Game-Changing New Powers

[Kevin]

Seiki, I stay DW unless they're hurting me too much, I sunder to half-life on the mob, or 5, whichever comes first (usually half-life about 3), and then finish it off. It makes for a nice damage boost, and is cheap on rage. If I have my shield on, I use shield slam some, if not, I use HS/Devastate mostly, along with a fair amount of overpower. Zerker's 3% crit usually isn't worth the damage you take in most cases as a prot build soloing, IMO.

I took little Gnolack out for a spin the other day to test some stuff so I was only doing Hellfire quests and only facing L58-62 mobs with my L60 self. I did the same method. Dual wield (my Quel and Brute blade) unless I hit one of the elites or got 3 or more on me. Sunder till 50% life or a 5 stack then devestate and heroic strike. The sunder to 50% health or 5 has a kinda of natural pattern too. Lower armor mobs hit 50% faster so you don't "over sunder". High armor mobs get the full stack before 50% health so you get more advantage out of it.

I did some playing with gear and maybe not so oddly I kept 5 piece wrath on for the highest DPS, I was only doing about 230 DPS but that is plenty for grinding. That proc that cuts rage by 5 is really nice there were a few times that I got that and overpower and I got 3 rage back from the overpower since with focused rage overpower is already down to 2 rage. It did refund rage, it was neat not that that happened a lot. The extra AP from battle shout didn't hurt either. I would usually try to do the HS with the proc up since that seemed more effective than a 7 rage devestate. As Mav said with shield on I will do shield slams for more DPS and just generally not use HS. And my weapon, the Quel, is a bad devestate weapon as well, but it still seems to work a bit better for DPS than pure HS.

But yeah my pattern hasn't really changed from pre TBC days, sunder is still a very solid DPS increase, I hate downtime so while I could get more DPS from going to zerker and working in some whirlwinds (put my untamed blade on and throw those out) the extra damage I took even with high mit meant that I was eating/bandaging more frequently and that extra downtime chewed up the killing speed advantage.

I do want to see about building a little more rage with the dual wield and then putting on the UTB and doing some slam spamming, which was a standard DPS method for me in raids as prot but is now viable solo with the changes to slam but I generally can't build that much rage. But it might prove to be more DPS, dunno.

Oh and Gnolack is 5/5/41 right now as well.