Prot warrior needing help with dps

[djosh]

So I basically MT my guilds group 2 and we are 2/8 heroic. My gear has gotten me through so far but I noticed my dps is lacking. The problem is I can't tell if I am ctc capped when I start messing with stuff. I know I'm not amazing at the game so I'm not hoping for miracles, but just some adjustments maybe to shape up my gear better to be able to help pull more dps for fights.

Here is my armory

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...h/Djosh/simple

Any help or advice would be great. Couple of things to note, I do have the heroic hand of morchock and the normal tier shoulders. Don't know if those would make much of a difference though. Just to note I do have a pally/druid at all times for kings buff and another warrior for battle shout. I usually use the feast but I have mastery food when I need my own, but lately been eating str food for some extra dps. Thanks for the help

[Bigbad]

Get a CTC macro (should be easy enough to google) if you want to play around ingame. You can also use chardev to play around with gear and CTC.

I would suggest the hc shannox belt and hc firelands neck to increase expertise a little but I see you haven't done firelands on heroic. The only real option would be ultraxion ring and reforges but with the 15% debuff this week extra dps from tanks really shouldn't be needed, tiershoulders can't hurt. Use expertise instead of strengthfood though.

[woodyman]

ive always found my dps problems as warrior tank was mainly down to my inner rage up time and getting my hs spams off

[Thegreatme]

I'd personally drop gag order and 3/3 shield spec to get get BnT, thunderstruck and 1/3 shield spec. from there you can use a rend over a deva early in the fight, and then refresh it with TC when the duration is under 3 seconds, and then burn the thunderstruck stacks on shockwave when you have 3. it's definitely a more involved rotation when doing this, but it should be a dps increase. don't forget about using heroic leap on CD when ever you aren't going to need it for mobility. make sure you're using retaliation on every fight, and if you can get away with taking the extra damage recklessness is nice too.

[Tengenstein]

HC hand of morchok vs normal sould drinker had a thread ( i think it was actually about prot trinkets) on papaer Souldrinker pulls head unless you havew a racial that gives axe expertise, in wheich case Hand is ever so slightly (<0.2%) ahead of Souldrinker, it literally comes down to would you rather have static health (Hand) or a proc heal (Soul).

I Personally wouldn't take Thunderstruck, while it certainly is Nice, i think 3/3 shield specialization is nicer if you can dump your rage fast enough, Sure if you find yourself sitting at the cap then you have issues and should drop points in Shield specialization, but twith the correct rotation you're rarely gonna get 3 stacks on a single target if your TCing ever 12-15 seconds unless you start significantly delaying Shockwave (and massively devaluing Glyph of SHockwave; why bother lowering the CD to 17 seconds when it takes between 36 and 45 seconds to full stack thunderstruck?). Secondly TC does cost a lot of rage and it and Rend can't proc SnB so moving from a Rendless rotation to one that includes Rend can be quite a shock if your used to having lots of rage to burn. Personally i'd get used to stance dancing to zerker stance when you don't have something beating on you and getting a few Colossus smash's and 30rage executes in, maybe swapping to battle to keep rend ticking, if you need to.

Do you have any logs of your fights? whats you "standard" rotation? how fast do you react to SnB procs? what proportion of your damage is HS? whats your inner rage uptime?

[djosh]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/y...79g/details/7/

That a set of my last logs, I was doing better on some attempts of ultrax but not on others. And I don't claim to be amazing, I don't think I should all of a sudden pull a lot more dps, just I feel like I am on the low end of what a prot warrior can do.

My rotation I figure is pretty normal, with Shield Slam > revenge > devastate with heroic strikes when needed. I do heroic strike a lot, but I am not 100% used to hitting inner rage as much as I could. Been trying to use it more often, but I still forget a lot. Is there a good macro or something I could use for inner rage that might help me a little? Also I use heroic strike a lot when I am tanking the boss, which is pretty often on most fights, but some fights I don't take as much, like Ultrax I don't tank first so I noticed I don't build vengeance really high at the beginning and kinda wastes my hero.

Thanks for the help so far, any more info needed I will let you know.

[leethaxor]

A quick trick. If you blow all your tank cooldowns on the pull they will reset when thrall gives the earth buff. So you can blow shield block, wall, and last stand, and recklessness and drop CRAZY sheild slams without worrying about about taking extra damage

[reasonyousmile]

prot warriors on ultraxion do a LOT of damage since shield block can be kept up indefinitely due to thrall's buff - it makes shield block last 20s, with a 15s CD (as opposed to the normal 10s, 30s CD).

if you consistently refresh SB, you will likely crit-block cap since it stacks. as a result, going into Ultraxion at ~75% CTC is no big deal (esp since you'll pull with SW up as well - it'll reset with Thrall's buff).


i regularly pull 30k+, and you can too.

1) keep 4 pieces of tier gear on, and replace the rest of your gear with DPS gear (favoring hit/expertise; if you're really hardcore you can reforge to hit & exp caps while maxing out crit); dps trinkets and everything (i still use a steelskin flask, but go w/ your gut)
2) use souldrinker; its DPS is still superior to h-morchok
3) go max DPS spec; 3/3 deep wounds and 2/2 cruelty, 3/3 incite, ignore blood & thunder or thunderstruck (i leave 2pts in safeguard, but eh)
4) pull first - this is important since that's the longest stretch of time any tank is consistently tanking. arrange to stay in for the first hour
5) SHIELD BLOCK ON CD*****

don't macro HS into Inner Rage, you'll just end up using IR when you don't want to. pop inner rage when you're the first tank after an hour of twilight.

just shield slam, revenge, devastate, heroic strike. have fun!

[Tengenstein]

Ok this isn't going to help you with your DPS, but on the log on your morchok kill you're not putting up either Demo shout or thunderclap debuffs. As a tank these are 2 debuffs that you really should be keeping up yourself on morchock. on other fights where you and another tank are sharing a boss both of you shoud dharing that responisbility, Really they are incredibly significant to tank survival.

[djosh]

I do have dps gear, its a little subpar though. I'll def try using some dps gear to help out. I don't know if I can tank first on that fight though, my raid leader does, even though I MT almost every other fight. Will def try with some dps gear on next time though, and check my talents to make sure I have the dps ones.

As for TC and demo, for most fights I barely need them and they just hurt my dps, so I kind of got used to not using them, gonna need to get used to using them again though because I know they are going to be important for upcoming heroics.

[Bigbad]

You should do 20k dps on ultraxion as prot, can even get significantly higher with some dps gear and stancedancing+CS. The problem you have is the number of shieldslams, you should use shieldslam every 6 seconds and that's not even counting SnB procs.
For example:
Ultraxion kill 34 out of 53 shieldslams
Try1 35 out of 53 shieldslams
Try2 19 out of 32 shieldslams
Heroic strike usage could be higher as well but as long as you fix your shieldslam usage you should see a nice improvement in dps.

[djosh]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/s...xub/details/7/

Here is the new logs from this week, maybe a little better, but on the fights I tried harder on I didn't do as well, and fights I just relaxed I did better on, no idea whats going on.

[Peca]

You have more than enough gear ,that is last thing to be troubled with.I tanked all 25 man heroic bosses in DS with normal/lfg items and FL pieces.

For my taste that secondary spec you have is not good.Your raid will find more use of you specing for safe guard than that small heal you get from blood craze.Also first spec ,why you need gag order ?Blood and thunder will be much better than that.

Also imo dont get troubled by your dps that much.I see ppl write here about crazy shield slams etc.Yes it is nice to do that but if you are still in learning process and getting expiriance as warrior tank,shield block is CD !! Not dps one but one of best small cd's you can have.

Your job is to mitigate dmg and survive first than if you can tweak out to play with dps a bit.Never ever macro shield slam with shield block.That shield block can save your ass many times.That is my pov.

Spec is your prio ,than other things that are far from important as that is.When you understand your spec then it will all go better.

Your dps now when zone buff went over 15% should never ever be so crucial that will determine will boss die or not.As one of posters said before me incite 3/3 is must if you want good dps.Hs is still big chunk of our dps.

[djosh]

The second spec was for heroic yor, used to be a dps spec. Don't use it on other fights. I might get rid of gag order, but I don't tank a lot of adds so I don't see blood and thunder being super useful. Maybe switch it over to incite?

[Tengenstein]

BnT refreshed Rend is part of your SINGLE TARGET rotation. Gag Orderis a crutch, taking it is a declaration that you're willing to sacrifice raid performance to allow you to be lazy or mediocre. Even if you skip BnT (which if your wanting to maximise DPS you don't) you should still be using Rend on single targets.

Looking at the Zon'ozz kill since its the only fight where the tank has 100% on target, the reason your DPS is low is because your rotation is wrong. You are FAILING to keep up Demo shout and Thunderclap debuffs on the boss. a 20% decrease in attack speed and a 10% decrease in physical damage are huge, frikking Huge. 54% of your damage taken on Zon'ozz is melee. Fifty-four percent, 1.2million damage. 336,000 damage you could have prevented if you where playing properly.

Your proper priority is

1) keep demo shout up
2) keep thunderclap
2) Shield slam
3) keep rend up (if you spec properly you keep TC up with this aswell)
4) shorten the CD of Shield slam
5) Shockwave
6) concussion blow
7) Revenge
8) devastate
9) dump extra rage with HS/inner rage.

[djosh]

Well on the kill it was normal mode, I didn't care about reduced damage because it isn't a tough fight, when i was doing heroic, I had it up as much as I could. I didn't know I should be using shockwave and conc blow before revenge, never seen that before on any priority list. Plus putting up demo shout and clap lowers my dps so I don't see how not using them lowers my dps.

I don't disagree with you, I just am trying to get better, on normal fights I'm not worried about my survivability, I'm trying to do more dps to get better at that so when I do heroics I can be better while trying harder to survive. My dps was pretty good on a couple of the fights, but it was really bad on others.

The spec I am using I saw somewhere where people were saying its the best single target spec, but it was a while ago. That is why I am asking to see what I can change, I want to get better, and I figure this would be a good way to see what I am doing wrong.

[Tengenstein]

Well on the kill it was normal mode, I didn't care about reduced damage because it isn't a tough fight, when i was doing heroic, I had it up as much as I could. I didn't know I should be using shockwave and conc blow before revenge, never seen that before on any priority list. Plus putting up demo shout and clap lowers my dps so I don't see how not using them lowers my dps.

CB and SW have been in the single target rotation since Wrath those abilities hit like trucks. As to Rev being behind CB/SW, it is and it isn't, depending whether or not its possible to shorten the CD of shield slam. Think of it like this the prot warrior rotation is a a 6 second 4GCD cycle [Shield slam>something>something>something] repeating, now SnB interefereso you restart they cycle everytime SnB procs. Both CB and SW hit have a higher Damage per execute than (DPE, basical damage each time you use them with miss and dodge and parry a nd crit rates factored in) then devastate, however neither CB or SW can proc SnB. however in the last GCD of a cycle and SnB proc isn't going to shorten the cooldown onf shield slam, you're gonna shield slam anyway next GCD whatever, so its just a saving of 20rage at that point, having a proc at this point is not going to increase the number of shield slams you manage to squeeze in during the fight. so in order to maintian maximum number shield slams, and still weave in CB and SW your cycles become Shield Slam>something to procs SnB>something to procs SnB>Truck] reseting each time you proc SnB. Rend then comes along and hits hard enough that its worth keeping up even to the extent of sacrafcing potential SnB procs, but not actual SnB procsdue to the nature of safeclipping means you should never be in a situation that it clashes with shieldslam. As a side note whether revenge is worth using is bit technical as unless your stacking enough stam and vengeance its DPE is below that of devastate

I don't disagree with you, I just am trying to get better, on normal fights I'm not worried about my survivability, I'm trying to do more dps to get better at that so when I do heroics I can be better while trying harder to survive. My dps was pretty good on a couple of the fights, but it was really bad on others.

The spec I am using I saw somewhere where people were saying its the best single target spec, but it was a while ago. That is why I am asking to see what I can change, I want to get better, and I figure this would be a good way to see what I am doing wrong.

if its not got BnT then it's not the best, the BnT spec is theoretically and in reality the highest DPS spec. If people say otherwise they're wrong. The logs and sims show this. the best i can sim from you (with shockwave weaving from above) is 18.4k, swap in BnT and start keeping rend up and you sim up to 18.9K, 500DPS may not sound significant, but 18.9k>18.4k

Edit: Also that wipe on Zon'ozz Normal, Demo and TC being up would have let you take one more melee swing before dying. Maybe not preventing a wipe, but you get my point. You're averaging about 60% uptime on HC where you're in Demoshout range of him the entire fight and he spends most of his time beating you in the face. You really shouldn't be chasing meters as a tank, I know its fun and we all have this drive to have some sort quantitative way of telling people that we're awesome, but the best advice to you at this point as you're progressing on HCs is forget the meters, concentrate on minimising your damage taken but making sure that your debufs are up whenever something is in range of your face. Now if its a case of my raid needs extra DPS to beat this bosses enrage, or to nuke down this add faster, you don't do that by pushing tank DPS, you swap out a healer or a tank for a DPS, and you do that by minimising the amount of damage taken.

[djosh]

Yeah, I see what you mean, I am definitely going to change my spec, get rid of gag order and switch to BnT. Will try that, and that wipe was because my guild thought it was a good idea to go 10 bounces then 10 bounces on zonozz. the second group of 10, it bounced to close with the range and I couldn't get it to hit the boss so it kinda destroyed us. I will work on the TC and Demo, I have been looking for an add-on that keeps track of my cooldowns/buff/debuff uptime better, any advice?

I'm not gonna worry so much about dps anymore, they decided to make me raid leader of this group cause its a group 2, and people wanted me to do it. Thanks for the advice, I will see how things go this week and post logs with some changes and hopefully things turn out better.

[Tengenstein]

I use PowerAura's Classic to track when anyone puts them up on my target. I know Weakaura's can alos do it, and that NeedToKnow is also good for tracking them. You have my condolences about being made raid leader.