have to respec to off tank or tank once in a while

I actually just posted a topic on this too, and the spec I came up with was very similar to yours. I tried out heroic UP with it and it went fine, but yeah, AoE tanking was a pain, especially since I wasn't generating any agro whatsoever on any target that I wasn't specifically attacking (with the exception of Thunderclap's awesomeness). But, I found that I always had enough rage to spam cleave and revenge constantly when I had more than 2 mobs beating on me, so that might be a decent trash spec with 3.0.8's change to the Cleave Glyph.

I just feel that, since the higher-up talents in prot aren't really for mitigation (except for critical block), and that they are all really just there for more threat, it would be okay to dip into the Arms tree for Unrelenting Assault, such that Revenge is taking up every cooldown.

Of course, this only goes for situations when you would be rage starved in your avoidance gear, so that a normal spec wouldn't be able to perform at 100%. This kind of spec thrives in when in a place where your avoidance is so high that your hate (and thus, tps) is hurting significantly. Also, by throwing in Sweeping Strikes with revege/cleave-spam, AoE tanking might be pretty viable with this spec. IMO, it wouldn't be bad at all in this spec if they were to make it so Sweeping Strikes could be used in Defensive Stance.

It seems a fairly solid OT spec but I haven't MTd with it in anything harder than a heroic dungeon. Have to agree with Xav's 15/5/51 spec for now(except atm I've got 2 points from "Focused Rage" in for "Improved Spell Reflection" for Malygos phase 2)

its a nice pvp speck but u wont b able to tank naxx or outher raids trying to do damage with a build its all about the button rotasion to do more damage but a build is somthing u must try to see if it works and if it works for u then grats and have fun with it but tanking ull need a tanking speck for it sorry

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...but u wont b able to tank naxx or outher raids...

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confirmed >.< ouch

not every boss / adds, but some i suppose. otherwise shieldslam is vastly superior in terms of innate threat that would hold aggro in higher dps raid composition settings.