Reinventing Durambar

[TheDragoon]

However as mentioned the 10% weapon damage is not going to beat out the 10% more AP...

How did you arrive at this conclusion? The 10% damage applies to all attacks (even Bloodthirst, I believe) and since it also boosts your damage via your weapon in addition to just the attack power, I cannot imagine any situation where +10% AP > +10% damage. At best, +10% AP = +10% damage (weapon has 0 DPS and not using skills that have a fixed damage component to them), but that is very unrealistic.

...and rampage that you are giving up for it as far as damage.

Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding was that rampage was not "refreshable" in that you would have to build it up every time you used it. That was the current theorycrafting the last time I really looked at it (pre-TBC) and the viewpoint, then, was that its rage cost made it seem a bit less useful than one would hope. I have generally assumed that this would not be a very big deal, though it is some slight improvement in damage (estimated 1% increase or so).

So overall, I was looking at everything as follows:
0/31/30 => +10% DPS via One-hand spec
0/41/20 => ~6.5% DPS via 10% AP (assumed 2000 AP baseline with a 90 DPS weapon => ~65% damage comes via AP rather than weapon damage), ~2.5% DPS via +3% hit (assumed 30% crit 10% miss, so your overall DPS change by adding non-crits instead of misses would be reduced by 3%/(0.9hitdamage+0.30critdamage)=2.5% damage increase)), ~1% DPS via Rampage => 10% DPS overall

If things really come out that close, I figured that the extra Protection talents would be handy, as well, and all of them work to help tank, so the 0/31/30 build would be the way to go.

Imp sunder, Conc blow and 10% more damage isn't really going to up your tanking that much (it will get you more aggro while tanking because you won't be in zerker and I don't think you can use rampage in def stance, even if you can 10% more damage should still be more aggro than 250 AP and the loss of the GCD every 30 seconds or so to maintain the stack).

A recent empirical analysis was showing a pretty good amount of threat generation coming from overall damage output (on the order of 60%), so a 10% increase to damage output would give you a 6% increase in threat. That really isn't that bad when you consider that Defiance only adds 0.15/1.3 = 11.5% more threat and the damage is actually useful while DPSing while extra threat is not. And without Shield Slam, the only spammable threat generation skills are going to be Sunder Armor and Heroic Strike (cooldowns on Bloodthirst, Thunderclap and Revenge), so you as well help out the efficiency of Sunder Armor. Those talent points are kind of floating points that could be put elsewhere, if desired, I just figured that this was the best use. :)


Anyway, that's my theorycrafting for the day. If you think any of these assumptions are poor, let me know so I can reconsider. :)