leveling 60-70 prot dps

[afatgoat]

After jumping around from arms, to fury, and finally protection at 60 i'm having a hard time time pumping out some substantial dps, but love the survivability of multi mobing 3-4 at once. I have tank gear jacked for stam survivability and a crit/dps set that rocks out around 21% crit before berserker stance and around 11-12% dodge/parry/blah blah blah.
I rock the one hander sword from ramps and decent shield. rage and threat generation aren't a problem but again, it takes a fair while to kill most mobs.

Devestate, shield slams, thunderclaps, and whirlwind are my bread and butter. Should I be rocking higher +str to maximize my shield slam or switch to duel wielding slow or fast weopons to maximize solo mob grinding? I read time and time again in threads about this mystical dps prot spec, but i'm neither 70 nor rocking epics.

Comments and thoughts welcome.

[Horgar]

For a prot dps set str>crit>ap>hit (get 6% +hit minimum first, though). Slow mh is good, off hand doesn't matter so much but the faster off hand will give you more consistant rage. For a 1h/shield dps set you would go with the above while substituting any high +block value items you have for big shield slams.

Dual wielding is somewhat gear dependant for effectiveness so it's still going to be hard to level up prot and do decent dps. MS/arms is easier to level with because as long as you keep your weapon up to date and half-decent other gear you're going to do OK. DW dps doesn't really shine until you can get your AP high enough while maintaining the 6% hit floor to start out-performing 2h with MS... and in both fury and prot are talents that scale very well with stats. Arms builds tend to have a more flat scaling so being arms in greens/lowblues tends to provide better results than fury or prot (for dpsing/soloing).

EDIT: if you're going to do a lot of solo questing I'd say spring for respec to an arms build. Get something with 3/3 TM. Probably a 33/5/13 build and then add points to prot as you level up. This will let you tank pretty well with the TM change and you'll have defiance while still having a much better solo dps capability. By 70 you'll have 33/5/23 or something like that which is still a solid tanking spec. You won't need full prot til you're doing heroics or raids to be honest.

[Taelas]

Off-hand speed does matter now. Whirlwind demands a slow off-hand for proper DPS.

[Horgar]

For leveling 60-70 he may not have the ideal pick of weapons. Holding out for a slower OH over a better one that's a bit faster is going to hurt more than help. It's not a huge difference. As you get to higher tier (100dps+) weapons it will make a noticible difference, though.

Besides isn't WW normalized? If so after considering mitigation and half dmg for off hand you're looking at maybe 22-23 dmg per WW difference for using 2.6 vs 1.6 speed weapons around 80dps each (comparing vindicators to fireguard which is what I'm using for this). Using slower weap would increase my WW by about 5% dmg I guess. But WW is only 10-11% of my overall dps so if it's normalized the impact on overall dps of me using fireguard over a 80-84dps 2.6 speed weapon is less than half a percent. (I'm assuming 40% mitigation... without mitigation it's more like 0.7% impact on overall dps assuming WW is about 10% of total dps).

Less than that since this is only figured while self buffed and raid buffs would increase the dmg portion from raw AP (AP/14*2.4 MH, AP/14*2.4/2 OH)

[Taelas]

[item]Fireguard[/item] vs. [item]Vindicator's Brand[/item].

While yes, Whirlwind is normalized, weapon speed still has indirect effect on instant attacks due to the way DPS works.

22-23 damage is incorrect. Multiply the DPS of the weapons with the speed and you have an average hit within the damage range of the weapon.

That means 84.4*1.6 for Fireguard, 81.2*2.6 for Vindicator's Brand, or ~135 damage for Fireguard, and ~211 for Vindicator's Brand. That's a difference of ~76 damage pre-talents (and pre-OH penalty). Talents increase it to ~83 (10% One Hand Weapon Specialization) whereas OH decreases it to ~41. Almost twice what you estimated.

As a Protection warrior, Whirlwind will be your primary attack. When you're special-hit capped, you should have plenty of Rage to use Whirlwind every time it's up (as long as you do not spam Heroic Strikes), and Devastate on all other GCDs. This amounts to a fair bit more than 10% of your total DPS.

[Horgar]

~41. Almost twice what you estimated

Like I said in the post I am assuming 40% mitigation with the 22.3 mark. If you work all the numbers out you'll see that the difference is still not that huge. 2x what I said seems like a lot but the difference on the average of 22.3/total WW dmg vs 41/total WW dmg is pretty minimal. Ignoring mitigation (38 dmg diff I posted vs 41) and the impact on overall dps is 0.08% instead of 0.07% if WW is around 10% of overall dps.

The 10% of my dps being WW is not a guestimate. It is a trend I've seen from recap and WWS and has been confirmed by other people's posting of DPS log analysis. While I may not have hit it right on the money every time it was up the difference wouldn't have been all that much given the huge percentage of our dmg is just plain white hits. I'd guess in trash fights it comes closer to 15-17% of overall dps. But for bosses you lose a lot of potential WW time to executes and other variables. Here's a gruul's example with post-patch WW (so half the number to get the times I hit it I guess).

Horgar - WWS

Fight was about 6 min - Ideally giving 36 uses. I used WW 23 times. Now we have to subtract the start seconds where tanks were getting aggro, then subtract shatter time, and also subtract execute time before figuring the real amount of time I had to use WW effectively and then divide by cooldown.

For arguments sake lets say I could have done the same damage but WW was 15% of my total because I used it 36 times. My avg ww should have hit for around 808 including both weapons so I add 10k dmg to its total and now 33k/218k is about 15%. The variance would still be around 41. 41/808 = 5% *.15 (15% of overall) puts us at about 0.7% of overall dmg. Right about at my estimate even when figuring it's 10% of the overall dps. So I can do about 0.5% - 0.7% more dps if I use a slower off hand (assuming I have the rage to use WW every time which is less likely at lower gear levels when using 2 slows).

Conclusion: For prot dps: 2 slows at higher gear levels will almost definitely increase your dps. If the rage gen gets impacted where you're sitting there waiting to hit devastates and/or WW because you just don't have enough rage gen then 2 slows will most likely lower your dps by a larger margin than they increase them otherwise. Now for fury there's the whole flurry charges to consider making 2 slows even more desirable and probably have a much larger impact on the dps.

[afatgoat]

Thanks for all the input guys. Shortly after the original post i picked up the axe from the thrallmar vendor and axe of the legion and started pumping out some have decent dps. Nothing amazing, but enough to grind through single guys no problem.

Arms isn't really my playing style. I still love being able to rock 10-12k health when buffed and being able to take on 3-4 guys at once nevermind the extra little bit from last stand, so I think i'll stay with prot for a while longer.
Thanks again.

[Taelas]

Like I said in the post I am assuming 40% mitigation with the 22.3 mark. If you work all the numbers out you'll see that the difference is still not that huge. 2x what I said seems like a lot but the difference on the average of 22.3/total WW dmg vs 41/total WW dmg is pretty minimal. Ignoring mitigation (38 dmg diff I posted vs 41) and the impact on overall dps is 0.08% instead of 0.07% if WW is around 10% of overall dps.

Sigh. Yes, I make this mistake far too often. Mea culpa.

The 10% of my dps being WW is not a guestimate. It is a trend I've seen from recap and WWS and has been confirmed by other people's posting of DPS log analysis. While I may not have hit it right on the money every time it was up the difference wouldn't have been all that much given the huge percentage of our dmg is just plain white hits. I'd guess in trash fights it comes closer to 15-17% of overall dps. But for bosses you lose a lot of potential WW time to executes and other variables. Here's a gruul's example with post-patch WW (so half the number to get the times I hit it I guess).

Horgar - WWS

Fight was about 6 min - Ideally giving 36 uses. I used WW 23 times. Now we have to subtract the start seconds where tanks were getting aggro, then subtract shatter time, and also subtract execute time before figuring the real amount of time I had to use WW effectively and then divide by cooldown.

For arguments sake lets say I could have done the same damage but WW was 15% of my total because I used it 36 times. My avg ww should have hit for around 808 including both weapons so I add 10k dmg to its total and now 33k/218k is about 15%. The variance would still be around 41. 41/808 = 5% *.15 (15% of overall) puts us at about 0.7% of overall dmg. Right about at my estimate even when figuring it's 10% of the overall dps. So I can do about 0.5% - 0.7% more dps if I use a slower off hand (assuming I have the rage to use WW every time which is less likely at lower gear levels when using 2 slows).

You're right. ~10% WW damage seems normal.